Stylogeny, the style database by Van Riel Online Services

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Made in your style, by Van Riel Online Services

Found a direction you like? Van Riel Online Services makes the things you need in it, so everything you put out looks like it belongs together.

• Social media content

  Posts and stories made in your style, planned and posted for you. A photographer or videographer on location, replies to comments and messages, and a monthly report can be added.

  Ask about social media content

• Stationery and gift sets

  Business cards, letterheads, cards and gift sets for your clients and events, all in the same look.

  Ask about stationery and gift sets

• Brand style kit

  Your direction written down: palette, typefaces, layout rules, what to do and what to avoid, with example images, so everyone who makes something for you keeps the same look.

  Ask about brand style kit

• Review mirror and signs

  A mirror in your shop’s style with a QR code and an NFC tag that invites customers to leave a review, and signs to match.

  Ask about review mirror and signs

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What it does

• Advice from a brief in plain words

  Describe the job as you would to a colleague: “a poster for a jazz festival, warm but classy, no photos”. Stylogeny returns a few distinct directions, each with why it fits, what it leaves out and what to watch for, plus questions to put to the client.

• Find what your design resembles

  Describe a design you have, or list its choices, and get the closest styles: what you already share with them, and what each would add.

• Fill the decisions still open

  Blend one or more styles, lock the choices you have made and rule out the ones you don’t want. For every decision left, Stylogeny suggests options and explains each one, including creative leaps: choices borrowed from unrelated styles that still fit with yours.

• See the systems underneath

  Beneath the styles sit 12 design systems: bundles of choices that keep turning up together, across centuries and continents. Any design can be read as a mix of them, and the map shows the combinations that only one style has tried.

• Grounded in real works

  Styles are backed by real artefacts from museums, libraries and archives such as the Met, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the V&A, MoMA, the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons: 608 works for 138 of the 362 styles so far, each checked against its style’s period and region and reviewed by a critic. 211 are openly licensed; the rest are linked, not copied.

• Images, checked and labelled

  Turn a style, a blend or a rarely tried combination into a prompt for an image model, or into a finished image. A vision check compares the result with all the design choices without being told what was intended, and every image is labelled as AI-generated, with its provenance kept.

• Family trees and maps

  Follow a style back through the styles it grew out of on a time-scaled tree, or see the atlas as a map where styles sit closer the more their choices agree, even when they are centuries and continents apart.

• Built in for AI assistants

  Advice, matching, blending, systems and images are also available to AI assistants over the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the standard way to give an assistant tools, so it can consult Stylogeny in the middle of a task: while it designs, critiques a visual or writes an image prompt.

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All 362 styles

Oldest first within each branch. Each style has its own page: its design choices, where it comes from, and real works. Or browse them by world region, by when they began, or by design choice. See the styles added lately, or ask for one that’s missing.