About
How the atlas is made
Stylogeny is an atlas of 359 graphic-design styles from 13 world regions, from Islamic geometry and ukiyo-e to Ghanaian movie posters and neo-brutalist web. It describes each style by the design choices that make it, the way a biologist describes a species by its traits, and traces where each style comes from. It is made by Van Riel Online Services.
How a style is described
Every style is described with the same vocabulary of 150 design choices in10 facets. Each facet answers one design question:
- Layout & composition: how is the picture plane organised?
- Space & hierarchy: how is attention distributed?
- Typography: what do the letters look like, and how are they set?
- Colour: what is the colour strategy?
- Form & shape: what is the shape language?
- Surface & texture: what is the material finish?
- Ornament: how much decoration, and of what kind?
- Imagery: what kind of pictures, if any?
- Medium & production: what technology shaped it?
- Tone & intent: what should the work make people feel or do?
For each style, a choice is defining (it makes the style), characteristic (usual) or occasional. Each style also lists the choices it avoids.
Styles are linked in two ways. Descent: the style each one grew out of, and the styles that influenced it. Together these make a family tree. Likeness: how many choices two styles share, compared facet by facet and worked out by the atlas itself. Related styles can look unalike, and unrelated ones alike.
The styles are grouped in 8 broad branches, such as the avant-garde and rational modernism. A branch is a convenience, not a strict family: descent often crosses branches.
Where the facts come from
The styles are researched in rounds by AI research agents, working from published sources. One agent drafts a style, another reviews it adversarially, and the draft is revised and reviewed again. Only drafts the reviewer accepts go in. Automated checks refuse a draft that breaks the vocabulary, or whose choices are too close to a style already in the atlas.
Each style’s page lists its sources at the foot: 3,988 in all. 138 styles also link to real works (608 in all) in open collections such as the Met, Wikimedia Commons, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Europeana, Cooper Hewitt, the V&A and MoMA. Each work was checked against the style’s period and region.
The atlas is not complete. A census in October 2026 compared it with open sources, such as Wikidata and the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, and estimated that there are about 900 graphic-design styles in all. The atlas keeps growing. Dates and borders of styles are often disputed; the atlas gives one reading, with its sources. If you spot a mistake, email info@vanriel.eu.
The images
The images on this site are generated by AI (OpenAI’s gpt-image-2) from each style’s recorded design choices. They are not real or historical works. Every prompt forbids copying existing works or named artists.
A vision model then checks each image against all 150 design choices, without being told which style was meant, and reports what it sees. Only images that pass, or that a person chose, are shown. 514images have been made so far; 265 styles have one on their page.
Every image is labelled as AI-generated, on the page and in the file itself: its metadata carries the IPTC digital source type for media made by a trained model.
Some styles belong to living communities or carry sacred meaning. Stylogeny doesn’t generate images of34 of them at all, and holds back the images of 14 more until someone who knows the tradition has checked them. Styles like these carry a note on respectful use.
Who makes it
Stylogeny is made by Van Riel Online Services, which designs and produces work for businesses in a chosen style: social media content, stationery, brand style kits and signs. The atlas is how it advises on a direction. Get advice for your project, or see what it makes.
Use and cite it
To cite a style, name Stylogeny, the style and its page, for example:
Stylogeny, “Bauhaus”, https://stylogeny.com/styles/bauhaus/
For AI tools, every style’s page also exists as plain text: add .md to its address without the last slash, as in /styles/bauhaus.md. /llms.txt lists them all.