Style combination · Pairs well
Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock × Ma
Both make the empty ground do the work; borrow wabi-sabi's earthy, rough materials to give a Ten Bamboo-style motif a humbler surface, or its quiet asymmetry to place it.
Mix them and make something Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock Ma
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.
Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock (Douban & Gonghua) Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics
- Type from Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock
- Colour from Ma
- Form from Ma
- Composition from Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock
- Surface from Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock
Quiet
Kaushan Script, standing in for Brush calligraphy cut into the block: the poems and titles written for the 1633 Collection by about 120 poet-calligraphers, printed so that the print keeps the written stroke
Text · Ma
A Japanese aesthetic rooted in Zen and the wabi tea ceremony that prizes austerity, imperfection, impermanence and the charged interval (ma) between things. In graphic design it appears as vast empty grounds, a single off-centre element, muted natural colours, visible material texture and the unrepeatable brush mark, from ink painting to Muji's 'emptiness'.
Shippori Mincho; Ma used Bokuseki and Sōsho cursive kana and kanji
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Ma, with a counter-accent from Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock (Douban & Gonghua) Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics
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#e9e4d8ground · 36% -
#2b2a28ink · 14% -
#7d4e3aaccent · 18% -
#b8352daccent · 14% -
#b9a88aaccent · 10% -
#d27a7faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #e9e4d8;
--ink: #2b2a28;
--accent-1: #7d4e3a;
--accent-2: #b8352d;
--accent-3: #b9a88a;
--accent-4: #d27a7f;
--font-display: "Kaushan Script", cursive;
--font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}Use it with care
Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock (Douban & Gonghua): Woodblock printing in watercolour (muban shuiyin) of this kind is still practised by studios such as Duoyunxuan in Shanghai and Rong Bao Zhai in Beijing and is on China's national list of intangible cultural heritage (木版水印技艺, VIII-77: Rong Bao Zhai 2006, Duoyunxuan 2008 and the Hangzhou Shizhuzhai Art Museum 2014): commission or credit their carvers and printers rather than passing off a digital imitation as a hand-printed edition, and never present a generated image as a leaf of the 1633 Collection, the 1644 Letter Papers or the Mustard Seed Garden manual. Have every inscription written or checked by a fluent reader, because image models invent pseudo-characters, and never make up a seal bearing a real painter's, collector's or studio's name.
04
The two styles
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More combinations
With Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock
- Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho) Pairs well · The same Nanjing book trade cut both: put a ruled Song-style text page opposite a graded colour leaf, as an album or a book with plates.
- Hong Kong East–West Graphic Modernism Pairs well · From the 1980s Hong Kong designers such as Kan Tai-keung staged ink washes and brush strokes in wide modernist white space; a single graded bamboo or plum spray on a clean field works the same way on packaging or a poster.
- Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints Contrasts · Japanese colour prints fill flat colours into a carved black key line; the Ten Bamboo leaf drops the key line and grades each colour inside its block. The 1633 manual was reprinted in Japan and foreshadowed nishiki-e, yet the choice is between a graphic outline and a print that passes for a wash painting.
- Nianhua & Chinese Folk Print Contrasts · Both are Chinese colour woodblocks, but New Year prints are outlined, saturated, symmetrical and crowded with auspicious figures for every household, while the literati leaf is pale, sparse and made for the scholar's desk.
- Rinpa & Saga-bon Pairs well · Kōetsu's poems written over printed and painted papers are a Japanese cousin of the decorated letter paper: pair a faint printed motif with brushed text that runs over it.
- Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China') Pairs well · The late-Ming letter papers pressed uninked blocks into paper (gonghua); use the same blind relief for a title or motif that shows only in raking light, as the colourless debossed title of the 2018 award book Ti'ang: Bai Ming de guodu does.
With Ma
- Minimalist Graphic Design Pairs well · Add one rough material or brush mark to a minimalist layout so its emptiness feels lived-in rather than sterile.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Pairs well · Use a modernist grid but leave whole modules empty, the way Tanaka and Hara let ma structure the page.
- Memphis Design Contrasts · Memphis is loud, synthetic and glossy; set one Memphis squiggle on a vast wabi ground only if you want deliberate friction.
- Scandinavian Functionalism Pairs well · Both prize natural materials and restraint; combine Nordic clarity with wabi irregularity for warm, quiet identities.
- Uli & Nsibidi Line and Sign Tradition Pairs well · Both make the empty interval carry meaning and place a few elements off-centre in earth colours; uli supplies a living line and named signs where wabi-sabi supplies texture and a single mark.
- Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look) Pairs well · Leonard Koren, author of the 1994 book on wabi-sabi for designers, joined Kinfolk's editorial board in 2016; add a cracked bowl, raw linen or an off-centre object on a bare ground to make the calm less styled and more lived-in.
- Korean Commercial Calligraphy (Kaelligeurapi) Pairs well · Give one brushed word a wide, quiet field of paper-toned space so its dry streaks and pooled ink read as the whole design.
- Rinpa & Saga-bon Contrasts · Both come from Kyoto's tea culture (Kōetsu also made Raku tea bowls), but wabi-sabi wants rough clay and empty paper where Rinpa wants gold leaf and malachite; one bare field can serve either, so choose the material that fills it.