Style combination · Contrasts

Gothic Blackletter × Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture

Textura and Uchen both turn scripture into an even horizontal weave of letters. Set beside the tall Gothic page, the pecha's long oblong leaf of a few headed lines shows how much the page format, not only the letterform, decides the texture.

From the research on Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags)

Mix them and make something Gothic Blackletter Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Gothic Blackletter, their arrangement from Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture, the finish from Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture. 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.

Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags)

Type from Gothic Blackletter: Blackletter
Tight setting
Colour from Gothic Blackletter: Limited spot colours
Monochrome
Form from Gothic Blackletter: Angular & zigzag
Rectilinear
Composition from Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture: Classical text block
Repetition & rhythm
Surface from Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture: Carved line
Paper & letterpress bite

The type

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

Display · Gothic Blackletter

Civic

UnifrakturMaguntia, standing in for Gutenberg's 42-line Bible textura (Mainz, c. 1454–55)

Text · Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture

Tibetan Buddhist and Bön woodblock printing, from the first printed Kangyur (1410, cut in China) and the 15th-century presses of Gungthang to the great printing houses of Narthang, Derge and Lhasa. Books take the pecha form of Indian palm-leaf pothis: long, unbound oblong leaves of headed Uchen script, justified with syllable dots, cut in reverse from a calligrapher's copy and printed in black, or in cinnabar red for the Buddha's word. The same workshops cut icons, mandalas and prayer flags: a wind horse ringed by mantras, printed on cloth in five element colours and left to fade in the wind.

Caveat; Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture used Uchen (dbu can, 'with a head'), the headed script of print, written out by monk calligraphers as master copies for the block cutters and Umê (dbu med), the headless cursive of everyday handwriting

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Gothic Blackletter, with a counter-accent from Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags)

#efe6cf ground · 36%
#1b1714 ink · 14%
#b0302a accent · 18%
#e3b02e accent · 14%
#b8913a accent · 10%
#2c4a8c accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe6cf;
  --ink: #1b1714;
  --accent-1: #b0302a;
  --accent-2: #e3b02e;
  --accent-3: #b8913a;
  --accent-4: #2c4a8c;
  --font-display: "UnifrakturMaguntia", serif;
  --font-text: "Caveat", cursive;
}

Use it with care

Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition: Blackletter carries political weight in German-speaking countries: the Nazi regime pushed Fraktur as the German script in its first years before banning it in January 1941 as supposed 'Schwabacher Jewish letters', and neo-Nazis still use broken scripts. In the United States, too, certain blackletter faces are associated with hate groups, on tattoos and clothing. Check how a blackletter wordmark will read, especially for anything German, national or political. Cholo placas are territorial inscriptions of Los Angeles Latino street writing with their own codes: do not copy a real neighbourhood's placa or roll call, and commission or credit Chicano letterers (such as Chaz Bojórquez) rather than borrowing their menace as decoration.

Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags): Pecha, icon prints and prayer flags are sacred objects in living Tibetan Buddhist and Bön practice. The Kangyur is the Buddha's word (hence its cinnabar ink), icon prints guide the painting of deities, and flags carry mantras, the four dignities and prayers for a named sponsor. By tradition flags are not put on the ground or worn as clothing, and old ones are burned rather than thrown away. Do not use real or imitation pages, mantras or flags as texture, party bunting, fashion prints or logos, do not crop or mirror them, and have any Tibetan written or checked by a fluent reader. Image models cannot write Uchen and invent letters, so leave text areas blank in generated images and never present one as a real text or flag. Derge still prints by hand from its historic blocks, while Narthang's main halls were razed in 1966: credit and commission Tibetan calligraphers, carvers and printers, in Tibet and in exile, rather than tracing their blocks.

The two styles

Large black Gothic lettering reading “Frost Wacht” fills an aged cream poster, surrounded by curling black foliage, red berries, and two inward-facing black birds. Red, blue, and ochre starbursts and a zigzag border frame the symmetrical design.

c. 1180–present · Central Europe, Western Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, North America, Global / networked Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition The broken scripts of the Latin West. Textualis, a book hand from the late 12th century (Rotunda its rounder Italian form), went into type with Gutenberg's 42-line Bible (Mainz, c. 1454–55); Schwabacher followed from 1472, and Fraktur was cut for Maximilian I's Prayer Book (1513). Curves break into angles; tight justified pages read as a dark, even weave with red rubrics. Fraktur set German text until the Nazi ban of 1941. Elsewhere it had long become a display letter, and today signals age, gravity or menace on mastheads, beer labels, metal logos and cholo lettering. c. 1410–present · East Asia, South Asia Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags) Tibetan Buddhist and Bön woodblock printing, from the first printed Kangyur (1410, cut in China) and the 15th-century presses of Gungthang to the great printing houses of Narthang, Derge and Lhasa. Books take the pecha form of Indian palm-leaf pothis: long, unbound oblong leaves of headed Uchen script, justified with syllable dots, cut in reverse from a calligrapher's copy and printed in black, or in cinnabar red for the Buddha's word. The same workshops cut icons, mandalas and prayer flags: a wind horse ringed by mantras, printed on cloth in five element colours and left to fade in the wind.