The Modern colour palette was minimal, primary and bold. Red was the primary colour – the colour of the proletariat, associated with working class revolutionary forces since the French Revolution of 1789. When paired with black, it creates a startling visual combination (see El Lissitzky’s Red Wedge, below). In addition to that pairing, yellow, blue and green were also frequently used alone or in combination. Colour ink was at a premium, so the use of just one or two colours was common; full or four-colour reproduction was expensive, and other stocks of colour were limited.

Among the progressive art and design groups were the radically abstract Suprematists, founded in 1915 by Kazimir Malevich. They introduced a formalist combination of pure geometry – the reduction of content to symbolic shapes and forms, along with a limited palette (see below). That unprecedented combination was the foundation upon which Constructivism – aiming to make art that reflected a modern, industrial society – and other European modernisms evolved. Anti-antiquarian works that proffered graphic revolution were the paradigms for waves of similar aesthetics in Germany, Holland, England, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Many of these were, in turn, embraced by commercial designers and promoted by printing and typography journals in the capitalist world as codes for machine-age modernity.

All kinds of artistic viewpoints, from Cubism to Realism, became accepted expressive tools in the years that followed. But it was the unprecedented symbolic abstraction of Malevich and his contemporaries that became the recognised “revolutionary” art genre and the foundation of “agitation art”, or agitprop. In 1919, the Society of Young Artists was set up to produce posters and banners for social elevation and illumination, and a year later the Institute of Artistic Culture was founded in Moscow to train artists to produce design for proletarian use.

Applied avant garde artists like Alexander Rodchenko, Solomon Telingater, Valentina Kulagina, Sofia Dymshits-Tolstaya and especially El Lissitzky applied the shocking, geometric experiments of Kazimir Malevich to propaganda and advertising. This poster by El Lissitzky – its text translating as Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge – symbolises the Bolshevik forces conquering the Tsar’s White Russians.

These developments gave us much of what, today, is considered stereotypical Soviet-era art – the examples that heroically appear in all histories of 20th-century graphic design. But that geometric art wasn’t intended to be the only true Soviet form. It certainly was not Lenin’s first choice. Socialist Realism would come later.

The Soviet Union’s party ideologues quickly came to find the modern visual language suspect; abstract approaches were mysterious, blighted by hidden meanings that encouraged interpretation. These avant garde methods returned in the later 20th century, but not before they were superseded and pushed out of the public sphere by Socialist Realism in the late 1920s. A more conservative approach was the hallmark of the most influential visual and graphic arts group in the Soviet Union, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, formed in 1922. The Association called their evangelical revolutionary style “heroic realism.” The state’s preference for clear, unambiguous messages led to overly idealised representational art that replaced abstract ambiguity with unmistakable reflections of the revolution. Under Stalin, there was no longer place for play or experimentation and so, paradoxically, a neutered version of Constructivism was used a capitalist advertising tool to suggest modernity.

Taking inspiration from the pioneers of graphic design exhibited in our current blockbuster Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932, we asked our social media followers to design a new profile picture for the Royal Academy.

The winner was Luca Bowles for this striking red-and-white logo. Chosen by exhibition curator Ann Dumas and curatorial assistant Rebecca Bray, they praised the “bold design drawing on several aspects of Russian graphic design, very skilfully done.”

You can see our new profile picture in action on our Twitter and Instagram pages. Search the hashtag #profilerevolution on either channel to see the other inspiring entries.