Stylogeny combining Bengali Modernist Book Cover × Republican Chinese Book Cover Design

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Style combination · Pairs well

Bengali Modernist Book Cover × Republican Chinese Book Cover Design

A parallel literary cover culture two decades later: hand-drawn titles, two or three flat inks and pale stock, with Bengali letters and folk contours in place of Chinese characters and Han reliefs.

From the research on Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing)

Mix them and make something Bengali Modernist Book Cover Republican Chinese Book Cover Design

ReverieBengali Modernist × Republican Chinese
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Bengali Modernist Book Cover, their arrangement from Republican Chinese Book Cover Design, the finish from Bengali Modernist Book Cover. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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.

Bengali Modernist Book Cover (Prachchhad) Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing)

Type from Bengali Modernist Book Cover
Colour from Republican Chinese Book Cover Design
Form from Bengali Modernist Book Cover
Composition from Republican Chinese Book Cover Design
Surface from Bengali Modernist Book Cover

02

The type

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

Display · Bengali Modernist Book Cover

Reverie

Rozha One, standing in for Hand-drawn Bangla (Bengali) display lettering with stretched matra

Text · Republican Chinese Book Cover Design

The covers of China's New Literature. From 1923 the writer Lu Xun took up cover design in earnest, and from 1924 he commissioned the painter Tao Yuanqing; he called covers with titles inscribed by famous people or set in lead type 'old hat' (老套). A hand-drawn title, two or three flat colours and one symbolic motif sit on a wide, plain field with generous margins. The motif is often taken from Han and Six Dynasties stone carvings, cut into angular silhouettes or, more rarely, painted in free brush. Qian Juntao and Feng Zikai carried the manner on at Shanghai's Kaiming Bookstore.

Shippori Mincho; Republican Chinese Book Cover Design used Lu Xun's hand-drawn and brush-written title characters and Meishuzi (美术字, 'art lettering')

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Republican Chinese Book Cover Design, with a counter-accent from Bengali Modernist Book Cover. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Bengali Modernist Book Cover (Prachchhad) Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing)

  • #efe8d8 ground · 36%
  • #1e1b16 ink · 14%
  • #e39a2d accent · 18%
  • #d4552b accent · 14%
  • #8b2b22 accent · 10%
  • #22406e accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe8d8;
  --ink: #1e1b16;
  --accent-1: #e39a2d;
  --accent-2: #d4552b;
  --accent-3: #8b2b22;
  --accent-4: #22406e;
  --font-display: "Rozha One", serif;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing): Hand-drawn titles must be real, correctly formed Chinese characters checked by a fluent reader: pseudo-characters, mirrored strokes or random hanzi used as texture read as nonsense, a common failure of image models imitating this style. Tao Yuanqing's and Lu Xun's designs are in the public domain, but Qian Juntao's (he died in 1998) and Feng Zikai's (he died in 1975, so still protected in life-plus-70 countries) are not; draw new motifs, and do not copy an artist's personal seal or monogram as decoration.

04

The two styles

Large blue Bengali brush lettering fills the upper portion of a cream-coloured cover. Below, a black boat with a rust-red sail floats on blue water beside a yellow sun and a distant palm-lined shore. 1943–present · South Asia Bengali Modernist Book Cover (Prachchhad) A literary book-jacket culture that began at Calcutta's Signet Press in 1943, where Satyajit Ray and later Purnendu Pattrea made the hand-drawn Bengali title the main image of the cover. Qayyum Chowdhury and AKM Abdur Rouf carried it on in Dhaka. Stretched and interlocked letters, bold brush contours taken from pata scrolls, Kalighat and alpana, and two or three flat colours on pale stock give poetry, fiction and translations a modern face that is unmistakably Bengali. Large orange Chinese calligraphy sits at the upper left on textured cream paper. A black flowering tree with orange blossoms extends beside simplified village buildings and a stone embankment, with orange ripples below. 1923–1949 · East Asia Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing) The covers of China's New Literature. From 1923 the writer Lu Xun took up cover design in earnest, and from 1924 he commissioned the painter Tao Yuanqing; he called covers with titles inscribed by famous people or set in lead type 'old hat' (老套). A hand-drawn title, two or three flat colours and one symbolic motif sit on a wide, plain field with generous margins. The motif is often taken from Han and Six Dynasties stone carvings, cut into angular silhouettes or, more rarely, painted in free brush. Qian Juntao and Feng Zikai carried the manner on at Shanghai's Kaiming Bookstore.

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