Style combination · Contrasts
Vienna Secession × Wendingen
Both square their capitals into dense blocks inside symmetrical frames, but Vienna draws them by hand while Wendingen builds them from type metal; use the comparison to decide whether a heading should look drawn or assembled.
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.
Vienna Secession Wendingen & Amsterdam School Typography
- Type from Vienna Secession
- Colour from Wendingen
- Form from Vienna Secession
- Composition from Vienna Secession
- Surface from Wendingen
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Vienna Secession
Dawn
Federant; Vienna Secession used Alfred Roller's elongated, interlocking block capitals and Koloman Moser's geometric display lettering
Text · Wendingen
The graphic language of Wendingen (1918–1932), monthly of the Amsterdam architects' society Architectura et Amicitia, and its editor H. Th. Wijdeveld: the Amsterdam School's brick Expressionism in print. Wijdeveld built heavy capitals and meanders from compositors' brass rules and centred them in thick rule frames on square, Japanese-sewn pages; invited artists drew the covers. The School also built such capitals in brick and on bridge nameplates. Avant-garde covers, such as El Lissitzky's Proun (1921 no. 11, out 1922) and Vilmos Huszár's De Stijl design (1929), sit outside the house style.
Newsreader; Wendingen used H. Th. Wijdeveld's capitals and meanders assembled from compositors' brass rules and type-case pieces and Architectuur NF (Nick Curtis, Nick's Fonts, 2006), a digital revival of the rule-built letters of Wijdeveld's 1925 Frank Lloyd Wright issue, with his meander ornaments
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Wendingen, with a counter-accent from Vienna Secession. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Vienna Secession Wendingen & Amsterdam School Typography
-
#efe6d2ground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#c4561eaccent · 18% -
#b8913aaccent · 14% -
#a3282aaccent · 10% -
#8a8478accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe6d2;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #c4561e;
--accent-2: #b8913a;
--accent-3: #a3282a;
--accent-4: #8a8478;
--font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Vienna Secession
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · Set French whiplash against the Viennese square to show the turn from organic to geometric ornament within one decorative idiom.
- Art Deco Pairs well · Carry the Secession's squares, chequers and gold into Deco's stepped geometry for a luxurious but disciplined look.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Pairs well · Both reduce motifs to emblematic flat shapes in a calm field; combine them for elegant cultural posters.
- Glasgow Style Pairs well · Vienna learned from Glasgow in 1900; combine Mackintosh's attenuated verticals with Secession squares and gold for refined cultural branding.
- Josef Frank and Svenskt Tenn Botanical Prints Contrasts · Frank came out of Vienna, but his loose, asymmetric plant repeats are the opposite of the Secession's geometric, symmetrical ornament; compare a Wiener Werkstätte grid pattern with his free-growing trees.
- Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau) Pairs well · Both pulled Art Nouveau toward geometry, symmetry and strict repetition in the same years; add Vienna's black, white and gold and its white margins to the Dutch earth-colour repeat for a more open page.
- Mir iskusstva Book Art Contrasts · Both enclose pictures in symmetrical frames, but Vienna squared the frame into grids and bars while the Russian book filled a wide border with folk and rococo motifs; pick geometric order or narrative ornament.
- Bezalel School Contrasts · Both put pictures inside symmetrical ornamental frames, but Vienna squared the frame into grids and bars while Bezalel filled it with Middle Eastern filigree, carpet and metalwork motifs.
With Wendingen
- Die Neue Typographie Contrasts · While Wijdeveld centred ornamental rule frames, Tschichold's asymmetric programme threw them out; pit a centred Wendingen title page against a flush-left sans layout to make the choice between monument and function explicit.
- Bitmap & Pixel Graphics Pairs well · Rule-built capitals are already modular; map Wijdeveld's brass-rule construction onto a pixel or LED grid to make screen display type with an Amsterdam School accent.
- De Stijl Contrasts · Same country, same years and the same rules and bars: De Stijl set them asymmetrically in primaries as pure abstraction, Wendingen piled them symmetrically into monumental, decorative frames; set one against the other to choose between open balance and a formal facade.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Black plus one warm ink on cream suits two-colour riso; assemble heavy capitals and borders from rectangles for zines and posters that echo Wendingen without a letterpress.
- Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau) Pairs well · Its Amsterdam successor kept the symmetry, the closed frame and the systematic construction (Lauweriks drew Wendingen's first cover) but traded plants and batik for heavy capitals built from brass rules; combine them for a vegetal pattern inside a monumental frame.