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Tone & intent · Reason

Rational & objective

Clarity, neutrality and order above personality.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under tone & intent: what should the work make people feel or do?

styles make it: 67
as a defining choice: 15
as a usual one: 29
now and then: 23
avoid it: 58

Styles defined by it 15

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

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.
Die Neue Typographie1923–1940 · Central Europe, Western EuropeThe programme that turned avant-garde experiment into a functional typographic method, named by Moholy-Nagy in 1923 and codified in Jan Tschichold's 'elementare typographie' (1925) and Die neue Typographie (1928).
Isotype Pictorial Statistics1925–1971 · Central Europe, Western EuropeA method of visual education developed by Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath (Reidemeister) and Gerd Arntz in Red Vienna from 1925, which turns statistics into rows of identical pictograms where a greater quantity is shown by more signs, never by bigger ones.
Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid)1935–1972 · Western EuropeThe cover system of Penguin Books, London, from 1935 until Germano Facetti left in 1972.
Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type1947–present · Middle East & North AfricaArabic redrawn for the machine rather than the reed pen.
International Typographic Style1950–1975 · Central EuropeA post-war refinement of the New Typography in which the mathematical grid, objective photography and neo-grotesque sans-serifs were used to communicate with clarity and neutrality.
Brazilian Concrete Design1951–1975 · Latin America & CaribbeanA São Paulo and Rio movement in which concrete art, concrete poetry and Brazil's first design offices shared one vocabulary: Max Bill's mathematically generated geometry, serial repetition and sans-serif type.
HfG Ulm Systematic Design1953–1968 · Central EuropeThe Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (1953–1968) was founded as the successor to the Bauhaus.
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.
Total Design & Dutch Functionalism1963–1990 · Western EuropeThe Dutch strand of systematic modernism took shape when Wim Crouwel, Benno Wissing, Friso Kramer and Paul and Dick Schwarz founded Total Design in Amsterdam in 1963 as the country's first multidisciplinary studio.
Munich 1972 Olympic Design (Otl Aicher)1966–1972 · Central EuropeThe visual programme Otl Aicher's department made for the 1972 Munich Olympics, the 'cheerful Games' meant to show a democratic, modest West Germany.
Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design2004–present · Middle East & North Africa, Western Europe, Global / networkedA twenty-first-century type culture that redraws Arabic as a family matched to a Latin companion in weight, proportion and contrast, so the two scripts can share a page, screen or sign as equals.
Neo-Swiss Revival2005–present · Global / networked, Central Europe, Western EuropeA contemporary revival of the International Typographic Style, fuelled by digital re-releases of neo-grotesques and by studios such as Experimental Jetset and Norm: modular grids, flush-left grotesque type, huge tightly set headlines and flat fields of black, white and one signal colour.
Newsroom Data Graphics & Scrollytelling2009–present · North America, Western EuropeThe house style of newspaper graphics desks since about 2009–2011 (the New York Times graphics desk, D3.js, the Guardian Datablog): conventional charts drawn from the data, on a white or pale paper ground with light grey gridlines and no axis titles, lines labelled directly in place of a legend where possible and short annotations saying what to look at.
GOV.UK Design (GDS Style)2012–present · Western EuropeThe text-led design of GOV.UK, the UK government's single website, built by the Government Digital Service from 2012 and codified in the GOV.UK Design System (2018).

Styles that often use it 29

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

Styles that use it now and then 23

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.

Grotesque & neo-grotesquein 44 of 67
Modular gridin 39 of 67
Rectilinearin 45 of 67
Ornament-freein 39 of 67
Geometric primitivesin 46 of 67
Generous white spacein 41 of 67

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Other choices in tone & intent