Style combination · Pairs well

Art Nouveau × Shōjo Manga

Art Nouveau reached shōjo manga twice: through the prewar lyrical illustration of the girls' magazines, whose sentimental style drew on Art Nouveau and Nihonga, and directly, in the 1970s–80s shōjo artists influenced by Mucha's aestheticism whom the Mucha Foundation's 'Mucha to Manga' exhibition (Bunkamura, 2019) showed. Frame a shōjo title page in an Art Nouveau border with hand-drawn lettering for a romantic poster or book cover.

From the research on Shōjo Manga (Japanese Girls' Comics)

Mix them and make something Art Nouveau Shōjo Manga

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Art Nouveau, their arrangement from Shōjo Manga, the finish from Shōjo Manga. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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 Nouveau Shōjo Manga (Japanese Girls' Comics)

Type from Art Nouveau: Hand-lettering
Ornamented display
Colour from Shōjo Manga: Monochrome
Pastel
Form from Art Nouveau: Whiplash line
Biomorphic curves
Composition from Shōjo Manga: Collage & layering
Broken grid
Surface from Shōjo Manga: Halftone & Ben-Day dots

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Art Nouveau

Rose

Federant, standing in for Arnold Böcklin (Otto Weisert, 1904)

Text · Shōjo Manga

The look of Japan's girls' comics (strictly a readership, not a style), which Takahashi Macoto fixed in 1958 from the lyrical illustration (jojōga) of Nakahara Jun'ichi and the Year 24 Group remade in the 1970s. The page is built for feeling, not action: panels overlap, slant or lose their borders, and slender full-length figures with huge, sparkling eyes merge with flowers, petals and pattern screentone into one layered spread, while inner monologue drifts free of the balloons through white space. Black and white inside; soft colour on covers and title pages.

Shippori Mincho; Shōjo Manga used Free-floating monologue lines and Words strung across the page

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Shōjo Manga, with a counter-accent from Art Nouveau. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Art Nouveau Shōjo Manga (Japanese Girls' Comics)

#fbf8f3 ground · 36%
#161214 ink · 14%
#a8cdea accent · 18%
#c9a24b accent · 14%
#f4b8ca accent · 10%
#3f7a75 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #fbf8f3;
  --ink: #161214;
  --accent-1: #a8cdea;
  --accent-2: #c9a24b;
  --accent-3: #f4b8ca;
  --accent-4: #3f7a75;
  --font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

Shōjo Manga (Japanese Girls' Comics): Shōjo manga is the living work of named, mostly women artists, several of them still publishing, and its series and characters, from The Rose of Versailles to Sailor Moon, are in copyright: draw original characters in the shared idiom, never ask an image model for a named series, character or artist's hand, and label generated pages as AI-made rather than presenting them as a manga artist's work. Many heroines, and the boys of the 1970s boarding-school romances, are adolescents: keep the romance in mood, flowers and faces, and never sexualise characters who read as minors.