Creacionismo vs Estridentismo
クレアシオニスモ / エストリデンティスモ
Creacionismo comes from Experimental Typography and Estridentismo from Avant-garde. One is layout and the other style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Creacionismo
A movement begun in Chile and carried through Paris, which declared that poetry does not copy nature but creates new facts. It produced visual poems in quantity, arranging letters as shapes and making the border between language and page a subject of experiment. With Ultraismo, one of the two pillars of the Spanish-language avant-garde.
Estridentismo
A Mexican avant-garde that shouted its praise of the post-revolutionary city, of radio waves and machines. Sharp woodcut lines, type running on the diagonal and imagery of cables and aerials erupted over a few years through magazines and handbills. The moment Latin American vanguardism found a speed of its own.
| Creacionismo | Estridentismo | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1916–1930s | 1921–1927 |
| Family | Experimental Typography | Avant-garde |
| Kind | Layout | Style |
| Cues | Letters arranged as shapes / Lines of verse recomposed visually / Type without ornament / The white ground used as a component | Sharp woodcut lines / Type set on the diagonal / Imagery of cables, aerials and machinery / The hard contrast of two-colour printing |
| Best used for | Posters and titles where the words physically form the image, with no illustration and no photograph · Book and exhibition typography for texts that must be read as constructed objects rather than transcribed speech | Festivals or radio projects in a city that want the lift of waves and machines up front · Printing short run manifestos and handbills fast with nothing but woodcut and type |
| Type | One plain face at several sizes, with the change of scale as the only expressive device. | Heavy grotesque mixed with woodletter, the angle changing line by line |
| Composition | Words positioned as objects in a field, the white ground measured as carefully as the type, alignment abandoned wherever the sense requires it. | Drive cables and pylons across one diagonal, set text blocks square against it, leave no margin |
| Material | Black on white and nothing else: no rule, no colour, no image to fall back on. | Two inks, black and red, on coarse paper, the woodcut's white bite left in the line |
| Caution | Scattering words for the look of it: here the position of every word is an assertion, and arbitrary placement leaves only a shape. | Tilting a modern layout slightly is not it, and without the post revolutionary city as subject it copies Futurism. The angle works only when the letters are cut and the register is rough. |