Framed panels

Styles that often use it 88

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

• Amazigh Sign System & Tifinagh c. 0–present · Middle East & North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa The visual language shared by Amazigh communities from the Rif, Atlas and Kabylie to the Aurès and the Tuareg Sahara.
• Andean Woven Graphic Systems c. 600–present · Latin America & Caribbean The graphic systems of Andean cloth, the region's most prestigious medium, in which every motif is built on the warp-and-weft grid.
• Islamic Geometric & Calligraphic Tradition c. 690–present · Middle East & North Africa, South Asia, Southern Europe A 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.
• Nianhua & Chinese Folk Print c. 1100–present · East Asia Woodblock pictures bought each New Year and pasted on doors, walls and kitchen shrines to invite luck and ward off harm: paired door gods, plump babies with carp, the Kitchen God, opera scenes and auspicious rebuses.
• Square Kufic (Bannāʾī) c. 1100–present · Middle East & North Africa, South Asia 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.
• European Heraldry c. 1140–present · Western Europe, Central Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe The hereditary identifying devices of medieval Europe's knights and seals, codified into a rule-bound grammar still used by states, cities, churches, universities and families.
• Mongol Bichig Calligraphy & Ugalz Ornament c. 1204–present · East Asia Mongolia's classical script and the auspicious ornament that frames it on state, Buddhist and household objects.
• Vyaz (Ornamental Slavonic Lettering) c. 1230–present · Eastern Europe, Southern Europe Cyrillic letters bound into one even band of ornament.
• Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags) c. 1410–present · East Asia, South Asia 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 Typography c. 1460–1600 · Southern Europe, Western Europe, Central Europe The 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.
• Đông Hồ & Hàng Trống Folk Prints 1600–present · Southeast Asia Vietnam's two classic folk-print schools, bought for Tết. Đông Hồ families press each colour from its own carved block onto giấy điệp, dó paper brushed with ground scallop shell whose streaked, faintly sparkling surface serves as the white, and print the black line last.
• Lubok Popular Print 1650–1920 · Eastern Europe Cheap single-sheet Russian popular prints sold at fairs and by pedlars from the later 17th century: woodcut, later engraved and lithographed pictures of saints, fables, heroes, battles and satire in which text and image share one sheet.
• Adinkra & Kente Symbol Systems 1700–present · Sub-Saharan Africa The Akan textile languages of Ghana.
• Diné (Navajo) Weaving Design 1700–present · North America The tapestry-woven design tradition of Diné (Navajo) weavers, recorded in Spanish sources from the early 18th century.
• Northwest Coast Formline Design 1700–present · North America The two-dimensional design system of the northern Northwest Coast nations, painted, carved and woven onto boxes, house fronts, robes and hats, and printed as serigraphs since the 1960s.
• Pacific Barkcloth (Tapa) Design 1700–present · Oceania Barkcloth beaten from paper-mulberry inner bark and decorated across Polynesia and Fiji for gift exchange at weddings, funerals and chiefly investitures.
• Edo-moji Commercial Lettering (Kanteiryū, Yose-moji, Sumō-ji) 1779–present · East Asia The fat, ink-heavy brush hands that Edo's professional sign and bill writers made for the city's entertainments: Kanteiryū for kabuki signboards and playbills from 1779, yose-moji for rakugo halls, sumō-ji for sumo ranking sheets, and squarish kago-moji for votive name slips.
• Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen 1796–1939 · Western Europe, Central Europe Cheap single-sheet popular prints sold by pedlars across 19th-century Europe, led by the Pellerin imagerie at Épinal and the Neuruppin Bilderbogen.
• Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering 1800–present · Global / networked Letters painted by trained sign writers on fascias, windows, walls, vehicles and showcards, from Victorian gold leaf on glass to Mexican rótulos, Indian bazaar boards and Ghanaian barbershop signs.
• Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type 1810–1900 · Western Europe, North America The 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).
• Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing 1822–1956 · Middle East & North Africa The page of the Arabic printed book as Egypt's state press at Bulaq shaped it from 1822: justified blocks of black Naskh type on pale paper, often boxed in a ruled frame, with an ornamental headpiece on the opening page, headings set larger or in a second script such as Nastaʿlīq, and almost no pictures.
• Urdu Katib Lithography 1837–present · South Asia For about a century and a half Urdu chose lithography over movable type, because metal type could not reproduce the sloping, stacked ligatures of Nastaʿlīq.
