Style combination · Contrasts
Contemporary Arabic × Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
Turkey replaced Arabic letters with Latin in 1928, and Emin Barın carried calligraphic habits into the new script; contemporary dual-script type design keeps both scripts and matches them as equals. Compare the two to show replacement against coexistence.
Mix them and make something Contemporary Arabic Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
- Type from Contemporary Arabic
- Colour from Contemporary Arabic
- Form from Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
- Composition from Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
- Surface from Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
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Contemporary Arabic avoids painterly brushwork: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Contemporary Arabic
Notice
Fira Sans, standing in for Frutiger Arabic and Helvetica Arabic (Nadine Chahine)
Text · Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
The pictorial poster, label and ticket art of the young Turkish Republic, led by İhap Hulusi Görey after his Munich training in Ludwig Hohlwein's orbit, with Münif Fehim Özarman and, after 1943, Kenan Temizan. Lithographed figures modelled in crisp patches of light and shadow, sometimes in only one or two inks, giant numerals and letters, framed emblems and bold hand-drawn lettering in the Latin script adopted in 1928 advertised banks, the State Lottery, the state monopolies and tourism, and promoted the state's new alphabet.
Oswald; Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design used Hand-drawn Latin display capitals with Turkish diacritics (Ç, Ğ, İ, Ö, Ş, Ü) for brand and institution names and Shaded and extruded display letters and giant numerals
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Contemporary Arabic, with a counter-accent from Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
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#f7f6f2ground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#c1272daccent · 18% -
#0f6e6eaccent · 14% -
#c89b3caccent · 10% -
#8c8c8caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f7f6f2;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #c1272d;
--accent-2: #0f6e6e;
--accent-3: #c89b3c;
--accent-4: #8c8c8c;
--font-display: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Oswald", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design: Arabic must be set with correct contextual shaping and right-to-left direction; disconnected or reversed letters are a common and offensive error. Have every Arabic word checked by a fluent reader, avoid setting Qur'anic verses or the names of God and the Prophet as decorative texture, and commission or credit Arabic type designers rather than deriving Arabic glyphs from a Latin font.
Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design: Atatürk's likeness, the Turkish flag and the star and crescent are living national symbols, and Turkey's Law No. 5816 (1951) criminalises insulting Atatürk's memory, so do not caricature, distort or trivialise them when borrowing this style. Much of this imagery was produced for a one-party state and its campaigns, and Kemalist iconography (the unveiled "modern" woman, the six arrows, Atatürk portraits) is still politically charged in Turkey, read differently by secularists, religious conservatives and minorities whom the nation-building imagery left out. Do not present the regime's modernising narrative as neutral, and do not reuse party emblems as decoration.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Contemporary Arabic
- Corporate Identity Modernism Pairs well · Roll a matched Arabic–Latin family through a standards manual so both scripts carry the identity with equal authority.
- Urdu Katib Lithography Contrasts · The katib's stacked Nastaʿlīq cascade is everything a screen-optimised Arabic sans gives up; quote it where warmth and history matter more than efficiency.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · Use a strict, mirrored grid and a neutral sans so Arabic and Latin columns align in rhythm and weight.
- Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type Pairs well · Its digital successor: dual-script families pair Arabic with a matched Latin while keeping the firm baseline, even colour and reduced stacking that simplification made familiar. 29LT's UA Neo (2013), detached revivals of Khattar's Unified Arabic, is where the two touch.
- Ottoman Tughra & Dîvânî Chancery Calligraphy Pairs well · Keep hand-drawn calligraphy for the mark itself and set the running text in a well-made contemporary Arabic typeface with a matched Latin companion, instead of imitating Dîvânî in body text.
- Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type) Contrasts · Both extend a typeface's character set for a language need, but dual-script design matches two scripts for neutral, institutional legibility, while post-binary type invents new characters within one script and keeps them visible as a political statement.
- Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing Pairs well · Set long reading text in an Amiri-style calligraphic Naskh and use a low-contrast contemporary Arabic sans for headings, captions and screens, so each register does one job.
- Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) Contrasts · Both set Arabic beside Latin, but that type culture matches the two scripts in font families on rational, mirrored grids, while these anthologies letter both scripts by hand, one story at a time, and mirror whole pages so that the reader turns the magazine round with the script.
With Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
- WPA Silkscreen Posters Pairs well · Both are 1930s state-backed poster programmes for public institutions and tourism; combine WPA silkscreen flatness with Görey's modelled figures for civic campaigns.
- Urdu Katib Lithography Contrasts · Urdu print kept hand-written Arabic-script lithography for another century, while Turkey abolished Arabic letters in 1928; set the two side by side to show two answers to modern print.
- Die Neue Typographie Contrasts · In the same years German modernists replaced illustration with sans-serif type and photography; Turkish Republican graphics kept Munich's pictorial poster and hand-drawn letters.
- Egyptian Painted Film Poster Pairs well · Görey was born in Cairo and worked for Egyptian clients; Cairo's painted lithographic posters share his modelled faces and hand-lettered titles, in Arabic rather than Latin script.
- Mongol Bichig Calligraphy & Ugalz Ornament Contrasts · Both make the state's alphabet part of its official graphics, by opposite moves: Turkish Republican posters hand-letter the new Latin alphabet at display size to promote it, while Mongolia sets its revived old script beside Cyrillic on seals, signboards and letterheads as a national mark.
- Yeşilçam Film Poster (Turkish Hand-Painted Afiş) Pairs well · Both use hand-drawn Latin Turkish lettering; Republican graphics are calm and official, the film poster is crowded and emotional.
- Ottoman Tughra & Dîvânî Chancery Calligraphy Contrasts · The end of the sultanate in 1922 retired the tughra (its last on stamps that year), and the Republic replaced Arabic script with the Latin alphabet in 1928; its hand-lettered Latin posters are the deliberate opposite of the chancery's sultanic calligraphy.
- Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era) Pairs well · A state-promoted lithographic school of the same years that also advertised tourism under bold drawn lettering. Görey's figures, from his Munich training in Hohlwein's orbit, stand in crisp patches of light on a light ground where ANTA opens a painted vista; borrow its framed emblem and giant letters for a tighter, flatter ANTA sheet.
All 12 combinations with Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design