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Ornament · Motif

Rules & bars

Thick bars, lines and dots as structural accents.

A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under ornament: how much decoration, and of what kind?

styles make it: 94
as a defining choice: 13
as a usual one: 50
now and then: 31
avoid it: 1

Styles defined by it 13

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

Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho)c. 960–present · East AsiaThe page and letter of the East Asian book.
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.
Russian Constructivism1917–1934 · Eastern EuropeConstructivism rejected art for art's sake in favour of the artist-engineer building useful things for the new Soviet society.
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.
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.
Czech Poetist Book Design (Devětsil)1922–1938 · Central EuropeThe book and magazine design of the Czech Devětsil circle, where Karel Teige and his colleagues turned constructivist tools (asymmetry, sans and slab capitals, heavy bars, photomontage) toward Poetism's lyrical celebration of travel, cinema, jazz and the circus.
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).
Streamline Moderne1930–1945 · North AmericaThe late, chiefly American phase of Art Deco, in which aerodynamic science became a visual language for a Depression-era culture hungry for progress.
Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism1953–1990 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe 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.
Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography1968–1990 · Central Europe, North AmericaA rebellion from inside the Swiss school: Wolfgang Weingart and his Basel students kept the grotesque and the grid but set them in motion with extreme letterspacing, stepped and angled lines, rules and bars, enlarged halftone screens and layered film montage.
Demoscene Graphics (Cracktros, Demos & Text-Mode Art)1985–present · Northern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe, North America, Global / networkedThe graphics of the demoscene, a mainly European community of coders, graphicians and musicians that grew from the intros software crackers added to pirated Commodore 64 and Amiga games in the mid-1980s.
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.
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 50

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

Styles that use it now and then 31

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.

Rectilinearin 59 of 94
Grotesque & neo-grotesquein 46 of 94
Typography onlyin 48 of 94
Letterpressin 32 of 94
Layered informationin 48 of 94
Straight photographyin 40 of 94

Styles that avoid it

Styles that deliberately leave it out.

Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering2005–present

Other choices in ornament