Style combination · Pairs well

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic × Isotype Pictorial Statistics

Otto Neurath called his visual autobiography From hieroglyphics to Isotype, with chapters on hieroglyphics through the centuries and their renaissance; borrow the rule-bound sign family and rows of standing figures, but note the opposite rule of size: Isotype shows more by adding signs of equal size, Egypt shows rank by making one figure bigger.

From the research on Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition

Mix them and make something Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Isotype Pictorial Statistics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic, their arrangement from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic, the finish from Isotype Pictorial Statistics. 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.

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition Isotype Pictorial Statistics

Type from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic: Hand-lettering
Rotated & vertical setting
Colour from Isotype Pictorial Statistics: Flat fields
Limited spot colours
Form from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic: Pictogram
Stylised figuration
Composition from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic: Framed panels
Column grid
Surface from Isotype Pictorial Statistics: Flat

The type

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

Display · Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic

Form

Cinzel; 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

Text · Isotype Pictorial Statistics

A method of visual education developed by Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath (Reidemeister) and Gerd Arntz in Red Vienna from 1925, which turns statistics into rows of identical pictograms where a greater quantity is shown by more signs, never by bigger ones. Continued in The Hague and Oxford until 1971, its standardised symbols, flat colours and sans-serif captions laid the foundations of modern information graphics and pictogram systems.

Jost; Isotype Pictorial Statistics used Futura and Gerd Arntz's linocut pictogram set (c. 4,000 signs), used like a fount of picture-type

The colours

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

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition Isotype Pictorial Statistics

#f2ecdf ground · 36%
#1a1a1a ink · 14%
#c8372d accent · 18%
#d4a03a accent · 14%
#2c5aa0 accent · 10%
#8a5a3b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2ecdf;
  --ink: #1a1a1a;
  --accent-1: #c8372d;
  --accent-2: #d4a03a;
  --accent-3: #2c5aa0;
  --accent-4: #8a5a3b;
  --font-display: "Cinzel", serif;
  --font-text: "Jost", 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

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.

A cream-coloured infographic headed “TO SCHOOL” shows rows of red pedestrians, blue cyclists, green buses, brown cars and black scooter riders, labelled 20, 12, 8, 6 and 4. Buildings, four round green trees and a red schoolhouse form a strip along the bottom.

1925–1971 · Central Europe, Western Europe Isotype Pictorial Statistics A method of visual education developed by Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath (Reidemeister) and Gerd Arntz in Red Vienna from 1925, which turns statistics into rows of identical pictograms where a greater quantity is shown by more signs, never by bigger ones. Continued in The Hague and Oxford until 1971, its standardised symbols, flat colours and sans-serif captions laid the foundations of modern information graphics and pictogram systems.