Stylogeny combining Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography × Urdu Katib Lithography

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Style combination · Contrasts

Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography × Urdu Katib Lithography

Urdu turned down type to keep the calligrapher's hand while Song–Ming printing depersonalised the brush for the block cutter; choose deliberately between a written page and a cut one.

From the research on Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho)

Mix them and make something Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography Urdu Katib Lithography

AtlasSong–Ming Woodblock × Urdu Katib Lithography
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography, their arrangement from Urdu Katib Lithography, the finish from Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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.

Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho) Urdu Katib Lithography

Type from Urdu Katib Lithography
Colour from Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography
Form from Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography
Composition from Urdu Katib Lithography
Surface from Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography

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The type

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

Display · Urdu Katib Lithography

Atlas

Rakkas, standing in for Lahori Nastaʿlīq (katib hand)

Text · Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography

The page and letter of the East Asian book. Song block cutters copied the regular script of Tang masters; from the mid-16th century Ming cutters straightened it into a knife-made letter of thin horizontals, thick verticals and triangular stroke ends. Equal square characters run in right-to-left vertical columns in a ruled frame folded at a central column. As metal type in Shanghai and Nagasaki it became Mincho, Myeongjo and the standard CJK text face. Frame, rules and fold column belong to the woodblock page; type keeps the letter, the square and, in Japan and Taiwan, the vertical column.

Shippori Mincho; Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography used Song block-cut regular script after Ouyang Xun, Yan Zhenqing and Liu Gongquan and Ming-style Songti / Mingti, the straightened 'craftsman's' letter, mature by the Wanli era

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography, with a counter-accent from Urdu Katib Lithography. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho) Urdu Katib Lithography

  • #f1e9d6 ground · 36%
  • #16130f ink · 14%
  • #b5342b accent · 18%
  • #d6c49c accent · 14%
  • #2e3d5c accent · 10%
  • #5b564e accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1e9d6;
  --ink: #16130f;
  --accent-1: #b5342b;
  --accent-2: #d6c49c;
  --accent-3: #2e3d5c;
  --accent-4: #5b564e;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho): Have any Chinese, Japanese or Korean text set and proofread by a fluent reader: Song, Mincho and Myeongjo fonts draw some characters differently for each locale, and pseudo-characters, mirrored glyphs or random hanzi used as texture read as nonsense or worse. Pages of Buddhist sutras and other scripture carry devotional text; do not crop them into decoration.

Urdu Katib Lithography: Urdu pages often carry Qur'anic phrases, the names of God and the Prophet and religious verse; never use Nastaʿlīq as meaningless texture or set invented text that imitates it, and have every word read by a fluent Urdu reader. Katibs were rarely credited; name the calligrapher where known, and commission a working khushnawees rather than tracing archival pages.

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The two styles

A vintage-style bookstore poster has large black Japanese characters stacked vertically in a central panel, with smaller vertical lettering along both sides. Black ruled borders, red four-petal motifs, diamonds and dots decorate a textured cream background. c. 960–present · East Asia Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho) The page and letter of the East Asian book. Song block cutters copied the regular script of Tang masters; from the mid-16th century Ming cutters straightened it into a knife-made letter of thin horizontals, thick verticals and triangular stroke ends. Equal square characters run in right-to-left vertical columns in a ruled frame folded at a central column. As metal type in Shanghai and Nagasaki it became Mincho, Myeongjo and the standard CJK text face. Frame, rules and fold column belong to the woodblock page; type keeps the letter, the square and, in Japan and Taiwan, the vertical column. 1837–present · South Asia Urdu Katib Lithography For about a century and a half Urdu chose lithography over movable type, because metal type could not reproduce the sloping, stacked ligatures of Nastaʿlīq. Teams of katibs wrote whole newspapers, books and advertisements by hand on transfer paper, nesting each cascading word into dense, hand-ruled columns under enlarged calligraphic headlines. Noori Nastaliq (1981), digitised from Ahmed Mirza Jamil's hand, carried the katib's letterforms into computer composition.

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More combinations

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With Urdu Katib Lithography

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