Style combination · Pairs well
Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books × Shanghai Modern
Its parent print culture: pair a lianhuanhua line sequence with a yuefenpai-style painted cover for a period Shanghai feel.
Mix them and make something Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Shanghai Modern
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.
Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai
- Type from Shanghai Modern
- Colour from Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books
- Form from Shanghai Modern
- Composition from Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books
- Surface from Shanghai Modern
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books
Palm-sized Chinese picture books, about three by five inches, that tell a novel, opera, film or revolutionary story in hundreds of single framed drawings, one to a page, each with a short caption. Interiors are black ink line drawings, from fine classical-costume outline to realist sketching, with colour kept for the cover. Rented and read at street stalls, they were the most popular reading of 20th-century China until television and manga displaced them from the late 1980s.
Shippori Mincho; Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books used Songti (Ming) and Kaiti printing types for captions and Hand-drawn meishuzi ('art lettering') cover titles
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books, with a counter-accent from Shanghai Modern. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai
-
#f0ead8ground · 36% -
#1b1b1bink · 14% -
#e2b84aaccent · 18% -
#b8322faccent · 14% -
#3d6e8faccent · 10% -
#1f5f5baccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f0ead8;
--ink: #1b1b1b;
--accent-1: #e2b84a;
--accent-2: #b8322f;
--accent-3: #3d6e8f;
--accent-4: #1f5f5b;
--font-display: "Limelight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}04
The two styles
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More combinations
With Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books
- Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Pairs well · Woodcut picture-stories and lianhuanhua share the one-image-per-page sequence; mix carved frames with drawn ones for documentary storytelling.
- Pop Art Graphics Contrasts · Pop blew one comic panel up to gallery scale; lianhuanhua keeps hundreds of quiet frames small, a useful test of scale and pace.
- Nianhua & Chinese Folk Print Pairs well · Both retell opera and folk stories for a popular audience; borrow nianhua colour for the cover and keep the inside in line.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Both tell stories in outlined drawings; lianhuanhua gives each pocket-sized page one framed black-ink picture with a caption and keeps colour for the cover, ligne claire fills tiered multi-panel pages with balloons and flat, bright colour, caricatural figures in realistic settings.
- Amar Chitra Katha Comics Contrasts · Both are didactic picture-story series of classical and historical tales; lianhuanhua gives each page one black-ink picture over a printed caption, Amar Chitra Katha puts several coloured panels with balloons on every page.
- Chinese National-Style Animation (Shanghai Animation Film Studio) Contrasts · Its printed contemporary: both told myths and fables, the Monkey King among them, to a mass audience under the same state, but the palm-sized picture-story books drew in black ink line, one framed picture to a page with a caption, while the studio moved painted and cut-paper figures over empty grounds with few or no words.
- Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics) Contrasts · Both are cheap, widely rented East Asian picture-story books; lianhuanhua gives each palm-sized page one framed drawing with a caption beneath and no balloons, while story manga packs a page with panels of changing size, balloons, speed lines and drawn sound effects.
- Korean Webtoon Graphics Contrasts · Both are picture stories for a mass readership, but lianhuanhua frames one monochrome line drawing per pocket-book page with a caption below; switch to the webtoon when the story should run as one full-colour column with the gutter, not the page turn, setting the pace.
With Shanghai Modern
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · After 1949 the same painters and rubbed-watercolour technique served propaganda; compare how one rendering style sells glamour versus ideology.
- Nianhua & Chinese Folk Print Pairs well · Fold nianhua's auspicious symbols and bright folk colour into a calendar-poster layout for festive packaging.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Its framed, ornamented, figurative poster is the opposite of Swiss reduction; strip elements one by one to find what carries the mood.
- Art Deco Pairs well · Wrap a softly painted yuefenpai figure in Deco borders and geometric lettering for East–West period glamour.
- Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing) Contrasts · Same city and decades, opposite intent: calendar posters model glamorous women in soft polychrome with ornamental borders, while New Literature covers leave a plain field to one flat, symbolic motif and a drawn title.
- Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Contrasts · Both are tobacco-sponsored calendar pictures of beauties, but yuefenpai set softly rubbed watercolour women inside decorative borders with the products alongside, while the Mexican chromo is an oil painting of a whole scene that fills the sheet, with the pad pasted at its foot.
- Cuban Tobacco Lithography (Habilitaciones & Marquillas) Pairs well · Shanghai's calendar posters were also given away by tobacco firms; pair their softly modelled women and ornamental borders with the Havana label's medals and arms for a cross-continental tobacco or spirits heritage line.
- Showa Modern Commercial Art and Zuan-moji Pairs well · Both put a modern-girl figure in East Asian commercial posters; combine the Japanese geometric lettering with Shanghai's painterly figure for a pan-Asian Deco look.