Style combination · Contrasts
Bezalel School × Die Neue Typographie
While Bezalel was gilding hand-drawn Hebrew letters inside ornamental frames, German modernists stripped ornament for sans-serif type and asymmetric layout; the two mark the poles of 1920s print.
Mix them and make something Bezalel School Die Neue Typographie
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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.
Bezalel School Die Neue Typographie
- Type from Die Neue Typographie
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Bezalel School avoids grotesque & neo-grotesque: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Colour from Die Neue Typographie
- Form from Bezalel School
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Die Neue Typographie avoids abundant decoration and borders & frames: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Composition from Bezalel School
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Die Neue Typographie avoids central symmetry: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Surface from Bezalel School
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The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Die Neue Typographie
The programme that turned avant-garde experiment into a functional typographic method, named by Moholy-Nagy in 1923 and codified in Jan Tschichold's 'elementare typographie' (1925) and Die neue Typographie (1928). It demanded asymmetric layouts, sans-serif type, standard paper formats, photography and active white space, all justified by clarity of communication, and spread through the Ring neue Werbegestalter and designers from Delft to Prague.
Jost; Die Neue Typographie used Futura and Akzidenz-Grotesk
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Die Neue Typographie, with a counter-accent from Bezalel School. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Bezalel School Die Neue Typographie
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#f3efe4ground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#d32a1faccent · 18% -
#c9a03aaccent · 14% -
#7d7a73accent · 10% -
#2f8a8caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f3efe4;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #d32a1f;
--accent-2: #c9a03a;
--accent-3: #7d7a73;
--accent-4: #2f8a8c;
--font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Bezalel School: Bezalel works quote Hebrew scripture and decorate ritual objects: do not crop, distort, mirror or print biblical verses, and above all the names of God, on throwaway items (such pages are customarily buried rather than discarded), and have any Hebrew read by a fluent reader. The style's figures cast Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews, who modelled for its students and worked as its silversmiths and stone carvers, as picturesque biblical types, and its programme was Zionist in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine; credit the artisans, avoid exoticising living communities, and do not present it as a neutral 'Holy Land' or regional style. It also built a Jewish national art in part from Arab and Islamic sources (Persian and Syrian metalwork, Damascene inlay, Moorish pattern, and Hebrew lettering that drew on Arabic script) in a land it shared with Palestinian Arabs, whom, like Yemenite Jews, its artists took as models for biblical figures: name those sources rather than presenting the motifs as purely Jewish, and treat pieces such as 'Come to Palestine' and the Zionist insignia as political documents, not neutral travel imagery.
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The two styles
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More combinations
With Bezalel School
- Vienna Secession Contrasts · Both put pictures inside symmetrical ornamental frames, but Vienna squared the frame into grids and bars while Bezalel filled it with Middle Eastern filigree, carpet and metalwork motifs.
- Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art Pairs well · Both built a graphic language for a people's cultural renewal from ancestral ornament and biblical subjects in the 1920s; combine Bezalel's gilded frames with Aaron Douglas's flat silhouettes.
- Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Contrasts · In the same decade Turkey replaced the Arabic script with Latin letters, while Bezalel made the revived Hebrew script its chief ornament; set them side by side to show two national answers to script.
- Islamic Geometric & Calligraphic Tradition Pairs well · Bezalel took Moorish and Islamic geometric pattern for its borders and filigree; pair the two for frames whose star tilings and strapwork hold a figurative centre.
- Hebrew Poster Lettering & Early Israeli State Design Contrasts · The Jerusalem national art that came before it used the same menorah, ancient coins and hand-drawn Hebrew, but packed them into gilded, ornamental, biblical frames; the Tel Aviv studios reduced them to a single emblem on flat colour, and the emblem committee of 1949 deliberately left out overtly religious symbols.
- Celtic Revival Illumination & Lettering Pairs well · Another national illumination of the 1900s–1920s, with hand-drawn national letters, jewel colours and gold inside heavy symmetrical frames; compare how each built a national art from ancient ornament.
- Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design Contrasts · Two Jewish national arts of the same years with hand-drawn Hebrew letters: Bezalel's Zionist, biblical pictures in gilded symmetrical frames in Jerusalem, and the Kultur-Lige's secular Yiddish children's books in faceted avant-garde planes in Kyiv; never merge them into one 'Jewish style'.
- Mir iskusstva Book Art Pairs well · In the same years both used Art Nouveau's ornamental frame to build a national book art from older ornament; set Bilibin's folk borders beside Raban's filigree frames to compare two revivals, or combine their framed, lettered pages.
With Die Neue Typographie
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Two-colour riso printing suits its black-plus-red restraint for low-budget editorial and posters.
- Cranbrook & Deconstructivist Typography Contrasts · Cranbrook dismantled exactly these rules; state one New Typography convention clearly, then break it on purpose.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · Extend its asymmetric black-and-red onto a full modular grid for a seamless Swiss-era update.
- Renaissance Book Typography Contrasts · Tschichold himself returned to the centred classical page; set the two side by side to choose between symmetric tradition and asymmetric function.
- Mechano-Faktura & Polish Constructivist Advertising Pairs well · Pair the line-field image with asymmetric sans setting for an advertising layout.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Pairs well · Saville's model: borrow Tschichold's asymmetric placement and small sans-serif capitals, then replace his photographs with one quoted image to get a cool, ordered sleeve.
- Brodovitch Editorial Design (Harper's Bazaar) Contrasts · Asymmetry without rules: improvised and photographic rather than systematic.
- German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung) Contrasts · From the mid-1920s the Bauhaus and the New Typography took over the avant-garde of the book; centred hand-press pages against asymmetric sans-serif layouts make a clear old-against-new tension.