• Fante Asafo Flags (Frankaa) 1850–present · Sub-Saharan Africa The company flags (frankaa) of the Fante asafo, the old warrior companies of Ghana's central coast, widely adopted from the mid-nineteenth century.
• Egyptian Cigarette Packaging (Cairo Tobacco Houses) 1871–1970 · Middle East & North Africa, Western Europe, Central Europe, North America The flat tins and slide boxes in which Cairo's tobacco houses, most of them Greek-run, sold hand-made Egyptian cigarettes to the world.
• Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art 1878–present · South Asia Mass-printed images of Hindu deities, epic scenes, saints, nationalist heroes and film stars, sold in bazaars and given away as business calendars, from the chromolithographs of the Calcutta Art Studio and Ravi Varma Press to Sivakasi offset.
• Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino) 1879–present · Southern Europe 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.
• Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) 1880–1917 · Latin America & Caribbean Cheap broadsheets, chapbooks and gazettes sold on the streets of Porfirian Mexico City by the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and illustrated by Manuel Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada.
• Norwegian and Finnish National Romantic Graphics (Munthe & Karelianism) 1880–1922 · Northern Europe The flat, decorative branch of Norway's and Finland's national romanticism, which turned Viking carving, the sagas, the Kalevala and old peasant weaving into modern ornament.
• Art Nouveau 1890–1910 · Western Europe, Central Europe, Southern Europe, North America An international 'new art' that sought a modern style free of historical revival, drawing its forms from plant growth and the female figure.
• Fileteado Porteño 1890–present · Latin America & Caribbean A Buenos Aires tradition of ornamental brush painting that began around 1900 on the grey-painted trade carts of Italian immigrant coachbuilders and spread to trucks, colectivo buses, shop signs and gallery panels.
• Glasgow Style 1890–1914 · Western Europe Glasgow's distinctive answer to Art Nouveau, formed around Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret and Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair at the Glasgow School of Art.
• Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau) 1892–1914 · Western Europe The Dutch branch of Art Nouveau, seen mostly in book covers, vignettes and posters.
• Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich) 1896–1944 · Central Europe The house style of the Munich satirical weekly Simplicissimus, set by Th.
• Bògòlanfini Mud Cloth 1900–present · Sub-Saharan Africa The 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.
• Guna Mola 1900–present · Latin America & Caribbean The reverse-appliqué blouse panels of Guna women in Panama, made by cutting through two to seven stacked layers of cotton so that every shape is ringed by echoing bands of the colours beneath.
• Santiniketan & Bengal School Graphics 1905–1954 · South Asia The nationalist, anti-academic art of Calcutta and Santiniketan, which turned from oil-paint naturalism and chromolithograph gloss to Indian and pan-Asian sources.
• Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration 1910–1940 · East Asia The lyrical illustration (jojōga) of late-Meiji to early-Shōwa Japan, led by Takehisa Yumeji: willowy, large-eyed women in kimono drawn with an Art Nouveau contour, set among camellias and kimono patterns and lettered by hand.
• Arnhem Land Bark Painting & Rarrk 1912–present · Oceania Painting in ochres on flattened stringybark by Yolŋu, Kunwinjku, Kuninjku and other clans of Arnhem Land, carrying ceremonial designs into portable form; collected from 1912, painted through art centres since the 1970s.
• Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design 1917–1924 · Eastern Europe, Central Europe The Yiddish modernist book of the Kultur-Lige, the secular Jewish culture league founded in Kyiv in 1918, and its circle: El Lissitzky, Issachar Ber Ryback, Iosif Chaikov, Boris Aronson and others, who sought a new Jewish art in the shtetl synagogues and tombstones they had recorded and in Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism.
• Wendingen & Amsterdam School Typography 1918–1932 · Western Europe The graphic language of Wendingen (1918–1932), monthly of the Amsterdam architects' society Architectura et Amicitia, and its editor H.
• Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22) 1922–1929 · Latin America & Caribbean The print side of São Paulo's Modernismo (1922-29), set in jobbing print shops.
• Mavo 1923–1925 · East Asia Tokyo'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).
• Peruvian Indigenista Graphics (Amauta and Neo-Peruvian Design) 1923–1945 · Latin America & Caribbean The woodcut-led print graphics of Peru's indigenist movement, in which the Andean face and pre-Columbian ornament stand for a modern Peruvian nation.
• Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing) 1923–1949 · East Asia The covers of China's New Literature.
• Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design 1925–1960 · Middle East & North Africa The pictorial poster, label and ticket art of the young Turkish Republic, led by İhap Hulusi Görey after his Munich training in Ludwig Hohlwein's orbit, with Münif Fehim Özarman and, after 1943, Kenan Temizan.
• Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era) 1929–1959 · Oceania 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.
• Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) 1929–present · Western Europe, Southern Europe The comic drawing style of Hergé's Tintin and the Brussels school, named 'klare lijn' by Joost Swarte in 1977.
• Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop) 1934–present · North America The mainland American fantasy of the South Seas, begun by Don the Beachcomber's Hollywood bar (about 1934) and Trader Vic's in Oakland and at its height in the Polynesian restaurants of the 1950s and 60s.
• Literatura de Cordel Woodcut 1940–present · Latin America & Caribbean The cover art of Brazil's literatura de cordel, pocket chapbooks of verse whose single picture is a small woodcut cut in soft umburana wood and printed in black above a plain letterpress title.
• Ndebele Geometric Painting 1940–present · Sub-Saharan Africa The mural tradition of Southern Ndebele women, who paint homestead walls and gateways, and later canvases and objects, with bold, symmetrical geometric designs.
• Jeepney Art 1946–present · Southeast Asia The decoration of the Philippine jeepney, the shared taxi built from surplus US Army jeeps after 1945 and later from locally fabricated stainless-steel bodies by firms such as Sarao and Francisco Motors.
• Pakistani Truck Art 1947–present · South Asia The total decoration of Pakistan's trucks and buses, which grew from company marks and saints' portraits painted in the late 1940s into a workshop art in which painters, metalworkers, woodcarvers and reflective-tape specialists collaborate on each vehicle.
• Hong Kong Neon & Beiwei Shop-Sign Lettering 1950–present · East Asia The night-time signscape of Hong Kong's Kowloon streets.
• West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs 1950–present · Sub-Saharan Africa Hand-painted boards advertising barbershops and braiding salons across West and Central Africa, made by self-taught, often anonymous sign painters since the mid-20th century.
• Cairo–Beirut Arab Modernist Book & Periodical Design 1952–1990 · Middle East & North Africa The illustrated book, magazine and children's-book culture that ran from Cairo's post-1952 publishing houses to the Arab nationalist and leftist presses of Beirut.
• Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism 1953–1990 · Latin America & Caribbean The design of Mexico City's literary and cultural press, shaped from the 1950s by the Barcelona-born exile Vicente Rojo: México en la Cultura, the Revista de la Universidad, Plural, La Jornada and the covers of Ediciones Era.
• Push Pin Style 1954–1980 · North America The eclectic illustrative style of New York's Push Pin Studios, founded by Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel.
• Situationist Détournement Graphics 1956–1972 · Western Europe, Northern Europe Graphics 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.
• Shōjo Manga (Japanese Girls' Comics) 1958–present · East Asia, Global / networked The look of Japan's girls' comics (strictly a readership, not a style), which Takahashi Macoto fixed in 1958 from the lyrical illustration (jojōga) of Nakahara Jun'ichi and the Year 24 Group remade in the 1970s.
• Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas) 1962–1978 · North America, Central Europe, Western Europe The 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.
• Rorke's Drift Linocut 1962–1982 · Sub-Saharan Africa The prints of the Lutheran art centre that Swedish teachers Peder and Ulla Gowenius started at Ceza Hospital in 1962 and moved to Rorke's Drift in 1963: under apartheid, which denied Black South Africans formal fine-art education, the chief training ground for many Black artists.
• Soviet Central Asian Ornamental Modernism 1966–1999 · Eastern Europe The monumental art of Soviet Central Asia after the 1966 Tashkent earthquake: a strand of Socialist Realism mixed with Islamic and national ornament.
• Picó Sound-System Painting (Colombian Caribbean) 1967–present · Latin America & Caribbean The hand-painted fronts of the picós, the giant sound systems that play dances in the barrios of Barranquilla and Cartagena.
• Pop Achorado (Peruvian Agrarian Reform Posters) 1969–1975 · Latin America & Caribbean Posters for the Peruvian military government's agrarian reform, made in Lima from 1969 by Jesús Ruiz Durand and colleagues at the state's reform publicity office.
