Style combination · Pairs well
Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography × Victorian Letterpress
Front a sober Sanskrit text block with a centred English title page in mixed jobbing faces and ornamental dashes, as the Kāvyamālā volumes did.
Mix them and make something Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography Victorian Letterpress
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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.
Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography (Bombay Metal Type) Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type
- Type from Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography
- Colour from Victorian Letterpress
- Form from Victorian Letterpress
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Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography avoids abundant decoration: this is where the two pull against each other.
- Composition from Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography
- Surface from Victorian Letterpress
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography
Fiesta
Yatra One, standing in for Nirnaya-sagar Pica No. 1, the basis of Monotype's 12 pt Devanagari, and the Nirnaya-sagar pica struck from Ranoji Raoji Aru's punches that Tilak's Kesari used
Text · Victorian Letterpress
The commercial jobbing print of the industrial century: posters, playbills, auction notices and ephemera built from a flood of new display types (fat faces, Egyptians, grotesques, Tuscans and condensed wood type). Lines are centred and each is set in a different face and size to fill the measure, framed in rules and stock borders and printed in black with one or two flat colours.
Zilla Slab; Victorian Letterpress used Fat face romans and Egyptian / Antique slab serifs
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Victorian Letterpress, with a counter-accent from Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography (Bombay Metal Type) Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type
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#efe4c9ground · 36% -
#1b1a17ink · 14% -
#b3322baccent · 18% -
#a08a62accent · 14% -
#d9b45aaccent · 10% -
#cbbd9baccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe4c9;
--ink: #1b1a17;
--accent-1: #b3322b;
--accent-2: #a08a62;
--accent-3: #d9b45a;
--accent-4: #cbbd9b;
--font-display: "Yatra One", cursive;
--font-text: "Zilla Slab", serif;
}Use it with care
Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography (Bombay Metal Type): Much of the press's output is scripture and ritual text, from the Vedas with their accents to Purāṇas, stotras and the almanac that fixes the dates of rites and festivals, so never use mantras, verses or divine names as texture, crop, mirror or garble them, or put them on floors, footwear or throwaway goods. Have every Sanskrit, Marathi or Hindi word set with correct conjuncts and read by a fluent reader, since image models invent pseudo-Devanagari with broken headlines and impossible ligatures, never present a generated page as a Nirnaya Sagar imprint, and credit the founder and his punch-cutter Ranoji Aru as well as the pandit editors.
04
The two styles
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More combinations
With Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography
- Urdu Katib Lithography Contrasts · Urdu kept the katib's hand on the litho stone because type could not hold Nastaʿlīq, while Javaji took a lithographed almanac into metal type; choose a written page or a set one deliberately.
- Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing Pairs well · Both turned a calligraphic hand into a book type for classics and scripture; in a multilingual edition, let an unframed Devanagari page with its apparatus face a rule-framed Naskh page.
- Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art Pairs well · For a devotional book, put one chromolithographed god picture from the Bombay presses opposite a black, typeset text page, and keep the type itself free of colour.
- Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags) Contrasts · Set against the carved, oblong pecha page, it shows what cast metal type did to an Indic script: repeatable sorts, sizes and tiers of commentary instead of one carved block per page.
- Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho) Contrasts · Song–Ming squares each character into an equal cell inside a ruled woodblock frame; Nirnaya Sagar hangs syllables of varying width from a continuous headline in an unframed metal-type block.
With Victorian Letterpress
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Sign writers and type founders traded letterforms; add brushed shading and drop shadows to wood-type headlines for a street-made feel.
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Push Pin revived Victorian display faces with irony; mix one wood-type headline with modern illustration for the same knowing nostalgia.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · One face, flush left and white space against a centred clamour of faces: use the contrast to test whether hierarchy needs variety at all.
- Arts & Crafts Movement Contrasts · Morris reacted against exactly this commercial clutter; set the two side by side to show craft restraint versus jobbing exuberance.
- HfG Ulm Systematic Design Contrasts · A Victorian mixed-face handbill is the clutter Ulm's one-family rule was meant to cure; use it as a before-and-after foil.
- Victorian Colour Toy Books (Evans, Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway) Contrasts · Its black-letter-dense, type-and-ornament jobbing page is the opposite of a picture-led page; combine them by hanging a wood-type title over a flat colour picture.
- Dada Pairs well · Raid Victorian wood type and stock ornaments as the Dadaists did, but scatter them instead of centring them.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Pairs well · Both are cheap letterpress print that shouts to passers-by; borrow the playbill's stacked display capitals, banners and rules for a comic cover's blurbs and price box, while keeping the comic's hand-drawn letters and keyline art.