Style combination · Pairs well
Contemporary Chinese Book Design × Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock
The late-Ming letter papers pressed uninked blocks into paper (gonghua); use the same blind relief for a title or motif that shows only in raking light, as the colourless debossed title of the 2018 award book Ti'ang: Bai Ming de guodu does.
Mix them and make something Contemporary Chinese Book Design Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock
01
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') Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock (Douban & Gonghua)
- Type from Contemporary Chinese Book Design
- Form from Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock
- Composition from Contemporary Chinese Book Design
- Surface from Contemporary Chinese Book Design
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Contemporary Chinese Book Design
Tide
Shippori Mincho, standing in for 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
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
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock, 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') Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock (Douban & Gonghua)
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#e9e0ccground · 36% -
#403e3aink · 14% -
#b8352daccent · 18% -
#d27a7faccent · 14% -
#a8925aaccent · 10% -
#5f7986accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #e9e0cc;
--ink: #403e3a;
--accent-1: #b8352d;
--accent-2: #d27a7f;
--accent-3: #a8925a;
--accent-4: #5f7986;
--font-display: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
--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.
Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock (Douban & Gonghua): Woodblock printing in watercolour (muban shuiyin) of this kind is still practised by studios such as Duoyunxuan in Shanghai and Rong Bao Zhai in Beijing and is on China's national list of intangible cultural heritage (木版水印技艺, VIII-77: Rong Bao Zhai 2006, Duoyunxuan 2008 and the Hangzhou Shizhuzhai Art Museum 2014): commission or credit their carvers and printers rather than passing off a digital imitation as a hand-printed edition, and never present a generated image as a leaf of the 1633 Collection, the 1644 Letter Papers or the Mustard Seed Garden manual. Have every inscription written or checked by a fluent reader, because image models invent pseudo-characters, and never make up a seal bearing a real painter's, collector's or studio's name.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Contemporary Chinese Book Design
- Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho) Pairs well · Tea Canon prints its vertical text in the red line grid of the woodblock page and then loosens the grid into black hairlines on its picture leaves; quote the ruled frame on the text pages and let it dissolve where images begin.
- Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics Contrasts · Both leave paper empty and slow the eye, but wabi-sabi prizes the worn, imperfect thing, while these books are precisely engineered, industrially printed objects whose roughness is designed; use wabi-sabi when the patina should be real.
- Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing) Contrasts · Lu Xun and Tao Yuanqing made the cover the work: a hand-drawn title and one motif on a plain field, with the untrimmed (毛边) edges that Bu Cai takes up again. In 1996 Lü Jingren and three colleagues called for moving from zhuangzhen (装帧), which by the 1990s had narrowed to dressing the cover, to shuji sheji (书籍设计), designing the whole object: paper, sewing, edges, sequence. Choose between dressing a book and building one.
- German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung) Pairs well · 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.
- Guochao (China-Chic National Trend) Contrasts · 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.
With Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock
- Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho) Pairs well · The same Nanjing book trade cut both: put a ruled Song-style text page opposite a graded colour leaf, as an album or a book with plates.
- Hong Kong East–West Graphic Modernism Pairs well · From the 1980s Hong Kong designers such as Kan Tai-keung staged ink washes and brush strokes in wide modernist white space; a single graded bamboo or plum spray on a clean field works the same way on packaging or a poster.
- Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints Contrasts · Japanese colour prints fill flat colours into a carved black key line; the Ten Bamboo leaf drops the key line and grades each colour inside its block. The 1633 manual was reprinted in Japan and foreshadowed nishiki-e, yet the choice is between a graphic outline and a print that passes for a wash painting.
- Nianhua & Chinese Folk Print Contrasts · Both are Chinese colour woodblocks, but New Year prints are outlined, saturated, symmetrical and crowded with auspicious figures for every household, while the literati leaf is pale, sparse and made for the scholar's desk.
- Rinpa & Saga-bon Pairs well · Kōetsu's poems written over printed and painted papers are a Japanese cousin of the decorated letter paper: pair a faint printed motif with brushed text that runs over it.
- Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics Pairs well · Both make the empty ground do the work; borrow wabi-sabi's earthy, rough materials to give a Ten Bamboo-style motif a humbler surface, or its quiet asymmetry to place it.