Style combination · Pairs well
Square Kufic × Turkish Modernist Poster
Erkmen set the Latin initials TİEM on a square-Kufic grid for the Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi logo, and Ertel drew on Kufic for a Ministry of Culture logo; borrow the bannāʾī grid as a structure for a mark, but check what any Kufic letters spell before using them.
Mix them and make something Square Kufic Turkish Modernist Poster
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.
Square Kufic (Bannāʾī) Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design
- Type from Square Kufic
- Colour from Turkish Modernist Poster
- Form from Square Kufic
- Composition from Square Kufic
- Surface from Turkish Modernist Poster
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Square Kufic
Light
Reem Kufi, standing in for Bannāʾī (maʿqilī): square Kufic laid in glazed and unglazed bricks or tiles, one brick or tile per grid unit, with stroke and gap of equal width
Text · Turkish Modernist Poster
The posters of Istanbul's first generation of professional graphic designers for theatres, films, festivals and exhibitions. Mengü Ertel, Yurdaer Altıntaş and later Bülent Erkmen reduced each play or film to one visual idea or pun: a figure, mask, eye or object drawn as flat, simplified shapes in two or three inks on an open field of colour or white, with a hand-drawn or bold serif title. From the 1980s Erkmen pared the language down further to a giant word, a stripe or one photographed detail.
Newsreader; Turkish Modernist Poster used Hand-drawn title lettering by the designers themselves, e.g. Altıntaş's heavy lowercase 'aptal kız' (Kent Oyuncuları, 1961) and his condensed brush capitals for Dormen Tiyatrosu's 'Bugün Git Yarın Gel' and Bold and book serif titles centred above the image (Erkmen's Kent Oyuncuları posters and 'Les Civilisations Anatoliennes', 1983, in a Times-like transitional serif), and heavy serif capitals on Ertel's 'Jan Dark'ın Çilesi' and 'Le Gardien'
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Turkish Modernist Poster, with a counter-accent from Square Kufic. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Square Kufic (Bannāʾī) Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design
-
#efe8dcground · 36% -
#111214ink · 14% -
#c8162daccent · 18% -
#2a9ea6accent · 14% -
#007266accent · 10% -
#1e3d8faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe8dc;
--ink: #111214;
--accent-1: #c8162d;
--accent-2: #2a9ea6;
--accent-3: #007266;
--accent-4: #1e3d8f;
--font-display: "Reem Kufi", cursive;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}Use it with care
Square Kufic (Bannāʾī): Square-Kufic panels almost always spell sacred words: the names of God, Muhammad and ʿAli, the shahada, the takbir or Qur'anic phrases. Never crop, mirror or scramble them, never fill a surface with invented pseudo-Kufic as a pixel texture, and keep such text off floors, footwear, packaging and other throwaway surfaces. Some formulas belong to one community, such as the Shiʿi addition 'ʿAli is the friend of God', so have every composition read and approved by a fluent reader or a square-Kufic calligrapher, and commission or credit living calligraphers rather than tracing panels from buildings. The square-Kufic takbir band belongs to the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran (since July 1980), and many Iranian opposition groups and diaspora communities fly the Lion and Sun flag or a plain tricolour instead, so do not quote the band as decorative Persian shorthand. Do not treat the names Muhammad and ʿAli together as neutral filler either: they interlock on the minarets of the Shah Mosque in Isfahan, and they also appear in the blue brickwork of the Timurid shrine of the Sunni Sufi Khoja Ahmed Yasavi, so check how the community commissioning the work reads them.
Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design: These posters are the signed work of named designers, several of them living or recently dead: borrow the method (one flat sign, two or three inks, an open field), not a particular poster. Karagöz shadow theatre is a living tradition on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2009), and square Kufic often spells sacred names such as Allah, Muhammad or Ali, so do not cut either into decoration without knowing what it says.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Square Kufic
- Islamic Geometric & Calligraphic Tradition Contrasts · The parent tradition mixes cursive Thuluth and Naskh, girih stars and arabesque, while square Kufic keeps only the orthogonal grid; choose square Kufic when a design needs one rigid two-tone module, and the wider tradition when it needs curves, interlace and polychrome hierarchy.
