Style combination · Contrasts

Japanese Postwar Modernism × Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

Postwar modernism reduces to emblem and white space with set type; Serizawa fills the sheet with hand-cut figures and letters.

From the research on Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

Mix them and make something Japanese Postwar Modernism Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Japanese Postwar Modernism, their arrangement from Japanese Postwar Modernism, the finish from Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics. 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.

Japanese Postwar Modernism Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

Type from Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics: Hand-lettering
Ornamented display

Japanese Postwar Modernism avoids ornamented display: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Colour from Japanese Postwar Modernism: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Japanese Postwar Modernism: Geometric primitives
Stylised figuration
Composition from Japanese Postwar Modernism: Generous white space
Single focal point
Surface from Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics: Paper & letterpress bite
Flat

The type

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

Display · Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

Tide

Shippori Mincho, standing in for Hand-cut stencil kana and kanji, dyed together with the picture, for calendar month names, book titles and inscriptions

Text · Japanese Postwar Modernism

Building on the New Typography that Hiromu Hara and the Nippon Kobo circle had absorbed in the 1930s, Japan's postwar graphic designers fused the grid, sans-serif and objective photography of European modernism with indigenous traditions of family crests (kamon), asymmetry and charged emptiness (ma). From the Graphic '55 exhibition and the Nippon Design Center to Yusaku Kamekura's Tokyo 1964 Olympic posters, it produced bold emblematic symbols, luminous flat colour fields and photography of startling precision.

Zen Kaku Gothic New; Japanese Postwar Modernism used Gothic and Mincho

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Japanese Postwar Modernism, with a counter-accent from Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Japanese Postwar Modernism Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics

#f4f1ea ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#d7261e accent · 18%
#d9a635 accent · 14%
#1d3c78 accent · 10%
#6b7a3a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4f1ea;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #d7261e;
  --accent-2: #d9a635;
  --accent-3: #1d3c78;
  --accent-4: #6b7a3a;
  --font-display: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
  --font-text: "Zen Kaku Gothic New", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Serizawa Katazome and Mingei Stencil-Dye Graphics: Katazome and Okinawan bingata are living crafts: bingata is an Okinawan (Ryukyuan) tradition, carried on by dye houses such as the Shiroma family, and is protected as an intangible cultural property, so credit Okinawa and its makers when borrowing its colours and motifs, and do not sell printed or generated imitations as hand-dyed katazome or bingata. Mainland mingei collecting of Okinawan and Korean crafts in the 1930s and 1940s is now read critically against Japan's colonial rule over Korea and its treatment of annexed Okinawa, which is one more reason to name Okinawan makers rather than present bingata as Serizawa's invention. Serizawa's and Yunoki's designs are authored works held by their museums: work in the manner rather than copying a calendar or screen. His Buddhist subjects, such as the 1939 scroll of the priest Hōnen, are devotional images, not decoration. Kana and kanji must be real, correct text checked by a fluent reader, never pseudo-script used as texture.