Tone & intent · Emotion
Calm & contemplative
Quiet, slow, meditative.
A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under tone & intent: what should the work make people feel or do?
- styles make it
- 66
- as a defining choice
- 8
- as a usual one
- 32
- now and then
- 26
- avoid it
- 44
Styles defined by it 8
For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.
Ma & Wabi-sabi AestheticsA Japanese aesthetic rooted in Zen and the wabi tea ceremony that prizes austerity, imperfection, impermanence and the charged interval (ma) between things.
- Ten Bamboo Studio Colour Woodblock (Douban & Gonghua)A kind of colour woodblock printing begun in late-Ming Nanjing, made so that a print looks like a brush painting.
Minimalist Graphic DesignModernism reduced to its barest means, informed by 1960s Minimal art and Japanese emptiness: one image or line of type, vast white or neutral space, a monochrome or near-monochrome palette and meticulous typographic detail.
ECM Sleeve Aesthetic (Munich)The cover language of the Munich label ECM, made since 1970 by Barbara Wojirsch, Dieter Rehm and later Sascha Kleis and Mayo Bucher with co-founder Manfred Eicher.
City Pop IllustrationThe painted look of Japanese city pop record sleeves and magazine covers, fixed by Hiroshi Nagai's sleeve for Eiichi Ohtaki's A Long Vacation (1981) and Eizin Suzuki's for Tatsuro Yamashita's For You (1982).
- Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China')Chinese book design since 2003, when Shanghai founded the yearly 'Most Beautiful Books of China' award, whose winners go on to Leipzig.
Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)The look of Kinfolk, the slow-living quarterly founded in Portland in 2011 and run from Copenhagen since 2015, and of the indie lifestyle titles and Instagram feeds that copied it.
- Lo-fi Anime AestheticThe look of YouTube's 24/7 lo-fi hip hop streams.
Styles that often use it 32
A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.
Chinese Calligraphy & Seal Carving (Shufa & Zhuanke)The written art of China and the root of East Asian lettering.
- Ethiopian Ge'ez Manuscript & Haräg IlluminationThe manuscript art of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, written in the Ge'ez syllabary on parchment from the Garima Gospels (radiocarbon-dated to roughly the 4th–7th centuries) to the present.
Islamic Geometric & Calligraphic TraditionA visual system shared across the Islamic world in which proportioned calligraphy, compass-and-straightedge geometry and the vegetal arabesque carry meaning and beauty in place of figurative imagery.
- Hebrew MicrographyA Jewish scribal art in which lines of minute Hebrew script, usually the Masoretic notes that guard the biblical text, are written so that the line itself draws: interlaced frames and star rosettes on full carpet pages, and animals, knights, fish and grotesques in the margins.
Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho)The page and letter of the East Asian book.
Kamon (Japanese Family Crests)Japan's family crests: small one-colour emblems that reduce a plant, animal, tool or pattern to a flat silhouette, mirrored or repeated around a centre, often ringed and drawn with compass and brush.
- Square Kufic (Bannāʾī)Square Kufic builds Arabic script on a square grid: straight lines and right angles only, with every stroke as wide as the gap beside it.
- Persian Nastaʿlīq Calligraphy (Qiṭʿa, Chalipa and Siyāh-mashq)The 'hanging' script of Persian poetry and an art of the single sheet.
- Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags)Tibetan Buddhist and Bön woodblock printing, from the first printed Kangyur (1410, cut in China) and the 15th-century presses of Gungthang to the great printing houses of Narthang, Derge and Lhasa.
Renaissance Book TypographyThe printed book as shaped by humanist Italy and France: roman and italic types modelled on humanist handwriting, a single justified text block set in harmonious proportions within generous margins, and woodcut initials, borders and printer's devices as the only ornament.
Batik Pattern TraditionThe Javanese wax-resist textile tradition in which hot wax is drawn with a canting or stamped with a copper cap, then dyed in successive baths to build layered all-over patterns.
Neoclassical Book TypographyThe Enlightenment book stripped of Renaissance woodcut decoration.
JaponismeThe Western absorption of Japanese woodblock prints, textiles and crafts after Japan reopened to trade in the 1850s.
- German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung)The German reform of the book, from the magazine Pan (1895) to the private presses that ended around 1933.
Santiniketan & Bengal School GraphicsThe nationalist, anti-academic art of Calcutta and Santiniketan, which turned from oil-paint naturalism and chromolithograph gloss to Indian and pan-Asian sources.
Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat)The Swiss descendant of the German object poster, made in Zurich and above all Basel from 1919 to the early 1950s.
Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing)The covers of China's New Literature.
Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era)The pictorial posters that the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA, 1929), state tourist bureaux, railways and shipping lines commissioned to sell Australia abroad and at home.
Scandinavian FunctionalismNordic functionalism (funkis) arrived in graphic form with Sigurd Lewerentz's posters and winged emblem for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition.
Estado Novo Folk Modernism (SPN)The official image of Salazar's Estado Novo, shaped by António Ferro's Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (SPN, 1933; SNI from 1944).
- Hurufiyya Calligraphic ModernismA pan-Arab and Iranian modern-art movement, begun by Madiha Omar in the late 1940s, that freed the letters of the Arabic script from text and used them as abstract visual units.
