Typography · Display & special
Condensed display
Tall, narrow, heavy letters for impact.
A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under typography: what do the letters look like, and how are they set?
- styles make it
- 60
- as a defining choice
- 3
- as a usual one
- 30
- now and then
- 27
- avoid it
- 4
Styles defined by it 3
For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.
Vyaz (Ornamental Slavonic Lettering)Cyrillic letters bound into one even band of ornament.
Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino)The Spanish bullfight poster in its illustrated form, from Marcelino de Unceta's lithographs (from 1879) to the Valencian house of Ortega, which supplied rings across Spain.
Drum Magazine & Sophiatown PhotojournalismThe picture magazine of Black urban Africa in the 1950s.
Styles that often use it 30
A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.
Victorian Letterpress & Wood TypeThe commercial jobbing print of the industrial century: posters, playbills, auction notices and ephemera built from a flood of new display types (fat faces, Egyptians, grotesques, Tuscans and condensed wood type).
- Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets)Loose verse sheets printed and sold in Chile's cities from 1866, peaking around 1890 and declining after 1920, though some were still printed into the 1940s.
- Glasgow StyleGlasgow's distinctive answer to Art Nouveau, formed around Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret and Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair at the Glasgow School of Art.
- Vorticism & BLAST TypographyLondon's short-lived rival to Futurism, launched by Wyndham Lewis with BLAST (dated 20 June 1914; War Number, July 1915).
- Russian ConstructivismConstructivism rejected art for art's sake in favour of the artist-engineer building useful things for the new Soviet society.
- Estridentismo (Stridentist) GraphicsMexico's first avant-garde (1921-27), launched when Manuel Maples Arce pasted his manifesto Actual No. 1 on Mexico City walls.
- Italian Fascist Graphics (Romanità & Exhibition Photomontage)The visual language of Italian Fascism, which turned modernist means to a cult of Rome and of the Duce.
- Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22)The print side of São Paulo's Modernismo (1922-29), set in jobbing print shops.
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.
Giallo Mondadori Covers (I Libri Gialli)The cover system of Mondadori's crime series, Milan, from I Libri Gialli of 1929 to Il Giallo Mondadori today.
Streamline ModerneThe late, chiefly American phase of Art Deco, in which aerodynamic science became a visual language for a Depression-era culture hungry for progress.
Spanish Civil War PosterThe poster war waged by the Spanish Republic, its unions and its anarchist, communist and socialist parties against Franco's uprising.
Taller de Gráfica PopularA Mexico City printmaking collective founded in 1937 around Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O'Higgins and Luis Arenal to put art at the service of popular and anti-fascist struggles.
- Vietnamese Propaganda Poster (Tranh cổ động)The state poster art of Vietnam from the 1945 August Revolution to today.
West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow)The art-film and culture poster Hans Hillmann developed from 1953 for the West German distributors Neue Filmkunst and Atlas Film, which his Kassel student Gunter Rambow took with Gerhard Lienemeyer into staged photo posters for theatre, publishers and protest.
Blue Note Jazz Sleeve ModernismThe record-sleeve language of Blue Note Records, set by art director Reid Miles, who designed some 350 twelve-inch LP covers between about 1956 and 1967, often around Francis Wolff's session photographs.
Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic DesignThe posters of Istanbul's first generation of professional graphic designers for theatres, films, festivals and exhibitions.
Di Tella Graphic Design (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella)The in-house graphics of Buenos Aires' Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1960–1970, led by Juan Carlos Distéfano with Juan Andralis, Rubén Fontana, Norberto Coppola and Carlos Soler.
- Black Panther Party GraphicsThe visual language of the Black Panther Party, created largely by its Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas, for the weekly newspaper The Black Panther.
Roman-like Thai Typography (modern loopless Thai)A Thai type genre that drops the head loops of most Thai letters, so the script reads as an even sans like Helvetica.
South African Resistance PosterThe posters of the struggle against apartheid, from the exiled Medu Art Ensemble in Gaborone to the community workshops that served the United Democratic Front and the unions in the 1980s.
Pixação (São Paulo Tag Reto)The 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 GraphicsThe 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'.
- Nigerian Pentecostal Crusade Poster & BillboardThe 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.
Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie PosterHand-pulled, numbered screenprints that revived the rock poster in Austin from 1991, led by Frank Kozik, and spread via Flatstock fairs and, from 2004, Mondo to 'alternative' film posters, for collectors as much as the show.
- Internet Ugly & Meme VernacularA deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014.
Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover)The illustrated cover of the contemporary romantic comedy: a couple drawn as flat cartoon figures with simplified faces, from silhouettes and hidden faces to a few cartoon features, caught in one gesture that states the premise, on a single saturated ground of teal, pink, yellow or purple, under a hand-lettered title so large that the figures often lean on it.
Extinction Rebellion GraphicsThe visual identity of Extinction Rebellion, the climate movement founded in Stroud in 2018, built by its volunteer Art Group as a free kit anyone may print.
Book Blob (Abstract Colour-Blob Literary Fiction Cover)The default jacket of US literary fiction around 2019–2023: soft, overlapping blobs of saturated colour fill the cover edge to edge (cobalt, pink, orange-red, deep green, mustard).
Black Lives Matter Street MuralsA 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 use it now and then 27
An occasional choice in these styles.
- Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Traditionc. 1180–present
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering1800–present
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)1880–1917
- Plakatstil / Sachplakat1905–1920
- Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat)1919–1955
- Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book1922–1936
- Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design1925–1960
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster1932–1989
- WPA Silkscreen Posters1935–1943
- Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance)1947–present
- Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia)1948–1996
- Bossa Nova Sleeve Modernism (César Villela and Elenco)1960–1968
- Greek Tourism Modernism (EOT)1960–1974
- Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas)1962–1978
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster)1968
- Gráfica del 68 (Mexican Student Movement Graphics)1968
- Ethiopian Revolutionary Poster (Derg Era)1974–1991
- City Pop Illustration1979–present
- Jamaican Dancehall Signs & Sleeve Art1980–present
- Hipster Artisanal Revival2007–2018
- Lucerne Poster Scene (Neubad & Südpol Posters)2007–present
- YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face')2012–present
- 'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular)2013–present
- Solarpunk2014–present
- Latin American Feminist Protest Graphics (Ni Una Menos and the Green Wave)2015–present
- Kinetic Typography & Variable Type2016–present
- NFT Profile-Picture Collections (CryptoPunks to Bored Apes)2017–present
It often goes with
Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.
- All capsin 54 of 60
- Extreme scale contrastin 47 of 60
- Grotesque & neo-grotesquein 31 of 60
- Full bleedin 34 of 60
- Agitational & persuasivein 31 of 60
- Single focal pointin 50 of 60
Styles that avoid it
Styles that deliberately leave it out.
Other choices in typography
- Humanist & Garalde serif
- Transitional serif
- Didone
- Slab serif
- Grotesque & neo-grotesque
- Geometric sans
- Humanist sans
- Rounded sans
- Blackletter
- Script
- Brush & pen calligraphy
- Hand-lettering
- Ornamented display
- Stencil
- Monospace
- Bitmap & pixel
- Experimental & distorted
- All caps
- Lowercase only
- Type as image
- Flush left, ragged right
- Rotated & vertical setting
- Eclectic mixing
- Tight setting
- Wide letterspacing