Two voices and nothing between them: enormous condensed bold sans for the two headlines that bracket the poster top and bottom, and typewriter monospace for every word of body copy. No intermediate sizes, no third face. The absence of a middle tier is what makes both ends read as deliberate.
Steal · grid/layout
Body-text measures are keyed to the width of the photo band directly above them, not to a uniform column — so the text grid changes width three times down the page while staying locked to the images. Steal for image-heavy articles: set caption measure from the figure it belongs to.
Steal · texture/material
Emphasis is carried entirely by underline, because a typewriter has nothing else — no bold, no italic in the body at all. Attributions are underlined; that is the only mechanism. Adopting the constraint forces you to earn emphasis rather than sprinkle it.
Steal · copywriting
Every quotation carries its attribution underlined on the same line, immediately after the claim. Source-adjacent-to-assertion, never footnoted away. Use it wherever credibility is the argument — the citation belongs where the eye already is.
Fonts: condensed grotesque, typewriter monospace · curated by 1977
Five flat values and no shading anywhere: black silhouette crowd behind, the lit cream subject in the middle, a large desaturated grey cut-out figure in front. Depth is built purely by value separation and overlap — the nearest figure is the *dullest*, the subject the brightest. Invert the usual instinct to make foreground elements the most saturated.
Steal · typography
'MOULIN ROUGE' is repeated three times on stacked lines with one oversized red 'M' spanning all three as a shared initial. Repetition used as texture rather than emphasis — the name becomes a pattern block. Works for a hero wordmark: set the word three times, let one letter run the full stack height.
Steal · grid/layout
There is no grid. Type sits in four clusters at four different scales, placed wherever the illustration leaves room, and the foreground figure crops through the bottom headline so image and lettering interlock instead of occupying separate bands. Steal for editorial hero art: let one element break the type's bounding box.
Fonts: hand-lettered condensed sans · curated by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1891
Swiss / International · editorial · via V&A Collections
Steal · color
Exactly one saturated colour — a vermillion field holding the right ~28% as a full-bleed column — against an otherwise fully greyscale photograph. One hue, one large flat area, zero elsewhere. The discipline is what makes the orange read as loud; a second colour anywhere would halve it.
Steal · grid/layout
The subject straddles the seam: the figure sits half on the photograph and half on the flat colour field, so the boundary runs *through* the focal point instead of beside it. The masthead crosses the same seam. Steal this for split-panel heroes — put the subject on the join, not politely inside one side.
Steal · texture/material
A drawn white window grid is laid flat over a photographic landscape, so hard vector line sits directly on continuous tone with no blending at all. Cheap to reproduce in CSS: a `repeating-linear-gradient` mullion grid over an image, no blend mode, full opacity.
Steal · typography
Masthead is all-lowercase light geometric sans, reversed to white, and the date stacks under it at two sizes ragged-left on a shared left edge. A single line of micro-type sits alone in the top-right corner as counterweight to the photographic mass — the smallest element placed furthest from the heaviest.
Fonts: geometric sans, lowercase · curated by László Moholy-Nagy, 1929
Swiss / International · type specimen · via V&A Collections
Steal · typography
**Delete the capitals entirely.** The whole alphabet is single-case — there is no uppercase to fall back on, so hierarchy has to be carried by size, weight and position alone. Try it as a hard constraint: `text-transform: lowercase` on every heading, then make the page work anyway. What survives is real hierarchy rather than shouting.
Steal · texture/material
One glyph is blown up to roughly 8× the alphabet's reading size and filled with a coarse grain, sitting immediately beside the same letterforms set plain. The identical shape appears twice — once as information, once as image. Steal the pairing, not the grain: a display-scale letterform with texture next to the same face at body scale, clean.
Steal · grid/layout
Composition is anchored in the upper two-thirds and the bottom third is left completely empty — not balanced, just abandoned. Caption text is tiny and bold, giving a display-to-caption ratio near 20:1 with nothing in between. Two type sizes, one enormous void.
Fonts: Universal (Bayer) · curated by Herbert Bayer, 1925
Swiss / International · poster · via It's Nice That
Steal · grid/layout
Müller-Brockmann concert posters: type set on a strict grid, then ONE element breaks it diagonally. The violation only works because the grid is absolute.
Every reference here links out to its original, and all referenced work belongs to its creators. What this vault adds — and what it is for — is the human-written commentary: the steal-notes are the content, not the pixels. Study use only.
Made something shown here and want it removed? Email util.wills@gmail.com with the entry title or a link to this page — it comes down promptly, no questions asked.
Try it in your agent · no key
One command puts these notes inside Claude Code. Without a key the agent sees 5 families and gets 5 calls a day — enough to judge the taste before you rent it. The key opens every family and lifts the meter.
claude mcp add --transport http trova https://trova.design/api/mcp
