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Colour · Key & temperature

Fluorescent & neon

Day-glo inks and RGB brights.

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

styles make it: 50
as a defining choice: 10
as a usual one: 15
now and then: 25
avoid it: 73

Styles defined by it 10

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

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.
Picó Sound-System Painting (Colombian Caribbean)1967–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe hand-painted fronts of the picós, the giant sound systems that play dances in the barrios of Barranquilla and Cartagena.
Australian Poster Collective Screenprints1971–1994 · OceaniaScreenprinted posters from the political poster collectives and community workshops that spread across Australia from Sydney's Tin Sheds, where Earthworks began in 1971.
Chicha Poster1980–present · Latin America & CaribbeanFluorescent screen-printed street posters that emerged in the 1980s to promote chicha (Andean cumbia) concerts in Lima, made by printers from Andean migrant communities.
Rave & Acid House Graphics1988–2000 · Western EuropeThe pocket-sized promotional art of acid house, rave and early techno, handed out in record shops and car parks to advertise all-night parties.
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.
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).
Risograph & Indie Print Culture2008–present · Global / networkedA contemporary culture of zines, art books, posters and prints made on Japanese Risograph stencil duplicators, whose soy-based spot inks (fluorescent pink, yellow, blue, teal) are laid down one drum at a time.
Acid Graphics / New Ugly2016–present · Global / networked, Western Europe, Central EuropeA 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 often use it 15

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

Styles that use it now and then 25

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.

Found & vernacular imageryin 27 of 50
Web & CSSin 22 of 50
3D renderin 16 of 50
Collage & layeringin 26 of 50
Gradientsin 25 of 50
Rebellious & subversivein 27 of 50

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Other choices in colour