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Colour · Key & temperature

Dark ground

Light elements on black or deep fields.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under colour: what is the colour strategy?

styles make it: 129
as a defining choice: 12
as a usual one: 36
now and then: 81
avoid it: 9

Styles defined by it 12

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

Bògòlanfini Mud Cloth1900–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe mud-dyed cotton cloth of the Bamana and other Malian peoples, in which the ground rather than the motif is painted: cloth dyed yellow with n'gallama leaves is covered around each sign with fermented iron-rich mud, and the unpainted signs are then bleached pale.
Hong Kong Neon & Beiwei Shop-Sign Lettering1950–present · East AsiaThe night-time signscape of Hong Kong's Kowloon streets.
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.
Afrofuturist Design1970–present · North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Global / networkedA visual language of Black futures that fuses African and diasporic iconography (pyramids and ankhs, Adinkra and Nsibidi glyphs, textile patterning) with spacecraft, cosmic fields and technology.
Warli Painting1970–present · South AsiaThe ritual wall painting of the Warli, an Adivasi people of the northern Sahyadri in Maharashtra, carried onto paper and canvas from the 1970s by Jivya Soma Mashe and others.
Demoscene Graphics (Cracktros, Demos & Text-Mode Art)1985–present · Northern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe, North America, Global / networkedThe graphics of the demoscene, a mainly European community of coders, graphicians and musicians that grew from the intros software crackers added to pirated Commodore 64 and Amiga games in the mid-1980s.
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).
Fantasy User Interface (FUI) & Sci-Fi HUD1999–present · North America, Western Europe, Global / networkedFantasy user interfaces are the screen graphics of films and series: computer screens, holograms and helmet HUDs made to be watched for a few seconds, not used.
Synthwave / Outrun2006–present · Global / networked, Western Europe, Northern Europe, North America, OceaniaThe retro-futurist look of synthwave music: a 1980s revival that grew from mid-2000s French electro and online synth scenes, took its other name from Sega's arcade racer Out Run (1986) and reached the mainstream with Drive (2011).
Plain Tobacco Packaging2012–present · Oceania, Western Europe, Northern Europe, North America, Global / networkedA packaging language written into law to strip tobacco of persuasion.
Analog Horror Graphics2015–present · North America, Global / networkedA horror genre, mostly on YouTube, that tells its stories through imitation television and home-video graphics rather than actors: emergency-alert screens, station IDs, public-service, educational and instructional tapes, set between the 1960s and early 2000s.
Dark Tech Minimalism2019–present · North America, Global / networkedThe dark, restrained aesthetic of developer tools and SaaS landing pages since about 2019: near-black grounds, grey type ramps, a neutral grotesque such as Inter, hairline borders, soft radial glows and bento grids of crisp product screenshots.

Styles that often use it 36

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

Styles that use it now and then 81

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.

Extreme scale contrastin 75 of 129
Gradientsin 45 of 129
Isolated objectin 82 of 129
Full bleedin 56 of 129
Single focal pointin 94 of 129
Treated photographyin 36 of 129

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Other choices in colour