Style combination · Contrasts

Edo-moji Commercial Lettering × Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

Edo-moji crams heavy brush letters for the theatre and the street; Serizawa cuts open, airy letters that share the cloth with pictures.

From the research on Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

Mix them and make something Edo-moji Commercial Lettering Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics, their arrangement from Edo-moji Commercial Lettering, the finish from Edo-moji Commercial Lettering. 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.

Edo-moji Commercial Lettering (Kanteiryū, Yose-moji, Sumō-ji) Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

Type from Edo-moji Commercial Lettering: Hand-lettering
Tight setting
Colour from Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics: Earth & mineral
Flat fields
Form from Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics: Stylised figuration
Rounded & pill
Composition from Edo-moji Commercial Lettering: Horror vacui
Central symmetry
Surface from Edo-moji Commercial Lettering: Painterly brushwork

Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics avoids painterly brushwork: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.

The type

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

Display · Edo-moji Commercial Lettering

Fiesta

Yatra One; Edo-moji Commercial Lettering used Kanteiryū (勘亭流, shibai-moji) and Yose-moji (寄席文字)

Text · Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

Japanese folk-craft graphic design made by cutting paper stencils and dyeing through a rice-paste resist. Figures, tools, houses, plants and kana or kanji are cut as one stencil, so letters and pictures share the same soft, hand-cut edge and sit as flat fields of earth, indigo and bingata red on undyed cloth or washi. Serizawa used it for calendars, book covers, screens and picture books, setting small everyday scenes in grids of panels or repeating them across the cloth.

Shippori Mincho; Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics used Hand-cut stencil kana and kanji, dyed together with the picture, for calendar month names, book titles and inscriptions and Moji-e (文字絵), letters built from figures and objects, collected in Serizawa Keisuke no moji-e, san

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics, with a counter-accent from Edo-moji Commercial Lettering. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Edo-moji Commercial Lettering (Kanteiryū, Yose-moji, Sumō-ji) Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

#efe6d2 ground · 36%
#2b2622 ink · 14%
#d9a635 accent · 18%
#b8312a accent · 14%
#d8c8a0 accent · 10%
#1f3a5f accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe6d2;
  --ink: #2b2622;
  --accent-1: #d9a635;
  --accent-2: #b8312a;
  --accent-3: #d8c8a0;
  --accent-4: #1f3a5f;
  --font-display: "Yatra One", cursive;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

Edo-moji Commercial Lettering (Kanteiryū, Yose-moji, Sumō-ji): These are living professional hands: Kanteiryū is written by kabuki calligraphers, yose-moji is taught by the Tachibana school, and sumō-ji is the trained duty of the Japan Sumo Association's gyōji, so commission or credit those writers instead of passing off a font as their work. Senjafuda are votive slips left at shrines and temples and the banzuke's 蒙御免 is a formula of sumo tradition; do not print real shrine names, performers' names or rankings as decoration, and draw characters with their real meanings rather than as pseudo-Japanese texture.

Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics: Katazome and Okinawan bingata are living crafts: bingata is an Okinawan (Ryukyuan) tradition, carried on by dye houses such as the Shiroma family, and is protected as an intangible cultural property, so credit Okinawa and its makers when borrowing its colours and motifs, and do not sell printed or generated imitations as hand-dyed katazome or bingata. Mainland mingei collecting of Okinawan and Korean crafts in the 1930s and 1940s is now read critically against Japan's colonial rule over Korea and its treatment of annexed Okinawa, which is one more reason to name Okinawan makers rather than present bingata as Serizawa's invention. Serizawa's and Yunoki's designs are authored works held by their museums: work in the manner rather than copying a calendar or screen. His Buddhist subjects, such as the 1939 scroll of the priest Hōnen, are devotional images, not decoration. Kana and kanji must be real, correct text checked by a fluent reader, never pseudo-script used as texture.