Skip to content

Form & shape · Geometric

Geometric primitives

Circle, square and triangle as building blocks.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under form & shape: what is the shape language?

styles make it: 127
as a defining choice: 18
as a usual one: 66
now and then: 43
avoid it: 1

Styles defined by it 18

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

Amazigh Sign System & Tifinaghc. 0–present · Middle East & North Africa, Sub-Saharan AfricaThe visual language shared by Amazigh communities from the Rif, Atlas and Kabylie to the Aurès and the Tuareg Sahara.
Thai Yantra (Yant) Diagrams1700–present · Southeast AsiaThai protective diagrams in which Pali formulae, written in Khom, a sacred script derived from Khmer, are packed into squares, circles, triangles, spires and the outlines of Buddhas, monks and tigers, often framed by lines of script.
Suprematism1915–1925 · Eastern EuropeKazimir Malevich's non-objective art, unveiled with the Black Square at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, reduced painting to pure geometric planes floating in white, infinite space.
Bauhaus1919–1933 · Central EuropeThe German school founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 moved from Expressionist craft ideals to a programme of 'art and technology' after 1923, when Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Joost Schmidt made its printing and advertising workshops a laboratory for functional communication.
Milanese Industrial Modernism (Olivetti, Pirelli, Studio Boggeri)1933–1975 · Southern EuropeThe Milan-centred school that married Bauhaus- and Swiss-trained discipline with Italian painterly wit for enlightened industrial patrons such as Olivetti, Pirelli and La Rinascente.
Japanese Postwar Modernism1950–1990 · East AsiaBuilding on the New Typography that Hiromu Hara and the Nippon Kobo circle had absorbed in the 1930s, Japan's postwar graphic designers fused the grid, sans-serif and objective photography of European modernism with indigenous traditions of family crests (kamon), asymmetry and charged emptiness (ma).
Zagreb Modernist Graphics (EXAT 51 to Teatar &TD)1951–1975 · Southern Europe, Central EuropeZagreb graphic design grown from the EXAT 51 manifesto (1951), which tied abstract art to visual communication.
Corporate Identity Modernism1955–1990 · North America, Western Europe, Global / networkedModernist reduction applied to corporate communication.
British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert)1958–present · Western EuropeThe national sign system Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert designed for Britain's motorways, first used on the Preston By-pass in 1958, and through the Worboys Committee for all roads from 1 January 1965.
Bossa Nova Sleeve Modernism (César Villela and Elenco)1960–1968 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe cover language of bossa nova, made in Rio by the self-taught designer César Villela, first at Odeon and then on the first sixteen LPs of Aloysio de Oliveira's label Elenco (from 1963), often around Francisco Pereira's photographs.
Indian Institutional Modernism (NID)1961–1990 · South AsiaThe design culture of independent India's public institutions, banks and broadcasters.
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.
Memphis Design1981–1988 · Southern EuropeThe Milan collective founded by Ettore Sottsass, whose furniture, laminates and objects (first shown in September 1981) became a graphic language of their own.
Out-of-Square Hangul Typography1985–present · East AsiaA Korean typographic movement that frees Hangul from the equal square in which metal and photo type had always set each syllable.
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.
Seoul Independent Graphic Design (Small-Studio Scene)2005–present · East AsiaGraphic design by Seoul's small, self-run studios, which from about 2005 chose to stay small.
Low Poly Illustration2012–present · Global / networkedA digital illustration and game look in which subjects are built from a visible mesh of a few flat-shaded polygons, so that animals, faces, vehicles and landscapes read as hard-edged facets with no outline or texture.
Front-of-Pack Warning Octagons (Latin American Food Warning Seals)2016–present · Latin America & CaribbeanA state warning system stacked on commercial food packs.

Styles that often use it 66

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

Styles that use it now and then 43

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.

Non-representationalin 63 of 127
Geometric sansin 49 of 127
Rational & objectivein 46 of 127
Rectilinearin 60 of 127
Grotesque & neo-grotesquein 57 of 127
Generous white spacein 59 of 127

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration1910–1940

Other choices in form & shape