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Form & shape · Geometric

Rectilinear

Orthogonal bars, blocks and lines.

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

styles make it: 114
as a defining choice: 16
as a usual one: 58
now and then: 40
avoid it: 1

Styles defined by it 16

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

Andean Woven Graphic Systemsc. 600–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe graphic systems of Andean cloth, the region's most prestigious medium, in which every motif is built on the warp-and-weft grid.
Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho)c. 960–present · East AsiaThe page and letter of the East Asian book.
Square Kufic (Bannāʾī)c. 1100–present · Middle East & North Africa, South AsiaSquare Kufic builds Arabic script on a square grid: straight lines and right angles only, with every stroke as wide as the gap beside it.
Chaekgeori & Minhwa Screen Painting1776–present · East AsiaKorean painted folding screens of the late Joseon period.
Glasgow Style1890–1914 · Western EuropeGlasgow's distinctive answer to Art Nouveau, formed around Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret and Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair at the Glasgow School of Art.
Vienna Secession1897–1918 · Central EuropeThe Viennese break with academic art led by Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann and Alfred Roller, which pulled Art Nouveau toward the square, the grid and the flat plane.
London Transport Design1908–1966 · Western EuropeThe design programme Frank Pick built for London's Underground from 1908 and the London Passenger Transport Board (1933–40), continued by Harold Hutchison (1947–66).
De Stijl1917–1931 · Western EuropeA Dutch movement formed around Theo van Doesburg's journal De Stijl and Piet Mondrian's Neoplasticism, which sought universal harmony through the most elementary means: horizontal and vertical lines, rectangles, the three primaries and black, white and grey.
Wendingen & Amsterdam School Typography1918–1932 · Western EuropeThe graphic language of Wendingen (1918–1932), monthly of the Amsterdam architects' society Architectura et Amicitia, and its editor H.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Plain Tobacco Packaging2012–present · Oceania, Western Europe, Northern Europe, North America, Global / networkedA packaging language written into law to strip tobacco of persuasion.
Brutalist Web Design2014–present · Global / networked, Central EuropeA reaction against templated, conversion-optimised web design that exposes the raw materials of the browser: default system fonts, blue underlined links, visible borders, unstyled forms and plain document flow.

Styles that often use it 58

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

Styles that use it now and then 40

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.

Rules & barsin 59 of 114
Rational & objectivein 45 of 114
Typography onlyin 60 of 114
Modular gridin 46 of 114
Grotesque & neo-grotesquein 54 of 114
Geometric primitivesin 60 of 114

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Art Nouveau1890–1910

Other choices in form & shape