Skip to content

Medium & production · Environment & craft

Architecture & signage

Buildings, wayfinding, vehicles and the street.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under medium & production: what technology shaped it?

styles make it: 146
as a defining choice: 33
as a usual one: 63
now and then: 50
avoid it: 0

Styles defined by it 33

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

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Compositionc. 0–394 · Middle East & North AfricaThe visual system of pharaonic Egypt, in which writing is made of pictures and pictures are ruled like writing.
Square Kufic (Bannāʾī)c. 1100–present · Middle East & North Africa, South AsiaSquare Kufic builds Arabic script on a square grid: straight lines and right angles only, with every stroke as wide as the gap beside it.
Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering1800–present · Global / networkedLetters painted by trained sign writers on fascias, windows, walls, vehicles and showcards, from Victorian gold leaf on glass to Mexican rótulos, Indian bazaar boards and Ghanaian barbershop signs.
London Transport Design1908–1966 · Western EuropeThe design programme Frank Pick built for London's Underground from 1908 and the London Passenger Transport Board (1933–40), continued by Harold Hutchison (1947–66).
Italian Fascist Graphics (Romanità & Exhibition Photomontage)1921–1943 · Southern EuropeThe visual language of Italian Fascism, which turned modernist means to a cult of Rome and of the Duce.
Amazonian Boat Lettering (Abridores de Letras)1925–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe painted boat names of Pará's rivers in the Brazilian Amazon, made for about a century by self-taught riverside painters (abridores de letras).
Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop)1934–present · North AmericaThe mainland American fantasy of the South Seas, begun by Don the Beachcomber's Hollywood bar (about 1934) and Trader Vic's in Oakland and at its height in the Polynesian restaurants of the 1950s and 60s.
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).
Jeepney Art1946–present · Southeast AsiaThe decoration of the Philippine jeepney, the shared taxi built from surplus US Army jeeps after 1945 and later from locally fabricated stainless-steel bodies by firms such as Sarao and Francisco Motors.
Pakistani Truck Art1947–present · South AsiaThe total decoration of Pakistan's trucks and buses, which grew from company marks and saints' portraits painted in the late 1940s into a workshop art in which painters, metalworkers, woodcarvers and reflective-tape specialists collaborate on each vehicle.
Hong Kong Neon & Beiwei Shop-Sign Lettering1950–present · East AsiaThe night-time signscape of Hong Kong's Kowloon streets.
West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs1950–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaHand-painted boards advertising barbershops and braiding salons across West and Central Africa, made by self-taught, often anonymous sign painters since the mid-20th century.
Polish Cold War Neon (PRL Neonisation)1956–1981 · Eastern EuropeThe neon of People's Poland: after the 1956 thaw a state firm, Reklama, and a planned 'neonisation' set out to make war-ruined Warsaw a European capital of neon.
Dazibao (Big-Character Posters)1957–1980 · East AsiaHandwritten wall posters in large brush characters that turned the walls of Mao-era China into a public forum for criticism, denunciation and, at the Democracy Wall, dissent.
British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert)1958–present · Western EuropeThe national sign system Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert designed for Britain's motorways, first used on the Preston By-pass in 1958, and through the Worboys Committee for all roads from 1 January 1965.
Mexico 68 Olympic & Metro Identity1966–1970 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe graphic programme of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and the city's first Metro line.
Munich 1972 Olympic Design (Otl Aicher)1966–1972 · Central EuropeThe visual programme Otl Aicher's department made for the 1972 Munich Olympics, the 'cheerful Games' meant to show a democratic, modest West Germany.
Soviet Central Asian Ornamental Modernism1966–1999 · Eastern EuropeThe monumental art of Soviet Central Asia after the 1966 Tashkent earthquake: a strand of Socialist Realism mixed with Islamic and national ornament.
Stencil Street Art1978–present · Western Europe, Latin America & Caribbean, North America, Global / networkedPictures cut rather than drawn: a photograph is reduced to two or three flat tones, cut into card and sprayed onto a wall, usually uninvited, so one hard-edged figure appears in the street, in black with at most one accent colour.
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.
ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics1987–1995 · North AmericaThe graphics of New York's AIDS activist movement: the SILENCE=DEATH poster of 1987, a pink triangle above white capitals on black, and the posters, stickers, T-shirts, billboards and bus ads of Gran Fury (1988–1995), ACT UP's 'unofficial propaganda ministry'.
Matatu & Nganya Art1990–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe commissioned livery of Kenya's privately owned minibus taxis, at its most elaborate the Nairobi nganya.
Nigerian Pentecostal Crusade Poster & Billboard1990–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe roadside adverts of Nigeria's Pentecostal and independent churches: billboards, banners and posters on poles, walls and bridges announcing crusades, revivals, conventions and night vigils.
Tamil Nadu Flex Banners2000–present · South AsiaThe digitally printed vinyl boards, locally called flex banners, that fan clubs, party cadres, businesses and families have put up along the roads of Tamil Nadu since about 2000, as flex displaced hand-painted cinema banners and cut-outs over the following decade.
Arabic Calligraffiti2002–present · Middle East & North Africa, Western Europe, Global / networkedArabic letters sprayed, rolled and brushed at the scale of buildings.
Itasha (Anime Character Car Graphics)2005–present · East AsiaPrivate cars, motorbikes and bicycles that Japanese fans of anime, manga and games cover with their favourite characters, named by the mid-2000s with the self-mocking word itasha, 'painful car'.
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.
Oaxacan Protest Printmaking & Street Graphics (ASARO)2006–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe street graphics of Oaxaca City since the 2006 teachers' strike and APPO uprising, when ASARO, the stencil collective Lapiztola and later workshops such as Colectivo Subterráneos made the colonial centre's walls a newspaper.
Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)2011–2014 · Middle East & North AfricaThe street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper.
Latin American Feminist Protest Graphics (Ni Una Menos and the Green Wave)2015–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe graphics of Latin America's feminist tide, a mass movement since Ni Una Menos (Buenos Aires, 3 June 2015) and the 2018 'marea verde' for legal abortion, though its scarf dates from 2003.
Chilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20)2019–2022 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe street graphics of Chile's popular revolt, from 18 October 2019 to the March 2020 lockdowns, when a leaderless movement covered Santiago's Plaza de la Dignidad, the Alameda and other cities' walls.
Black Lives Matter Street Murals2020–present · North AmericaA single protest slogan painted along the roadway in capitals 20 to 35 feet tall, filling the street from kerb to kerb, so it reads whole only from rooftops, drones and helicopters.

Styles that often use it 63

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

Styles that use it now and then 50

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.

Hand-paintedin 68 of 146
Typography onlyin 64 of 146
Painterly brushworkin 72 of 146
Repetition & rhythmin 90 of 146
Authoritative & institutionalin 58 of 146
Textile & craftin 47 of 146

Other choices in medium & production