Japanese Postwar ModernismBuilding on the New Typography that Hiromu Hara and the Nippon Kobo circle had absorbed in the 1930s, Japan's postwar graphic designers fused the grid, sans-serif and objective photography of European modernism with indigenous traditions of family crests (kamon), asymmetry and charged emptiness (ma).
Chinese National-Style Animation (Shanghai Animation Film Studio)The 'national style' of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, which turned from Disney and Soviet models to Chinese media: Peking-opera masks and movement, paper-cut and folded-paper figures, mural and New Year print colour and, from 1960, ink-wash painting set in motion after Qi Baishi and Li Keran.
Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuit PrintmakingPrints from the Inuit co-operative studio at Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, with a catalogued collection every year since 1959.
- Greek Tourism Modernism (EOT)The modernist image of Greece made for the National Tourism Organisation (EOT) by Michalis Katzourakis, its art adviser in 1960-1967, and by Frederick Carabott, who advised it until 1967; in 1962 the two also founded the K&K Athens Advertising Centre.
Iranian Modernist Graphic DesignIranian graphic design came of age in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hong Kong East–West Graphic ModernismThe studio design of Hong Kong from the 1960s, made for banks, developers, trade bodies, hotels and cultural events in a city that had to speak Chinese and English at once.
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.
- Madinah Mushaf (King Fahd Complex Qur'an Page)One fixed page for the Qur'an across much of the Muslim world: Uthman Taha's fully vowelled Naskh in fifteen justified lines, written so that every page ends at the end of a verse (the late Ottoman âyet-berkenar layout), inside a floral frame, with sura titles in framed cartouches and verse numbers in small round medallions.
- Frutiger AeroThe glossy, optimistic look of consumer technology from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, retrospectively named in 2017 by the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute after Windows Vista's Aero interface and Adrian Frutiger's humanist sans.
Low Poly IllustrationA 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.
NeumorphismA short-lived interface trend in which controls are extruded from, or pressed into, a background of the same colour and modelled only by paired soft shadows.
Styles that use it now and then 26
An occasional choice in these styles.
- Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Compositionc. 0–394
- Maghrebi Script (Maghribi Calligraphy of al-Andalus and North Africa)c. 900–present
- Emblem Book (Motto, Picture & Epigram)1531–1724
- Rinpa & Saga-bon1600–present
- Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints1670–1900
- Diné (Navajo) Weaving Design1700–present
- Thai Yantra (Yant) Diagrams1700–present
- Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing1822–1956
- Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography (Bombay Metal Type)1864–present
- Glasgow Style1890–1914
- Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)1892–1914
- Bògòlanfini Mud Cloth1900–present
- Uli & Nsibidi Line and Sign Tradition1900–present
- De Stijl1917–1931
- Bossa Nova Sleeve Modernism (César Villela and Elenco)1960–1968
- Munich 1972 Olympic Design (Otl Aicher)1966–1972
- Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve1968–1983
- Western Desert Iconography1971–present
- Korean Commercial Calligraphy (Kaelligeurapi)1999–present
- Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering2005–present
- DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism2012–2022
- 'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular)2013–present
- Data Humanism2014–present
- Solarpunk2014–present
- Weirdcore & Dreamcore2019–present
- Glassmorphism2020–present
It often goes with
Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.
- Generous white spacein 42 of 66
- Brush & pen calligraphyin 32 of 66
- Analogous harmonyin 21 of 66
- Biomorphic curvesin 32 of 66
- Earth & mineralin 30 of 66
- Spiritual & sacredin 34 of 66
Styles that avoid it
Styles that deliberately leave it out.
- African Wax & Fancy Print1880–present
- Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)1896–1944
- Italian Futurism1909–1944
- Vorticism & BLAST Typography1914–1920
- Dada1916–1924
- Mavo1923–1925
- AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield)1930–1938
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age)1934–1993
- Spanish Civil War Poster1936–1939
- Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics)1947–1986
- Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia)1948–1996
- Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism1951–1965
- Pop Art Graphics1955–1975
- Situationist Détournement Graphics1956–1972
- Tropicália Graphic Design1964–1975
- Angura Theatre Poster1965–1985
- Black Panther Party Graphics1967–1980
- Picó Sound-System Painting (Colombian Caribbean)1967–present
- Ultras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo)1968–present
- Underground Comix1968–1982
- Kinshasa Popular Painting1970–present
- Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics1972–present
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)1972–2025
- Afrobeat Sleeve Art1974–present
- Punk & DIY Zine1976–1986
- Dutch Expressive Postmodernism (Studio Dumbar & Hard Werken)1977–1994
- La Movida Madrileña Graphics1977–1988
- Memphis Design1981–1988
- ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics1987–1995
- Rave & Acid House Graphics1988–2000
- Matatu & Nganya Art1990–present
- Bitterkomix (Afrikaans Underground Comics)1992–present
- Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster1992–present
- Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks)1993–present
- Japanese Dense Web Design1999–present
- Neo-Andean Architecture (Cholets)2005–present
- Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay2006–present
- Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef)2007–present
- YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face')2012–present
- Hong Kong Protest Art (Umbrella Movement to the 2019–20 Protests)2014–2020
- Acid Graphics / New Ugly2016–present
- NFT Profile-Picture Collections (CryptoPunks to Bored Apes)2017–present
- Chilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20)2019–2022
- Neo-Brutalism2020–present