Stylogeny in the style of Chinese Paper-Cut (Jianzhi)

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Stylogeny, the style database by Van Riel Online Services

374 graphic-design styles from 13 world regions, from Islamic geometry and ukiyo-e to Ghanaian movie posters and neo-brutalist web, each described by the design choices that make it. Open any of them to see how it works and where it comes from.

Get advice for your project Mix styles

styles
374
with an image
275
images made
546
design choices
150
world regions
13
real works
608

01

Advice for your project

Tell Stylogeny what you’re making and the feeling you’re after. It reads which design choices your words imply and returns a few distinct directions from 374 styles: why each one fits, what you would still add, what to watch out for, and the full design it settles, from layout and lettering to colour and pictures.

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Free, and it stays in your browser: nothing you type is sent anywhere.

02

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

  • Websites

    A website designed and built in your style, from a single page to a webshop: fast on phones, easy to find in search, and simple to keep up to date.

    Ask about websites

  • AI services

    Image generators, chat assistants and automations set up to work in your style and your voice, so what they make looks and sounds like you.

    Ask about AI services

  • 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

03

A database of styles, described by their choices

Most style references are mood boards: pictures you have to interpret. Stylogeny describes each style the way a biologist describes a species, by the traits it carries and by where it comes from.

Every style has a genome drawn from one vocabulary of 150 design choices in 10 facets. Each choice is marked as defining, characteristic or occasional, and every style also records what it deliberately avoids. Its descent is recorded too: the style it grew out of and the ones that influenced it. Because all styles are described in the same terms, they can be compared, matched and combined, by people and by software.

  1. Layout & composition How is the picture plane organised?
  2. Space & hierarchy How is attention distributed?
  3. Typography What do the letters look like, and how are they set?
  4. Colour What is the colour strategy?
  5. Form & shape What is the shape language?
  6. Surface & texture What is the material finish?
  7. Ornament How much decoration, and of what kind?
  8. Imagery What kind of pictures, if any?
  9. Medium & production What technology shaped it?
  10. Tone & intent What should the work make people feel or do?
styles
374
design choices
150
world regions
13
real works as evidence
608
design systems underneath
12

04

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 374 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.

05

What it’s used for

  • Designers and art directors

    Turn a vague brief into concrete, defensible directions before the first sketch, and fill the gaps in a concept with choices that belong together.

  • Client conversations

    Give a look a name, show where it comes from and what it is known for, and ask the questions that settle the rest of the design.

  • Briefing image models

    Write prompts from specific design decisions instead of “in the style of” a named artist, with the cultural guidance each style carries.

  • Brands and local businesses

    Pick directions that suit a business’s own look for posts, posters and menus. Van Riel Online Services uses it in its own client work.

  • Teaching and research

    Explore design history beyond the Western canon: how styles descend from one another, and which cultures reached the same ideas independently.

  • Getting out of a rut

    Find the combinations hardly anyone has made, and borrow one choice from a distant style instead of repeating the nearest one.

Respectful by design

Some visual languages belong to living communities or carry sacred meaning. Their styles come with guidance on respectful use, and the most sensitive (a living community’s craft, a sacred text, one artist’s signature work) are never generated. Advice holds back a style rooted in one culture unless the brief points at that culture. Prompts never ask to copy an existing work or a named artist, and a generated image is never presented as a historical one.

06

All 374 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.

Traditions & vernacular 100

Long-lived craft, folk, sacred and street traditions that seed later movements.

Craft & organic 14

Arts & Crafts through Art Nouveau: the hand, nature and the unified work of art.

Avant-garde 23

Early 20th-century experiments that broke pictorial and typographic convention.

Pictorial & machine age 69

Posters, Deco glamour and illustrative modernism built for mass persuasion.

Rational modernism 43

Grids, systems and objectivity: design as a neutral, universal method.

Counterculture 56

Psychedelia, punk, street and club cultures that reject polish and authority.

Postmodern 27

Irony, layering and deconstruction of modernist certainty.

Digital native 42

Styles born on screens: interfaces, the web and generative systems.