Style combination · Pairs well
Art Deco × Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
The expeditions that led to Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 set off a 1920s Egyptian Revival often counted as part of Art Deco (the papyrus-plant elevator doors of the Chrysler Building); a deco treatment can borrow lotus and papyrus motifs, stepped frames and flat colour, but should not invent pseudo-hieroglyphs.
Mix them and make something Art Deco Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
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.
Art Deco Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition
- Type from Art Deco
- Colour from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
- Form from Art Deco
- Composition from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
- Surface from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
The visual system of pharaonic Egypt, in which writing is made of pictures and pictures are ruled like writing. Scenes stand in horizontal registers; figures are drawn in composite view, sized by rank rather than distance and laid out to a canon of proportions, in flat mineral colour without depth. Hieroglyphs run in columns or rows, packed into square groups facing the start of the line, and fill the spaces around figures as captions. Book of the Dead papyri add black text with red rubrics and framed vignettes; royal names stand in cartouches.
Inter; Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic used Monumental hieroglyphs, carved in raised or sunk relief and usually painted, grouped in square blocks (quadrats) in columns or rows and Cursive hieroglyphs (hieroglyphic book hand), written with a reed brush in black and red ink on papyrus, wood or leather, usually in columns, for religious texts such as the Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic, with a counter-accent from Art Deco. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Art Deco Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition
-
#e8dcb5ground · 36% -
#1c1a17ink · 14% -
#d4a03aaccent · 18% -
#a63d24accent · 14% -
#1f5c9eaccent · 10% -
#3f8a6baccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #e8dcb5;
--ink: #1c1a17;
--accent-1: #d4a03a;
--accent-2: #a63d24;
--accent-3: #1f5c9e;
--accent-4: #3f8a6b;
--font-display: "Poiret One", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition: Hieroglyphs were 'the words of the gods', and most surviving pages and walls are funerary and temple texts written for named people, spells for the afterlife and royal names that carried sacred power: do not use them as random texture, invent pseudo-hieroglyphs, or put an ordinary name in a cartouche as if it were ancient practice, since cartouches enclosed royal names; nor scatter the ankh, djed, wedjat eye, scarab or winged sun disc as décor, since the first four were protective amulets and the winged disc was the emblem of Behdety, Horus of Edfu, protector of the pharaoh. Image models cannot write hieroglyphs and make up signs, so leave text areas blank in generated images, have any real text composed or checked by an Egyptologist from Gardiner's sign list, and never present a generated image as an ancient work. Many key works left Egypt in contested ways: the Papyrus of Ani was found in 1888 by Egyptians trading in illegal antiquities and obtained by E. A. Wallis Budge for the British Museum, by his own account smuggled out after the police had sealed the dealers' houses (locals tunnelled in while he kept the guards busy with a meal), for which the Treasury later paid him a £150 'gratuity'; the Nebamun paintings were hacked from the tomb walls around 1820 and sold by Henry Salt; and the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, formerly in charge of Egypt's antiquities, has repeatedly called for the Rosetta Stone's return as the 'icon of our Egyptian identity'. Credit objects with their findspots and holding institutions, treat pharaonic heritage as part of modern Egypt's identity rather than as exotic 'Egyptomania' décor, and avoid casting the ancient Egyptians to fit modern racial claims.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Art Deco
- Googie & Atomic Age Pairs well · Googie's atomic starbursts extend Deco's celestial ornament; mix them for retro hospitality and signage.
- Punk & DIY Zine Contrasts · Puncture Deco polish with a single torn, photocopied edge when luxury needs irony.
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · Deco straightened Nouveau's whiplash; place a rigid sunburst beside one sinuous curve to show the evolution.
- Streamline Moderne Pairs well · Fold Streamline speed lines and rounded corners into a Deco layout to move from stepped geometry toward aerodynamic sweep.
- Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat) Contrasts · A source as well as a foil: Leupin studied at the École Paul Colin in Paris in 1935-36 and took strong impressions from Colin and from Colin's rival Cassandre. Both make a product a heroic icon, but Deco stylises it into a geometric silhouette with airbrushed gradation and geometric capitals, while Basel paints the real object, its material and its label, as a still life.
- Estridentismo (Stridentist) Graphics Pairs well · Both drew the 1920s skyline; pair Deco's setback towers and block display letters with Stridentist black-and-white relief for a skyscraper poster with a rougher, revolutionary edge.
- Vienna Secession Pairs well · Carry the Secession's squares, chequers and gold into Deco's stepped geometry for a luxurious but disciplined look.
- Greek Tourism Modernism (EOT) Contrasts · Katzourakis studied poster design under Paul Colin in Paris; set a Deco travel poster's heroic, airbrushed destination beside this flat, cut-out sign to show how the tourist poster was stripped down after the war.
With Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Otto Neurath called his visual autobiography From hieroglyphics to Isotype, with chapters on hieroglyphics through the centuries and their renaissance; borrow the rule-bound sign family and rows of standing figures, but note the opposite rule of size: Isotype shows more by adding signs of equal size, Egypt shows rank by making one figure bigger.
- Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Pairs well · In 2012 Luxor-trained muralists such as Alaa Awad recast tomb painting on Cairo's Mohamed Mahmoud Street: profile processions of mourning women, registers, a sarcophagus and the weighing of the heart, brushed in acrylic around the faces of the martyrs. Look there for a living Egyptian use of the register and the procession, credited to its painters, rather than Egyptomania décor.
- Ethiopian Ge'ez Manuscript & Haräg Illumination Contrasts · Both write black text with red rubrics in ruled columns, but Ethiopian books are Christian parchment codices in the Ge'ez abugida with haräg interlace bands, while Book of the Dead papyri are rolls of cursive hieroglyphs with framed vignettes set between the text columns.
- Egyptian Painted Film Poster Contrasts · A brief that just says 'Egyptian' need not mean pharaonic: the painted cinema posters of 20th-century Cairo float naturalistic star heads in a painterly collage under Arabic calligraphic titles, the opposite of flat registers ruled by ground lines and columns of signs.
- Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting Contrasts · Both are sacred pictorial records in contour and flat colour with no depth, but Mixtec screenfolds lead the eye in a zigzag along red guidelines past big-headed figures and name glyphs, while Egyptian pages keep strict horizontal registers and ruled columns of a largely phonetic script, with figures sized by rank and drawn to a canon; do not merge them as generic 'ancient glyphs'.
- Egyptian Cigarette Packaging (Cairo Tobacco Houses) Pairs well · Draw the pharaonic motifs from real register compositions rather than souvenir clichés to give the vignettes more weight and accuracy.