Style combination · Contrasts
Indian Pop-Kitsch Design × Indian Institutional Modernism
Happily Unmarried commissioned designers trained at NID and NIFT; set a restrained NID-style grid and sans serif against one loud kitsch icon to show the two faces of Indian design school culture.
Mix them and make something Indian Pop-Kitsch Design Indian Institutional Modernism
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.
Indian Pop-Kitsch Design (Desi Kitsch) Indian Institutional Modernism (NID)
- Type from Indian Institutional Modernism
- Colour from Indian Pop-Kitsch Design
- Form from Indian Pop-Kitsch Design
- Composition from Indian Institutional Modernism
- Surface from Indian Pop-Kitsch Design
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Indian Pop-Kitsch Design
Urban Indian gift and T-shirt design from the late 1990s into the 2010s that recasts the street and bazaar as ironic, affectionate icons: truck tails and 'Horn OK Please', auto-rickshaws, Ambassadors and Chetaks, cutting chai, old Bollywood stills and dialogues, Bhagat Singh in place of Che. Labels such as Happily Unmarried, Playclan, 1469 and Chumbak redrew them as flat, saturated graphics with Hinglish puns and painted-sign lettering on mugs, magnets and notebooks, 'modern yet at the same time Indian'.
Space Grotesk; Indian Pop-Kitsch Design used Truck painters' shaded block capitals for slogans such as 'Horn OK Please', which Avid Learning's press release for the 2019 'Kitsch and the City' panel at NGMA Mumbai named among Mumbai's kitsch: 'the letters "Horn Ok Please" in block fonts' and Drawn Bollywood title lettering and quoted film dialogue, as in Happily Unmarried's 'Kya Tumney Aaj Phir Sharab Pee Hai' series
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Indian Pop-Kitsch Design, with a counter-accent from Indian Institutional Modernism. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Indian Pop-Kitsch Design (Desi Kitsch) Indian Institutional Modernism (NID)
-
#ffcc00ground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#f26522accent · 18% -
#ec1e79accent · 14% -
#22409aaccent · 10% -
#00a3a6accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ffcc00;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #f26522;
--accent-2: #ec1e79;
--accent-3: #22409a;
--accent-4: #00a3a6;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Space Grotesk", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Indian Pop-Kitsch Design (Desi Kitsch): The style quotes living crafts and sacred images: commission, credit and pay truck, sign and hoarding painters rather than lifting their panels, and do not put deities, the Om, the Khanda or Qur'anic phrases on footwear, underwear, ashtrays or toilet jokes. Check Hindi and Punjabi puns before printing, since several hits of the trend ('KLPD', 'Bosedk') are vulgar double entendres, and keep away from divisive political figures (1469 turned down demands for Bhindranwale T-shirts). Bhagat Singh is claimed by rival political camps (the farmers' movement, Communists, Khalistanis, the AAP and other parties), so check how a portrait tee will read before printing it. Laugh with the vernacular, not at the drivers, rickshaw pullers and chai sellers whose working lives supply the icons.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Indian Pop-Kitsch Design
- Hand-Painted Bollywood Poster Pairs well · Old film posters and dialogues are a staple of the style; borrow the painted star heads and drawn title logos of the hand-painted posters for a film-club or café identity, then flatten them into kitsch's vector colour for the merchandise.
- Guochao (China-Chic National Trend) Contrasts · China's guochao redraws imperial and auspicious motifs in palace red and gold with patriotic pride; desi kitsch mines the everyday street in neon pink and taxi yellow with irony, and by 2010 Open judged that 'in the race to be desi, we ended up being too desi'.
- Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art Contrasts · Its parent: Avid Learning's press release for the 2019 NGMA Mumbai panel traced Indian kitsch to 'calendars, cinema visuals and posters of gods and goddesses'. Calendar art paints deities with glowing naturalism for worship; desi kitsch redraws Hanuman, Shiva-Parvati or a lotus as flat icons that, as Open put it in 2009, 'signal novelty and coolness more than anything really religious'.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Open summed up Playclan's tees as 'Indian pop art on a T-shirt' and Nida Mahmood invoked Warhol's principle of drawing attention to something 'basic and in-your-face'; borrow Pop's repeated grid of one commodity (a row of chai glasses or tea packets) to give a desi icon gallery weight.
- Newtro (Korean New-Retro) Contrasts · Korea's newtro also sells nostalgia, but heritage firms reissue their own labels and mascots; desi kitsch borrows anonymous street vernacular (trucks, rickshaws, signboards) that no brand owns, and plays it for laughs.
With Indian Institutional Modernism
- Hand-Painted Bollywood Poster Contrasts · Set a hand-painted film poster's melodrama beside a reductive public-sector mark to contrast popular and institutional India.
- Bengali Modernist Book Cover (Prachchhad) Contrasts · Calcutta's lettering-led literary jackets are the hand-made counterpart to institutional symbols and grids; contrast them to decide how personal a cultural identity should feel.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Add Isotype counting figures to the symbol system for public-information campaigns that work across literacy levels.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Pairs well · Use corporate modernism's standards-manual discipline to roll a bilingual Indian mark out consistently across every script.
- Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art Contrasts · Bazaar calendar art's glossy deities and crowded borders are what NID modernism reacted against; quote one for a deliberate high-low clash.
- Mithila (Madhubani) Painting Pairs well · Set one bordered Mithila panel, credited to its painter, inside the quiet grid and white space of NID modernism, so the dense line work becomes the single focal point of an otherwise restrained Indian layout.
- Santiniketan & Bengal School Graphics Contrasts · Independent India's next public face, from NID, swapped hand-painted figures and illumination for geometric symbols and sans-serif logotypes; the pair marks the turn from craft nationalism to systematic identity.