Style combination · Contrasts
Indian Pop-Kitsch Design × Newtro
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.
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) Newtro (Korean New-Retro)
- Type from Newtro
- Colour from Newtro
- Form from Indian Pop-Kitsch Design
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Newtro avoids folk & sacred symbols: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Composition from Indian Pop-Kitsch Design
- 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.
Display · Newtro
Pop
Kaushan Script, standing in for Woowa Brothers' Euljiro (2019) and Euljiro 10 Years Later (2020), free Hangul fonts drawn from Euljiro signboard brush lettering
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 Newtro, with a counter-accent from Indian Pop-Kitsch Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Indian Pop-Kitsch Design (Desi Kitsch) Newtro (Korean New-Retro)
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#f4ecd8ground · 36% -
#1c1c1cink · 14% -
#f0b929accent · 18% -
#f26522accent · 14% -
#d7322baccent · 10% -
#ec1e79accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4ecd8;
--ink: #1c1c1c;
--accent-1: #f0b929;
--accent-2: #f26522;
--accent-3: #d7322b;
--accent-4: #ec1e79;
--font-display: "Kaushan Script", cursive;
--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.
Newtro (Korean New-Retro): Newtro revives a firm's own archive: for any other client draw on that client's history, not Jinro's toad or Gompyo's bear, which their owners guard. In 2023 the first cans of 7Bräu's Daepyo Wheat Beer, which kept Gompyo's colour scheme and a bear, drew Daehan Flour Mills' warning that copying the brand's design could be unfair competition, and 7Bräu promised a redesign with a tiger. Keep Hangul and Hanja correct and legible, and do not swap in Japanese Shōwa-retro or colonial-era 'Gyeongseong' imagery: a 2018 JoongAng Ilbo column called restaurants that mix Japanese food with Gyeongseong nostalgia 'tasteless', since those who lived through the occupation remember it as 'shameful and painful'.
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'.
- Indian Institutional Modernism (NID) Contrasts · 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.
- 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.
With Newtro
- Out-of-Square Hangul Typography Contrasts · Set the modernist, geometric de-squared Hangul of Ahn Sang-soo against newtro's revived brush and cursive label lettering to show two ideas of fashionable Hangul.
- Hipster Artisanal Revival Contrasts · Both dress a product in the past, but hipster badges invent a Victorian heritage for a new firm while newtro reissues a real firm's own recent archive.
- Synthwave / Outrun Contrasts · Synthwave imagines an eighties that never shipped, in neon gradients; newtro reprints packaging that actually sat on Korean shelves, in flat spot colours.
- Guochao (China-Chic National Trend) Contrasts · China's contemporary heritage trend draws on imperial and folk motifs in red and gold; newtro draws on late-twentieth-century consumer packaging and its mascots.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Newtro's lettering is borrowed from Korean signboards; pair a revived label with real sign-painted shopfronts, as Euljiro's cafés keep their old hardware-store signs.
- Kawaii Design Pairs well · Revived trademarks become cute merchandise and emoticons; push the toad or bear toward kawaii roundness for spin-offs while keeping the label's period lettering.
- Showa and Heisei Retro Revival (Japanese Packaging and Kissaten Graphics) Contrasts · Both revive old everyday graphics, but newtro is Korean heritage-brand reissue with badge-led logic, while this is Japanese katakana-led kissaten and dagashi graphics in pastel spot colour.
- Taiwan Floral Cloth (Huabu) Pairs well · Both turn a postwar household look into nostalgia for young buyers; pair a reissued retro label or mascot with a floral-cloth band for packaging that recalls a grandmother's home.