Skip to content

Form & shape · Geometric

Angular & zigzag

Chevrons, zigzags, sunbursts and faceted shards.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under form & shape: what is the shape language?

styles make it: 80
as a defining choice: 15
as a usual one: 30
now and then: 35
avoid it: 8

Styles defined by it 15

For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.

Amazigh Sign System & Tifinaghc. 0–present · Middle East & North Africa, Sub-Saharan AfricaThe visual language shared by Amazigh communities from the Rif, Atlas and Kabylie to the Aurès and the Tuareg Sahara.
Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Traditionc. 1180–present · Central Europe, Western Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, North America, Global / networkedThe broken scripts of the Latin West.
Diné (Navajo) Weaving Design1700–present · North AmericaThe tapestry-woven design tradition of Diné (Navajo) weavers, recorded in Spanish sources from the early 18th century.
Expressionist Woodcut Graphics1905–1925 · Central Europe, Western EuropeThe graphic arm of German Expressionism, from Die Brücke in Dresden (1905) to the Berlin journals Der Sturm and Die Aktion and Frans Masereel's woodcut novels.
Cubist Pictorial Space1907–1925 · Western EuropeThe pictorial revolution of Picasso and Braque that shattered single-point perspective into overlapping, faceted planes seen from several viewpoints at once.
Italian Futurism1909–1944 · Southern EuropeLaunched by Marinetti's 1909 manifesto, Futurism glorified speed, machines, the city and war, and turned the printed page into an explosive, noisy field.
Art Deco1910–1939 · Western Europe, North America, Global / networkedThe glamorous modern style named after the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which disciplined ornament into geometry: sunbursts, chevrons, stepped forms and sleek stylised figures rendered in lacquer-smooth colour with metallic accents.
Vorticism & BLAST Typography1914–1920 · Western EuropeLondon's short-lived rival to Futurism, launched by Wyndham Lewis with BLAST (dated 20 June 1914; War Number, July 1915).
Estridentismo (Stridentist) Graphics1921–1927 · Latin America & CaribbeanMexico's first avant-garde (1921-27), launched when Manuel Maples Arce pasted his manifesto Actual No. 1 on Mexico City walls.
Ndebele Geometric Painting1940–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe mural tradition of Southern Ndebele women, who paint homestead walls and gateways, and later canvases and objects, with bold, symmetrical geometric designs.
Googie & Atomic Age1945–1965 · North AmericaThe exuberant commercial modernism of post-war American roadside culture (coffee shops, motels, car washes, bowling alleys and neon signs), named in 1952 by critic Douglas Haskell after John Lautner's Googie's coffee shop in Los Angeles (1949).
Pixação (São Paulo Tag Reto)1980–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe name-writing of São Paulo's pixadores, which since the 1980s has covered walls and façades and, from the 1990s, the upper floors of tower blocks.
Black Metal Graphics1990–present · Northern Europe, Global / networkedThe visual language of black metal, fixed by Norway's second wave in the early 1990s, now worldwide, since the 2010s borrowed by mainstream acts (Szpajdel's Rihanna and Metallica logos, 2016).
Neo-Andean Architecture (Cholets)2005–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe facades and party halls of El Alto, Bolivia, begun by the Aymara builder-architect Freddy Mamani in 2005 for a new Aymara merchant class.
Low Poly Illustration2012–present · Global / networkedA digital illustration and game look in which subjects are built from a visible mesh of a few flat-shaded polygons, so that animals, faces, vehicles and landscapes read as hard-edged facets with no outline or texture.

Styles that often use it 30

A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.

Styles that use it now and then 35

An occasional choice in these styles.

It often goes with

Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Other choices in form & shape