Style combination · Contrasts
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic × Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
Both are sacred pictorial records in contour and flat colour with no depth, but Mixtec screenfolds lead the eye in a zigzag along red guidelines past big-headed figures and name glyphs, while Egyptian pages keep strict horizontal registers and ruled columns of a largely phonetic script, with figures sized by rank and drawn to a canon; do not merge them as generic 'ancient glyphs'.
Mix them and make something Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
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.
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
- Type from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
- Colour from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
- Form from Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
- Composition from Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
- Surface from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
Public
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 · Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
The painted screenfold books of Postclassic southern and central Mexico (not the Maya codices): long strips of gesso-coated deerskin, folded like a screen and painted on both sides. In the Mixtec histories red guidelines lead the reader in a zigzag through the deeds and marriages of rulers; in the divinatory Borgia Group, pages pair deities with periods of the 260-day count. Profile figures with large heads, glyphs for names, dates and places, and flat colour inside an even black contour make picture and writing one codified system.
Fira Sans; Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting used Calendar-name glyphs and Place signs, most built on a hill glyph that carries the attributes naming the town
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic, with a counter-accent from Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
-
#e8dcb5ground · 36% -
#1c1a17ink · 14% -
#d4a03aaccent · 18% -
#a63d24accent · 14% -
#1f5c9eaccent · 10% -
#3f8a6baccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #e8dcb5;
--ink: #1c1a17;
--accent-1: #d4a03a;
--accent-2: #a63d24;
--accent-3: #1f5c9e;
--accent-4: #3f8a6b;
--font-display: "Cinzel", serif;
--font-text: "Fira Sans", 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.
Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting: These books are Indigenous sacred and dynastic records: Mixtec speakers called them ñee ñuhu, 'sacred skins'; the Borgia Group almanacs set out deities and the ritual 260-day count, and the Mixtec histories record the genealogies of ruling houses whose Ñuu Dzaui (Mixtec) descendants live in Oaxaca, Puebla, Guerrero and the diaspora today. Almost all surviving books left Mexico during the conquest, the colonial period or the nineteenth century and are now in European libraries and museums; the Codex Colombino in Mexico City is a rare exception. 'Mixteca-Puebla' itself is an archaeologists' label, not a name the painters used: George Vaillant described a Mixteca-Puebla 'culture' or 'civilization', H. B. Nicholson redefined it as a style shared by Nahua and Mixtec artists, and its questions remain open. Do not lift deities, calendar signs or named rulers as decoration, logos or generic 'Aztec pattern', never invent pseudo-glyphs or present generated pages as historical, and work with Mixtec and Nahua scholars, artists and communities, crediting the codex and its people.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · 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.
- Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Pairs well · In 2012 Luxor-trained muralists such as Alaa Awad recast tomb painting on Cairo's Mohamed Mahmoud Street: profile processions of mourning women, registers, a sarcophagus and the weighing of the heart, brushed in acrylic around the faces of the martyrs. Look there for a living Egyptian use of the register and the procession, credited to its painters, rather than Egyptomania décor.
- Art Deco Pairs well · The expeditions that led to Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 set off a 1920s Egyptian Revival often counted as part of Art Deco (the papyrus-plant elevator doors of the Chrysler Building); a deco treatment can borrow lotus and papyrus motifs, stepped frames and flat colour, but should not invent pseudo-hieroglyphs.
- Ethiopian Ge'ez Manuscript & Haräg Illumination Contrasts · Both write black text with red rubrics in ruled columns, but Ethiopian books are Christian parchment codices in the Ge'ez abugida with haräg interlace bands, while Book of the Dead papyri are rolls of cursive hieroglyphs with framed vignettes set between the text columns.
- Egyptian Painted Film Poster Contrasts · 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.
- Egyptian Cigarette Packaging (Cairo Tobacco Houses) Pairs well · Draw the pharaonic motifs from real register compositions rather than souvenir clichés to give the vignettes more weight and accuracy.
With Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
- Chicano Screenprint Poster Pairs well · Chicano screenprinters reclaimed Mexica glyphs and calendar imagery for the movement; when contour-and-flat-colour glyphs meet a modern poster, follow their example of community context and credit. Mexica (Aztec) glyphs are a different source from these Mixtec and Borgia Group books: credit a codex source as such rather than folding it into 'Aztec'.
- Northwest Coast Formline Design Contrasts · Both are Indigenous American sign systems of contour and flat colour, but formline swells and tapers its line into ovoids and U-forms in symmetric crests, while the codex keeps an even, unmodulated contour around profile figures strung along a guided reading path; do not merge them as generic 'Native' art.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Pairs well · Both keep a sequential story readable with an even, unmodulated contour and flat colour, without hatching or modelling; borrow the codex's red-guideline reading path for a clear-line page, as a formal analogy rather than a lineage.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Both tell information through standardised, repeatable signs and count by repeating units; codex day signs with counting dots are a precedent for pictogram-plus-number systems.
- Andean Woven Graphic Systems Contrasts · Andean signs are built on the thread grid and repeated as pattern, while codex signs are painted freely in contour and strung along a narrative path; do not merge the two as generic 'pre-Columbian'.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Contrasts · Posada's broadsheets carve tone and texture into relief blocks under shouting type, whereas codex painting has no tone at all, only contour and flat colour; keep them apart when the brief just says 'Mexican'.
- Burmese Parabaik Painting (Konbaung Folding Books) Contrasts · Both are screenfold books, but the Mixtec codex reads glyphic figures along red guide-lines on flat colour, while the parabaik frames painted, captioned scenes with European depth.