Layout & composition · Free composition
Broken grid
A grid is implied and then deliberately violated or deconstructed.
A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under layout & composition: how is the picture plane organised?
- styles make it
- 20
- as a defining choice
- 6
- as a usual one
- 6
- now and then
- 8
- avoid it
- 9
Styles defined by it 6
For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.
Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics)The black-and-white narrative comic of postwar Japan, from Tezuka Osamu's Shin Takarajima (1947) to the weekly boys' magazines of 1959 and 1968 and the paperbacks that collect them.
Shōjo Manga (Japanese Girls' Comics)The look of Japan's girls' comics (strictly a readership, not a style), which Takahashi Macoto fixed in 1958 from the lyrical illustration (jojōga) of Nakahara Jun'ichi and the Year 24 Group remade in the 1970s.
- Swiss Punk / New Wave TypographyA rebellion from inside the Swiss school: Wolfgang Weingart and his Basel students kept the grotesque and the grid but set them in motion with extreme letterspacing, stepped and angled lines, rules and bars, enlarged halftone screens and layered film montage.
Métal hurlant Science-Fiction Comics (Mœbius, Druillet & Les Humanoïdes Associés)The adult science-fiction comics of Métal hurlant, the Paris magazine founded in 1974 by Mœbius, Philippe Druillet, Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Bernard Farkas.
Cranbrook & Deconstructivist TypographyGraduate-school experimentation, centred on Katherine and Michael McCoy's Cranbrook design programme, that applied post-structuralist literary theory to the page.
Grunge TypographyThe 1990s magazine and music-industry style in which type was layered, eroded, overlapped and cropped until legibility became negotiable.
Styles that often use it 6
A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.
Dutch Expressive Postmodernism (Studio Dumbar & Hard Werken)An anti-functionalist current in Dutch graphic design led by Studio Dumbar in The Hague (from 1977) and the Rotterdam collective Hard Werken (magazine from 1979, design office 1982–1994).
Emigre & Early Digital TypeRudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko's magazine and type foundry, launched in 1984 alongside the first Macintosh, turned the computer's low-resolution constraints into a new typographic idiom.
Glitch Art & Datamosh GraphicsAn art and design practice that makes digital failure the picture.
Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef)Adult comics magazines edited by Arab artists' collectives since 2007, at times with a ministry grant or an NGO partner: Samandal in Beirut, TokTok in Cairo, Lab619 in Tunis and Skefkef in Casablanca.
Brutalist Web DesignA reaction against templated, conversion-optimised web design that exposes the raw materials of the browser: default system fonts, blue underlined links, visible borders, unstyled forms and plain document flow.
Acid Graphics / New UglyA late-2010s club and poster style that updates 1990s rave graphics with modern 3D tools: liquid-chrome and melting lettering, neo-tribal spikes, wireframes, op-art patterns and acid-green palettes on black, mixed with blackletter and stretched grotesques.
Styles that use it now and then 8
An occasional choice in these styles.
- Persian Miniature (Ilkhanid, Timurid and Safavid Book Painting)c. 1300–1700
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age)1934–1993
- Underground Comix1968–1982
- Out-of-Square Hangul Typography1985–present
- L'Association and French Alternative Comics1990–present
- South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)1995–present
- Korean Webtoon Graphics2002–present
- Neo-Brutalism2020–present
It often goes with
Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.
- Visual tensionin 13 of 20
- Experimental & distortedin 13 of 20
- Rebellious & subversivein 15 of 20
- Eclectic mixingin 12 of 20
- Rotated & vertical settingin 11 of 20
- Collage & layeringin 12 of 20
Styles that avoid it
Styles that deliberately leave it out.
- Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho)c. 960–present
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster1932–1989
- Hebrew Poster Lettering & Early Israeli State Design1934–1974
- Bonelli Fumetto (Italian Popular Adventure Comics)1948–present
- Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism1953–1990
- Amar Chitra Katha Comics1967–present
- NSK Retro-Avant-Garde1980–present
- Yuru-chara (Japanese Local Mascot Design)2000–present
- Newtro (Korean New-Retro)2017–present