• Kinshasa Popular Painting 1970–present · Sub-Saharan Africa A school of easel painting founded in Kinshasa in the early 1970s by Chéri Samba, Moké, Chéri Chérin and Pierre Bodo, largely self-taught painters, several of them trained in Kinshasa's billboard and sign workshops.
• Roots Reggae Sleeve Art & Rasta Iconography 1973–1985 · Latin America & Caribbean, Western Europe The record sleeves of roots reggae, from Catch a Fire (1973) until dancehall took over in the 1980s.
• Lebanese Civil War Party Poster 1975–1990 · Middle East & North Africa The posters that some twenty parties and militias pasted on the walls of Beirut and other towns between 1975 and 1990, marking each quarter as one faction's territory.
• Bitmap & Pixel Graphics 1977–1995 · North America, East Asia Graphics and lettering built from the square pixels of low-resolution screens (arcade and console sprites, home-computer displays and the first graphical user interfaces), where every dot was placed by hand within tight limits of memory, resolution and palette.
• La Movida Madrileña Graphics 1977–1988 · Southern Europe The graphics of Madrid's Movida, the post-Franco scene of new-wave bands, fanzines and night life usually dated from the Canito concert of 9 February 1980 and later backed by the city council.
• Global Village Coffeehouse 1988–2003 · North America The faux-naive, earth-toned illustration style that late-1980s American designers set against Memphis, and that chain cafés, bookstores, packaging and clip art spread through the 1990s.
• Ghanaian Funeral Poster & Banner 1990–present · Sub-Saharan Africa The printed death announcements of southern Ghana, also found elsewhere in West Africa: colour posters, mostly A2, pasted on walls, trees, poles and vehicles, and by the mid-2010s large PVC banners hung at the family house.
• Nigerian Pentecostal Crusade Poster & Billboard 1990–present · Sub-Saharan Africa The 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.
• Early Web Vernacular 1994–2004 · Global / networked The 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.
• Fantasy User Interface (FUI) & Sci-Fi HUD 1999–present · North America, Western Europe, Global / networked Fantasy 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.
• Legible City Wayfinding (Heads-Up Pedestrian Maps) 1999–present · Western Europe, North America, Global / networked City-wide pedestrian wayfinding in which the sign is a map.
• Skeuomorphic UI 2000–2013 · Global / networked Interface design that imitates physical materials and objects (stitched leather, linen, wooden shelves, brushed aluminium, felt, paper and glass) so that digital tools look and behave like their real-world counterparts.
• Korean Webtoon Graphics 2002–present · East Asia, Global / networked The full-colour, vertical-scroll comic that Korean web portals made standard in the 2000s and smartphone apps took worldwide.
• Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular 2003–present · Global / networked, North America A deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014.
• Frutiger Aero 2004–2013 · Global / networked The 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.
• Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) 2011–2014 · Middle East & North Africa The street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper.
• Vaporwave 2011–2017 · Global / networked, North America An 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.
• Plain Tobacco Packaging 2012–present · Oceania, Western Europe, Northern Europe, North America, Global / networked A packaging language written into law to strip tobacco of persuasion.
• VTuber Avatar and Stream Graphics 2016–present · East Asia, Global / networked The graphic kit of virtual YouTubers, streamers who perform behind an animated anime-style character instead of their own face.
• Newtro (Korean New-Retro) 2017–present · East Asia A South Korean branding trend, named 'Going New-tro' in Seoul National University's Trend Korea 2019 (October 2018), in which heritage firms reissue their own postwar to 1990s labels, trademarks and mascots, polished for young buyers.
• Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label) 2017–present · Western Europe, Central Europe, Southern Europe A small, fixed public-health sign that grades a whole food instead of warning about one nutrient.
• Guochao (China-Chic National Trend) 2018–present · East Asia A Chinese branding and fashion trend, usually dated from Li-Ning's 'China Li-Ning' show at New York Fashion Week in February 2018, that redraws heritage motifs as finishes for sneakers, apparel, cosmetics and museum merchandise.
• Black Lives Matter Street Murals 2020–present · North America A 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.
• Instagram Slideshow Activism (Social-Justice Infographics) 2020–present · North America, Global / networked The text-led explainer slideshows that filled Instagram after George Floyd's murder in May 2020.