Style combination · Pairs well

German Book Art Movement × Contemporary Chinese Book Design

Both treat paper, type, binding and case as one work of book art; set a German book-art title page beside an exposed-spine Chinese volume to show two national cultures of the crafted book that meet in Leipzig.

From the research on Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China')

Mix them and make something German Book Art Movement Contemporary Chinese Book Design

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from German Book Art Movement, their arrangement from Contemporary Chinese Book Design, the finish from German Book Art Movement. 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.

German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung) Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China')

Type from German Book Art Movement: Humanist & Garalde serif
Blackletter
Colour from Contemporary Chinese Book Design: Earth & mineral
Limited spot colours
Form from German Book Art Movement: Stylised figuration
Restrained accents
Composition from Contemporary Chinese Book Design: Generous white space
Sequential narrative
Surface from German Book Art Movement: Paper & letterpress bite
Carved line

The type

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

Display · German Book Art Movement

Calm

UnifrakturMaguntia; German Book Art Movement used Behrens-Schrift (Peter Behrens, Gebr. Klingspor, 1902; semibold 1901), followed by Behrens-Antiqua and Behrens-Kursiv and Ehmcke-Antiqua and Ehmcke-Kursiv (Flinsch, 1908–1910; the Antiqua is dated 1908 or 1909/10) and Ehmcke-Fraktur

Text · Contemporary Chinese Book Design

Chinese book design since 2003, when Shanghai founded the yearly 'Most Beautiful Books of China' award, whose winners go on to Leipzig. The whole book is designed as an object to handle: sewing bared on an open spine, roughened or deckled edges, coloured or gilded fore-edges, blind-pressed marks, leaves left closed at the fold, accordion and loose-sheet formats. Vertical and horizontal Chinese text, ink painting and quiet photography sit in wide margins on cream, kraft and ribbed papers, often with a single red.

Shippori Mincho; Contemporary Chinese Book Design used Song (Songti), imitation-Song (Fangsong) and Kai (Kaiti, a common printing face modelled on handwritten regular script) text type, the standard faces of the Chinese book, for vertical or horizontal text; Order – The Story of Fangyuan Bookshop (2016) runs its script both ways in one book and Characters taken from old woodcut-printed books, used as subheads in The Art of Gardening (2018) to give the new page a calligraphic flavour

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Contemporary Chinese Book Design, with a counter-accent from German Book Art Movement. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung) Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China')

#f0eadb ground · 36%
#1b1a18 ink · 14%
#b0342a accent · 18%
#a8925a accent · 14%
#c9b68c accent · 10%
#9a9892 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0eadb;
  --ink: #1b1a18;
  --accent-1: #b0342a;
  --accent-2: #a8925a;
  --accent-3: #c9b68c;
  --accent-4: #9a9892;
  --font-display: "UnifrakturMaguntia", serif;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung): Fraktur carries political weight in German-speaking countries: the Nazi regime pushed it as the German script in its first years before banning it in January 1941 (see the blackletter-fraktur caution). Several of the movement's presses and artists were active up to the 1933 seizure of power, after which Harry Graf Kessler of the Cranach-Presse never returned to Germany. Check how a Fraktur page or a 'German book art' label will read, especially for anything national or political.

Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China'): Have every Chinese character set and proofread by a fluent reader: image models invent pseudo-characters, and mirrored or random hanzi used as texture read as nonsense. These are recent designs by living designers and publishers, so commission or credit them rather than copying a prize-winning book's structure wholesale, never present a generated image as one of the award winners, and do not crop reproduced scripture, classics or calligraphy into decoration.

The two styles

1895–1933 · Central Europe German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung) The German reform of the book, from the magazine Pan (1895) to the private presses that ended around 1933. After Morris's Kelmscott Press, artists, printers and publishers treated a book as one work in which text, type, illustration, paper, presswork and binding agree. A Jugendstil start of floral borders and Beardsley-like drawing gave way, from about 1900, to a typographic phase: artist-drawn romans and Frakturen, hand-press printing on handmade paper, and drawn titles and woodcut initials as the only ornament. After 1918 illustration returned, as at the Cranach-Presse. 2003–present · East Asia Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China') Chinese book design since 2003, when Shanghai founded the yearly 'Most Beautiful Books of China' award, whose winners go on to Leipzig. The whole book is designed as an object to handle: sewing bared on an open spine, roughened or deckled edges, coloured or gilded fore-edges, blind-pressed marks, leaves left closed at the fold, accordion and loose-sheet formats. Vertical and horizontal Chinese text, ink painting and quiet photography sit in wide margins on cream, kraft and ribbed papers, often with a single red.

More combinations

With German Book Art Movement

With Contemporary Chinese Book Design

Every style combination