Style combination · Pairs well

Indian Calendar × 'Good Morning' Greeting Images

Take calendar art's frontal deities, haloes and radiant gold for the devotional strand, and treat them with the same reverence.

From the research on 'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular)

Mix them and make something Indian Calendar 'Good Morning' Greeting Images

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images, their arrangement from Indian Calendar, the finish from Indian Calendar. 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.

Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art 'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular)

Type from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images: Script
Ornamented display
Colour from Indian Calendar: Full polychrome
Jewel & metallic
Form from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images: Naturalistic depiction
Biomorphic curves
Composition from Indian Calendar: Central symmetry
Single focal point
Surface from Indian Calendar: Gloss & highlights
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · 'Good Morning' Greeting Images

Halo

Rozha One, standing in for Devanagari greetings and verses: 'सुप्रभात!' in a heavy shadowed display face and Hindi couplets in a plain text face with key words picked out in red, above 'Good Morning' in an outlined non-script display face (WishGoodMorning.com)

Text · Indian Calendar

Mass-printed images of Hindu deities, epic scenes, saints, nationalist heroes and film stars, sold in bazaars and given away as business calendars, from the chromolithographs of the Calcutta Art Studio and Ravi Varma Press to Sivakasi offset. Frontal, idealised figures painted with academic naturalism glow against dreamy landscapes, in saturated colour with gold, haloes and ornate frames above the sponsor's name and calendar pad.

Archivo; Indian Calendar used Hand-drawn Devanagari display lettering and Hand-lettered Tamil and Bengali titles

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Indian Calendar, with a counter-accent from 'Good Morning' Greeting Images. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art 'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular)

#d4a537 ground · 39%
#141414 ink · 15%
#c8202f accent · 20%
#1e6fa3 accent · 15%
#3f8f3a accent · 11%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #d4a537;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #c8202f;
  --accent-2: #1e6fa3;
  --accent-3: #3f8f3a;
  --font-display: "Rozha One", serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art: These are devotional images that many viewers worship, so do not crop, distort or deface deities or place them on footwear, floors, underwear or in mocking contexts. Many original painters went uncredited; name the artist and press where known.

'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular): Many Indian good-morning images carry deities such as Krishna, Shukra Dev or Shani Dev, and many Brazilian ones carry prayers, Bible verses and saints of the day, so treat them as devotional pictures: do not crop, distort or mock a deity or a prayer, or put one on a joke. The senders are mostly older people, often new to smartphones, for whom the daily greeting keeps up family and friendships, so design with them rather than to sneer at 'tiozão do zap' taste. The photographs are usually stock or lifted from other sites and carry template makers' watermarks, so license or shoot your own pictures, and have every Hindi, Portuguese or other line checked by a fluent reader.

The two styles

1878–present · South Asia Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art Mass-printed images of Hindu deities, epic scenes, saints, nationalist heroes and film stars, sold in bazaars and given away as business calendars, from the chromolithographs of the Calcutta Art Studio and Ravi Varma Press to Sivakasi offset. Frontal, idealised figures painted with academic naturalism glow against dreamy landscapes, in saturated colour with gold, haloes and ornate frames above the sponsor's name and calendar pad. 2013–present · South Asia, Latin America & Caribbean 'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular) The ready-made greeting pictures that millions of smartphone users, many of them older and new to the internet, forward to family, friends and groups each morning on WhatsApp, above all in India and Brazil. A stock photo of flowers, a sunrise, birds, a coffee cup, a baby or, in India, the deity of the day sits under a greeting and a blessing, prayer or proverb. The look runs from glittering, crowded pictures to plain photo-and-text and pastel Canva-style cards, with a joking strand beside the devotional one. Sincere, the picture is mostly sent as it comes; the daily gesture is the message.