Style combination · Contrasts

Contemporary Chinese Book Design × Guochao

Guochao shouts Chinese heritage with saturated jewel colours, gloss and folk motifs on packaging; these books whisper it with bare paper, thread, one red and at most a matte gilt edge, so choose between the loud and the quiet national voice.

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

Mix them and make something Contemporary Chinese Book Design Guochao

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

Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China') Guochao (China-Chic National Trend)

Type from Guochao: Brush & pen calligraphy
Type as image
Colour from Guochao: Jewel & metallic
Limited spot colours
Form from Guochao: Folk & sacred symbols
Stylised figuration
Composition from Contemporary Chinese Book Design: Generous white space
Sequential narrative
Surface from Contemporary Chinese Book Design: Paper & letterpress bite
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Guochao

Souvenir

Kaushan Script, standing in for Bold brush calligraphy (kaishu and xingshu) for hero characters

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 Guochao, with a counter-accent from Contemporary Chinese Book Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China') Guochao (China-Chic National Trend)

#161616 ground · 36%
#f3ead8 ink · 14%
#e3b33b accent · 18%
#b0342a accent · 14%
#a8925a accent · 10%
#3c8d72 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #161616;
  --ink: #f3ead8;
  --accent-1: #e3b33b;
  --accent-2: #b0342a;
  --accent-3: #a8925a;
  --accent-4: #3c8d72;
  --font-display: "Kaushan Script", cursive;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

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.

Guochao (China-Chic National Trend): Guochao often lifts ethnic-minority crafts (Miao silverwork and embroidery, Dai and Mongolian motifs) and intangible-heritage techniques as packaging finishes. Credit and pay the communities and craftspeople whose patterns are used, commission or collaborate with practitioners rather than copying motifs, and remember that dragons, imperial yellow and national symbols carry political as well as decorative meaning.

The two styles

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.

An ornate red, gold and green label features large gold Chinese characters in a central cartouche, flanked by two white cranes with raised wings. Green mountains, a golden sun, curling clouds and flowering branches fill the surrounding space inside elaborate decorative borders.

2018–present · East Asia Guochao (China-Chic National Trend) A Chinese branding and fashion trend, usually dated from Li-Ning's 'China Li-Ning' show at New York Fashion Week in February 2018, that redraws heritage motifs as finishes for sneakers, apparel, cosmetics and museum merchandise. Huge brush or block characters become the picture, framed like seals and crossed with streetwear lockups, in palace red, imperial yellow, jade and gold with auspicious clouds, waves, dragons and lotus; the tone is nostalgic, premium and openly patriotic.