Style combination · Contrasts
Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design × Urdu Katib Lithography
Urdu print kept hand-written Arabic-script lithography for another century, while Turkey abolished Arabic letters in 1928; set the two side by side to show two answers to modern print.
Mix them and make something Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Urdu Katib Lithography
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.
Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Urdu Katib Lithography
- Type from Urdu Katib Lithography
- Colour from Urdu Katib Lithography
- Form from Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
- Composition from Urdu Katib Lithography
- Surface from Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
The pictorial poster, label and ticket art of the young Turkish Republic, led by İhap Hulusi Görey after his Munich training in Ludwig Hohlwein's orbit, with Münif Fehim Özarman and, after 1943, Kenan Temizan. Lithographed figures modelled in crisp patches of light and shadow, sometimes in only one or two inks, giant numerals and letters, framed emblems and bold hand-drawn lettering in the Latin script adopted in 1928 advertised banks, the State Lottery, the state monopolies and tourism, and promoted the state's new alphabet.
Oswald; Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design used Hand-drawn Latin display capitals with Turkish diacritics (Ç, Ğ, İ, Ö, Ş, Ü) for brand and institution names and Shaded and extruded display letters and giant numerals
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Urdu Katib Lithography, with a counter-accent from Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Urdu Katib Lithography
-
#eee6d2ground · 36% -
#141312ink · 14% -
#a32a2aaccent · 18% -
#c9bfa6accent · 14% -
#c89b3caccent · 10% -
#5f5a52accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #eee6d2;
--ink: #141312;
--accent-1: #a32a2a;
--accent-2: #c9bfa6;
--accent-3: #c89b3c;
--accent-4: #5f5a52;
--font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
--font-text: "Oswald", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design: Atatürk's likeness, the Turkish flag and the star and crescent are living national symbols, and Turkey's Law No. 5816 (1951) criminalises insulting Atatürk's memory, so do not caricature, distort or trivialise them when borrowing this style. Much of this imagery was produced for a one-party state and its campaigns, and Kemalist iconography (the unveiled "modern" woman, the six arrows, Atatürk portraits) is still politically charged in Turkey, read differently by secularists, religious conservatives and minorities whom the nation-building imagery left out. Do not present the regime's modernising narrative as neutral, and do not reuse party emblems as 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.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
- WPA Silkscreen Posters Pairs well · Both are 1930s state-backed poster programmes for public institutions and tourism; combine WPA silkscreen flatness with Görey's modelled figures for civic campaigns.
- Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Contrasts · Turkey replaced Arabic letters with Latin in 1928, and Emin Barın carried calligraphic habits into the new script; contemporary dual-script type design keeps both scripts and matches them as equals. Compare the two to show replacement against coexistence.
- Die Neue Typographie Contrasts · In the same years German modernists replaced illustration with sans-serif type and photography; Turkish Republican graphics kept Munich's pictorial poster and hand-drawn letters.
- Egyptian Painted Film Poster Pairs well · Görey was born in Cairo and worked for Egyptian clients; Cairo's painted lithographic posters share his modelled faces and hand-lettered titles, in Arabic rather than Latin script.
- Mongol Bichig Calligraphy & Ugalz Ornament Contrasts · Both make the state's alphabet part of its official graphics, by opposite moves: Turkish Republican posters hand-letter the new Latin alphabet at display size to promote it, while Mongolia sets its revived old script beside Cyrillic on seals, signboards and letterheads as a national mark.
- Yeşilçam Film Poster (Turkish Hand-Painted Afiş) Pairs well · Both use hand-drawn Latin Turkish lettering; Republican graphics are calm and official, the film poster is crowded and emotional.
- Ottoman Tughra & Dîvânî Chancery Calligraphy Contrasts · The end of the sultanate in 1922 retired the tughra (its last on stamps that year), and the Republic replaced Arabic script with the Latin alphabet in 1928; its hand-lettered Latin posters are the deliberate opposite of the chancery's sultanic calligraphy.
- Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era) Pairs well · A state-promoted lithographic school of the same years that also advertised tourism under bold drawn lettering. Görey's figures, from his Munich training in Hohlwein's orbit, stand in crisp patches of light on a light ground where ANTA opens a painted vista; borrow its framed emblem and giant letters for a tighter, flatter ANTA sheet.
All 12 combinations with Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design
With Urdu Katib Lithography
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Contrasts · Movable-type jobbing print is the technology Urdu turned down; set its centred, mixed metal faces against a flowing, hand-ruled lithographic page.
- Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Contrasts · Simplified Kufi- and Naskh-based dual-script type flattens the stacked Nastaʿlīq ligature; choose deliberately between the katib's cascade and a screen-friendly baseline.
- Dazibao (Big-Character Posters) Pairs well · Both are handwritten public text pages; use their crowded, hand-ruled columns and enlarged brush headlines for an editorial or protest broadsheet.
- Islamic Geometric & Calligraphic Tradition Pairs well · Crown a dense Nastaʿlīq news or book page with a manuscript-style illuminated headpiece or a Thuluth masthead drawn from the khatt tradition.
- Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography (Bombay Metal Type) 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.
- Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho) Contrasts · 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.
- Persian Popular Narrative (Lithographs & Coffeehouse Painting) Pairs well · The same lithographed Nastaʿlīq page culture across Iran and India: Khoi's Tehran Shahnameh followed the pictures of the Persian-language Bombay edition of 1846, written by Reza al-Hoseini al-Shirazi. Add hatched, framed scenes to a katib's dense columns for an illustrated Persian or Urdu text page.
- Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type Contrasts · Urdu made the opposite choice, keeping the katib's hand because metal type could not carry Nastaʿlīq; set side by side they show economy against calligraphic fidelity.