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Imagery · Synthetic & found

Found & vernacular imagery

Clip art, stock, screenshots, appropriated ephemera.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under imagery: what kind of pictures, if any?

styles make it: 79
as a defining choice: 20
as a usual one: 25
now and then: 34
avoid it: 6

Styles defined by it 20

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

Mavo1923–1925 · East AsiaTokyo's anarchist avant-garde, founded in July 1923 by Murayama Tomoyoshi, back from a year in Berlin, with four former Futurists, and its magazine MAVO (seven issues, July 1924 to August 1925).
Onitsha Market Pamphlets1947–1980 · Sub-Saharan AfricaCheap, stapled pamphlets of romance, advice, drama and political biography, written by students, clerks, journalists and traders and printed by jobbing letterpress shops around Onitsha Main Market in eastern Nigeria from the late 1940s.
Pop Art Graphics1955–1975 · North America, Western EuropePop turned the commercial imagery of post-war consumer culture (comics, packaging, celebrity photographs and advertising) into both its subject and its method.
Situationist Détournement Graphics1956–1972 · Western Europe, Northern EuropeGraphics of the Letterist and Situationist Internationals (1956–1972), built on détournement: taking existing words and pictures (comic strips, advertisements, news photographs, city maps, classic texts) and turning them against their source.
Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas)1962–1978 · North America, Central Europe, Western EuropeThe house graphics George Maciunas made from 1962 until his death in 1978 for Fluxus, a network of artists who staged events and sold cheap multiples.
Angura Theatre Poster1965–1985 · East AsiaThe posters of Japan's underground (angura) theatre from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, made for troupes such as Kara Jūrō's Jōkyō Gekijō and Terayama Shūji's Tenjō Sajiki.
Punk & DIY Zine1976–1986 · Western Europe, North AmericaThe graphic voice of punk rock in fanzines, record sleeves and gig flyers: images and words cut from newspapers, typed or scrawled, pasted down and run off on a photocopier.
Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD)1977–1990 · Western EuropeThe record sleeves that British art-school designers made after punk, for independent labels and some majors: Barney Bubbles at Stiff, Malcolm Garrett for Buzzcocks, Peter Saville at Factory and 23 Envelope at 4AD.
NSK Retro-Avant-Garde1980–present · Central Europe, Southern EuropeThe retro-avant-garde of Neue Slowenische Kunst, founded in Ljubljana in 1984 by Laibach, IRWIN and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, with Novi kolektivizem as its design department.
Early Web Vernacular1994–2004 · Global / networkedThe amateur web of the mid-1990s to early 2000s, when millions of people hand-coded personal homepages on free hosts such as GeoCities with table layouts, browser-default fonts, tiled backgrounds, animated GIFs, MIDI soundtracks, hit counters and ‘under construction’ signs.
South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)1995–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaA post-apartheid design language launched in Durban in 1995 by Garth Walker's Orange Juice Design and its free, experimental magazine Ijusi (isiZulu for 'juice'), which asked 'What makes me South African, and what does that look like?'.
Indian Pop-Kitsch Design (Desi Kitsch)1997–present · South AsiaUrban Indian gift and T-shirt design from the late 1990s into the 2010s that recasts the street and bazaar as ironic, affectionate icons: truck tails and 'Horn OK Please', auto-rickshaws, Ambassadors and Chetaks, cutting chai, old Bollywood stills and dialogues, Bhagat Singh in place of Che.
Cartonera Books (Latin American Cardboard Publishing)2003–present · Latin America & CaribbeanBooks of Latin America's cartonera presses, begun by Eloísa Cartonera in Buenos Aires in 2003 after Argentina's 2001 crash: photocopied texts stapled and glued by hand into covers cut from used boxes, usually bought from cartoneros (waste pickers) above the market price.
Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular2003–present · Global / networked, North AmericaA deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014.
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design2004–present · Western EuropeSleeves and print that rebuild a misremembered British past from the public graphics of roughly 1958–1978.
Vaporwave2011–2017 · Global / networked, North AmericaAn internet-born microgenre and visual aesthetic that remixes the debris of late-20th-century consumer culture (Windows 95 dialogs, classical busts, palm trees, mall interiors, Japanese text, early 3D renders) in pastel pinks and cyans.
'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular)2013–present · South Asia, Latin America & CaribbeanThe ready-made greeting pictures that millions of smartphone users, many of them older and new to the internet, forward to family, friends and groups each morning on WhatsApp, above all in India and Brazil.
Hong Kong Protest Art (Umbrella Movement to the 2019–20 Protests)2014–2020 · East AsiaThe graphics of Hong Kong's democracy protests, from the 2014 Umbrella Movement to the national security law of 2020, in two linked media.
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.
Weirdcore & Dreamcore2019–present · Global / networkedAn internet aesthetic popularised on Reddit, TikTok and YouTube in the early 2020s, with dreamcore as its softer, pastel, cloud-filled sister.

Styles that often use it 25

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

Styles that use it now and then 34

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.

Collage & layeringin 58 of 79
Ironic & self-awarein 50 of 79
Rebellious & subversivein 53 of 79
Eclectic mixingin 45 of 79
Photomontagein 38 of 79
Treated photographyin 34 of 79

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Other choices in imagery