Style combination · Contrasts

Egyptian Painted Film Poster × Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic

A brief that just says 'Egyptian' need not mean pharaonic: the painted cinema posters of 20th-century Cairo float naturalistic star heads in a painterly collage under Arabic calligraphic titles, the opposite of flat registers ruled by ground lines and columns of signs.

From the research on Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition

Mix them and make something Egyptian Painted Film Poster Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic, their arrangement from Egyptian Painted Film Poster, the finish from Egyptian Painted Film Poster. 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.

Egyptian Painted Film Poster Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition

Type from Egyptian Painted Film Poster: Brush & pen calligraphy
Hand-lettering
Colour from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic: Flat fields
Earth & mineral
Form from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic: Pictogram
Stylised figuration
Composition from Egyptian Painted Film Poster: Collage & layering
Extreme scale contrast
Surface from Egyptian Painted Film Poster: Hard offset shadow
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Egyptian Painted Film Poster

Atlas

Rakkas, standing in for Hand-painted Arabic calligraphic title logotypes

Text · Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic

The visual system of pharaonic Egypt, in which writing is made of pictures and pictures are ruled like writing. Scenes stand in horizontal registers; figures are drawn in composite view, sized by rank rather than distance and laid out to a canon of proportions, in flat mineral colour without depth. Hieroglyphs run in columns or rows, packed into square groups facing the start of the line, and fill the spaces around figures as captions. Book of the Dead papyri add black text with red rubrics and framed vignettes; royal names stand in cartouches.

Inter; Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic used Monumental hieroglyphs, carved in raised or sunk relief and usually painted, grouped in square blocks (quadrats) in columns or rows and Cursive hieroglyphs (hieroglyphic book hand), written with a reed brush in black and red ink on papyrus, wood or leather, usually in columns, for religious texts such as the Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic, with a counter-accent from Egyptian Painted Film Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Egyptian Painted Film Poster Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition

#e8dcb5 ground · 36%
#1c1a17 ink · 14%
#d4a03a accent · 18%
#d1262f accent · 14%
#a63d24 accent · 10%
#1f5fa8 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #e8dcb5;
  --ink: #1c1a17;
  --accent-1: #d4a03a;
  --accent-2: #d1262f;
  --accent-3: #a63d24;
  --accent-4: #1f5fa8;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition: Hieroglyphs were 'the words of the gods', and most surviving pages and walls are funerary and temple texts written for named people, spells for the afterlife and royal names that carried sacred power: do not use them as random texture, invent pseudo-hieroglyphs, or put an ordinary name in a cartouche as if it were ancient practice, since cartouches enclosed royal names; nor scatter the ankh, djed, wedjat eye, scarab or winged sun disc as décor, since the first four were protective amulets and the winged disc was the emblem of Behdety, Horus of Edfu, protector of the pharaoh. Image models cannot write hieroglyphs and make up signs, so leave text areas blank in generated images, have any real text composed or checked by an Egyptologist from Gardiner's sign list, and never present a generated image as an ancient work. Many key works left Egypt in contested ways: the Papyrus of Ani was found in 1888 by Egyptians trading in illegal antiquities and obtained by E. A. Wallis Budge for the British Museum, by his own account smuggled out after the police had sealed the dealers' houses (locals tunnelled in while he kept the guards busy with a meal), for which the Treasury later paid him a £150 'gratuity'; the Nebamun paintings were hacked from the tomb walls around 1820 and sold by Henry Salt; and the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, formerly in charge of Egypt's antiquities, has repeatedly called for the Rosetta Stone's return as the 'icon of our Egyptian identity'. Credit objects with their findspots and holding institutions, treat pharaonic heritage as part of modern Egypt's identity rather than as exotic 'Egyptomania' décor, and avoid casting the ancient Egyptians to fit modern racial claims.

The two styles

A vintage-style painted poster combines large portraits of a dark-haired woman and a mustached man in a white turban with Egyptian ruins, torch-bearing men, and sailboats on a river at sunset. Red Arabic lettering spans the top, while a woman in a flowing red dress crouches beside a carved stone wall below.

1932–1996 · Middle East & North Africa Egyptian Painted Film Poster The painted publicity of Egyptian cinema from the early talkies to the 1990s, designed outside the studios by artist-printers such as Hassan Mazhar Gassour and printed as colour lithographs in Cairo. Star portraits copied from stills float as cut-out heads above a melodramatic scene. The Arabic title is painted as a one-off calligraphic logotype whose swelling, interlocked strokes can act out the film's theme. c. 0–394 · Middle East & North Africa Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition The visual system of pharaonic Egypt, in which writing is made of pictures and pictures are ruled like writing. Scenes stand in horizontal registers; figures are drawn in composite view, sized by rank rather than distance and laid out to a canon of proportions, in flat mineral colour without depth. Hieroglyphs run in columns or rows, packed into square groups facing the start of the line, and fill the spaces around figures as captions. Book of the Dead papyri add black text with red rubrics and framed vignettes; royal names stand in cartouches.