Style combination · Pairs well

Dazibao × Urdu Katib Lithography

Both are handwritten public text pages; use their crowded, hand-ruled columns and enlarged brush headlines for an editorial or protest broadsheet.

From the research on Urdu Katib Lithography

Mix them and make something Dazibao Urdu Katib Lithography

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Urdu Katib Lithography, their arrangement from Urdu Katib Lithography, the finish from Dazibao. 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.

Dazibao (Big-Character Posters) Urdu Katib Lithography

Type from Urdu Katib Lithography: Brush & pen calligraphy
Hand-lettering
Colour from Dazibao: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from Urdu Katib Lithography: Rectilinear
Rules & bars
Composition from Urdu Katib Lithography: Column grid
Horror vacui
Surface from Dazibao: Painterly brushwork
Paper & letterpress bite

The type

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

Display · Urdu Katib Lithography

Ours

Rakkas, standing in for Lahori Nastaʿlīq (katib hand)

Text · Dazibao

Handwritten wall posters in large brush characters that turned the walls of Mao-era China into a public forum for criticism, denunciation and, at the Democracy Wall, dissent. Written by anyone, in black or red ink on white or red paper, without printed type or pictures, they were pasted edge to edge and over each other until walls, mat screens and corridors became one dense, ever-changing field of text. The right to write them was struck from the constitution in 1980.

Shippori Mincho; Dazibao used Freehand brush kaishu and xingshu and Imitations of Mao Zedong's cursive calligraphy for headings

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Dazibao, with a counter-accent from Urdu Katib Lithography. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Dazibao (Big-Character Posters) Urdu Katib Lithography

#f2eee3 ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#c3272b accent · 18%
#e3cf72 accent · 14%
#c9bfa6 accent · 10%
#5f5a52 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2eee3;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #c3272b;
  --accent-2: #e3cf72;
  --accent-3: #c9bfa6;
  --accent-4: #5f5a52;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

Dazibao (Big-Character Posters): Dazibao were instruments of denunciation: in the Anti-Rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution they named, humiliated and incited violence against real people, many of whom were persecuted or died. Do not use the look as playful 'Chinese protest' decoration or for mock denunciations of real individuals, have any Chinese text written or checked by a fluent writer, and treat surviving posters and photographs as testimony.

Urdu Katib Lithography: Urdu pages often carry Qur'anic phrases, the names of God and the Prophet and religious verse; never use Nastaʿlīq as meaningless texture or set invented text that imitates it, and have every word read by a fluent Urdu reader. Katibs were rarely credited; name the calligrapher where known, and commission a working khushnawees rather than tracing archival pages.

The two styles

1957–1980 · East Asia Dazibao (Big-Character Posters) Handwritten wall posters in large brush characters that turned the walls of Mao-era China into a public forum for criticism, denunciation and, at the Democracy Wall, dissent. Written by anyone, in black or red ink on white or red paper, without printed type or pictures, they were pasted edge to edge and over each other until walls, mat screens and corridors became one dense, ever-changing field of text. The right to write them was struck from the constitution in 1980. 1837–present · South Asia Urdu Katib Lithography For about a century and a half Urdu chose lithography over movable type, because metal type could not reproduce the sloping, stacked ligatures of Nastaʿlīq. Teams of katibs wrote whole newspapers, books and advertisements by hand on transfer paper, nesting each cascading word into dense, hand-ruled columns under enlarged calligraphic headlines. Noori Nastaliq (1981), digitised from Ahmed Mirza Jamil's hand, carried the katib's letterforms into computer composition.