- Bitmap & Pixel Graphics Pairs well · Both build letters from square units, and Sakkal compares building bricks to large pixels; set a bitmap Latin wordmark on the same cell size as a square-Kufic mark for a bilingual identity, but keep sacred formulas out of jokey, game-like pixel contexts.
- Iranian Modernist Graphic Design Pairs well · Persian Wikipedia records bannāʾī in modern posters, logos and letterheads, and the atlas's Iranian modernist entry counts it among its Persian scripts; pair a square-Kufic title block with a Nastaʿlīq line and one flat figure for a Persian cultural poster.
- Andean Woven Graphic Systems Contrasts · T'oqapu also fill square cells on a grid, but with signs of rank rather than legible words; compare them to see how a grid can carry writing or emblem, and never blend the two sacred systems into a generic 'geometric' pattern.
- Soviet Central Asian Ornamental Modernism Contrasts · The atlas's Soviet Central Asian entry recommends display capitals built on its mosaic or panjara module after the bannāʾī principle of tiles as pixels, for Cyrillic and Latin names only and with no Arabic script or pseudo-Kufic; use that route when a grid-built wordmark must stay secular, and square Kufic only for Arabic-script words read and approved by a fluent reader.
- Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Pairs well · Set reading text in a low-contrast Kufi-derived Arabic sans matched to its Latin companion, and keep square Kufic for the emblem or panel, where legibility may give way to pattern.
- Vyaz (Ornamental Slavonic Lettering) Contrasts · Both turn sacred words into a dense band that reads first as pattern, but square Kufic snaps letters to an orthogonal grid of equal stroke and gap, while vyaz stretches free pen-drawn letters upward and plugs the gaps with plant filler; choose the grid or the calligraphic interlace, and never blend the two sacred scripts into a generic 'ancient' texture.
- Ottoman Tughra & Dîvânî Chancery Calligraphy Contrasts · Square Kufic binds Arabic letters to a square grid of straight strokes; the tughra frees them into sweeping loops and tall shafts. Use the grid for a modular, tiled emblem and the tughra for a single flourishing signature.
With Turkish Modernist Poster
- Polish Poster School Contrasts · The same conceptual-poster network: Turkish designers showed at the Warsaw Poster Biennale from 1966 and Ertel's posters entered the Wilanów archive in 1968. The Polish school paints, collages and distorts its single idea; the Turkish posters cut it into flat shapes in two or three clean inks. Choose Warsaw for unease, Istanbul for a crisp visual pun.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · A background influence that came through teaching rather than through the poster makers themselves: the Bauhaus-modelled State School of Applied Fine Arts (1957), whose functionalism Erzincan sees following 'a trajectory parallel to the International Typographic Style', trained Aydın Erkmen and İlhan Bilge, not Ertel, Altıntaş or Bülent Erkmen, and the Academy's Grafik Atölyesi taught 'less is more' from 1967. Set a festival's credits on a column grid beside one flat figure, as Altıntaş set the credits of the film poster 'Sen de Gitme' (1996) in three columns.
- Iranian Modernist Graphic Design Contrasts · Its Iranian contemporary also learned from the Polish poster, but built its posters on Persian calligraphy and miniature; after the 1928 alphabet reform Turkish designers worked in Latin letters and quoted Kufic only as a reduced sign. Choose Tehran when the letterform should be the protagonist, Istanbul when a drawn figure should be.
- Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Contrasts · İhap Hulusi's generation modelled figures in lithographed light and shade for banks, monopolies and state campaigns; the modernists who followed worked for theatres and festivals and replaced the modelled figure with a flat sign and, later, with type. Use the Republican posters for warmth and official confidence, the modernists for wit.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · Same city, same decades, opposite density: Istanbul's poster designers reduced a play or film to one flat idea on an open field, while the humour weeklies packed a cover with a caricature, balloons, headline band and price box. Borrow the poster's single idea to calm a crowded cover.