Typography · Typographic treatment
Tight setting
Letters and lines crowded together, touching or overlapping.
A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under typography: what do the letters look like, and how are they set?
- styles make it
- 60
- as a defining choice
- 7
- as a usual one
- 30
- now and then
- 23
- avoid it
- 1
Styles defined by it 7
For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.
Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur TraditionThe broken scripts of the Latin West.
Vyaz (Ornamental Slavonic Lettering)Cyrillic letters bound into one even band of ornament.
- Ottoman Tughra & Dîvânî Chancery CalligraphyThe Ottoman sultan's calligraphic monogram and the chancery hand written beneath it.
Edo-moji Commercial Lettering (Kanteiryū, Yose-moji, Sumō-ji)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.
Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas)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.
Phototype Expressive Typography (Lubalin & U&lc)The display typography of the phototype era, led in New York by Herb Lubalin, his lettering partners John Pistilli, Tom Carnase and Tony DiSpigna, and the International Typeface Corporation.
Solidarność & Polish Underground GraphicsThe graphic language of Poland's Solidarność movement, from the August 1980 shipyard strike to the semi-free election of 4 June 1989.
Styles that often use it 30
A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.
- Hebrew MicrographyA Jewish scribal art in which lines of minute Hebrew script, usually the Masoretic notes that guard the biblical text, are written so that the line itself draws: interlaced frames and star rosettes on full carpet pages, and animals, knights, fish and grotesques in the margins.
- Persian Nastaʿlīq Calligraphy (Qiṭʿa, Chalipa and Siyāh-mashq)The 'hanging' script of Persian poetry and an art of the single sheet.
- Zoomorphic & Figural Calligraphy (Islamic Calligrams)Pictorial writing in which the strokes of a devotional text form one figure: a lion of ʿAli built from the Nad-e ʿAli prayer, a galleon whose hull spells the names of the Seven Sleepers, a peacock, a Sufi cap.
Lubok Popular PrintCheap 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.
- Thai Yantra (Yant) DiagramsThai 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.
- Urdu Katib LithographyFor about a century and a half Urdu chose lithography over movable type, because metal type could not reproduce the sloping, stacked ligatures of Nastaʿlīq.
Arts & Crafts MovementA British-led reform movement that answered industrial shoddiness with honest handcraft, medieval models and the ideal of joy in labour.
Nirnaya Sagar Devanagari Typography (Bombay Metal Type)Devanagari as Javaji Dadaji's Bombay type foundry (1864) and Nirnaya Sagar Press (1869) cut and printed it: upright metal type with a strong headline, cut with the punch-cutter Ranoji Aru, and enough conjunct and 'Akhand' sorts to set Sanskrit, Vedic accents and Marathi whole.
Vienna SecessionThe 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.
- Vorticism & BLAST TypographyLondon's short-lived rival to Futurism, launched by Wyndham Lewis with BLAST (dated 20 June 1914; War Number, July 1915).
Wendingen & Amsterdam School TypographyThe graphic language of Wendingen (1918–1932), monthly of the Amsterdam architects' society Architectura et Amicitia, and its editor H.
- Machine-Age Simplified Arabic TypeArabic redrawn for the machine rather than the reed pen.
Blue Note Jazz Sleeve ModernismThe record-sleeve language of Blue Note Records, set by art director Reid Miles, who designed some 350 twelve-inch LP covers between about 1956 and 1967, often around Francis Wolff's session photographs.
Di Tella Graphic Design (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella)The in-house graphics of Buenos Aires' Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1960–1970, led by Juan Carlos Distéfano with Juan Andralis, Rubén Fontana, Norberto Coppola and Carlos Soler.
Iranian Modernist Graphic DesignIranian graphic design came of age in the 1960s and 1970s.
Psychedelic PosterThe concert-poster language of the 1960s counterculture, born in San Francisco's Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms and echoed in London's underground press.
AfriCOBRAThe Black Arts Movement collective founded in Chicago in 1968 by Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams, after OBAC's Wall of Respect mural.
- Ultras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo)The graphic language of Italy's organised football supporters, the ultras, from the late 1960s, and of the groups that copied them across Europe, North Africa and beyond.
Graffiti & Hip-Hop GraphicsBorn on New York's subway cars and Bronx party flyers, graffiti writing turns the writer's name into a monumental letter-sculpture: bubble, block and wildstyle letters with arrows, 3D drop shadows, fades and highlights, painted freehand in aerosol.
Roman-like Thai Typography (modern loopless Thai)A Thai type genre that drops the head loops of most Thai letters, so the script reads as an even sans like Helvetica.
- Chicha PosterFluorescent screen-printed street posters that emerged in the 1980s to promote chicha (Andean cumbia) concerts in Lima, made by printers from Andean migrant communities.
Cranbrook & Deconstructivist TypographyGraduate-school experimentation, centred on Katherine and Michael McCoy's Cranbrook design programme, that applied post-structuralist literary theory to the page.
- Black Metal GraphicsThe visual language of black metal, fixed by Norway's second wave in the early 1990s, now worldwide, since the 2010s borrowed by mainstream acts (Szpajdel's Rihanna and Metallica logos, 2016).
Grunge TypographyThe 1990s magazine and music-industry style in which type was layered, eroded, overlapped and cropped until legibility became negotiable.
Arabic CalligraffitiArabic letters sprayed, rolled and brushed at the scale of buildings.
- Cartonera Books (Latin American Cardboard Publishing)Books of Latin America's cartonera presses, begun by Eloísa Cartonera in Buenos Aires in 2003 after Argentina's 2001 crash: photocopied texts stapled and glued by hand into covers cut from used boxes, usually bought from cartoneros (waste pickers) above the market price.
Neo-Swiss RevivalA 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.
Kinetic Typography & Variable TypeTypography as the moving image: letterforms that stretch, squash, rotate and morph along variable-font axes, loop seamlessly and cut to the beat of music, used for identities, social-media posters and digital out-of-home screens.
Extinction Rebellion GraphicsThe visual identity of Extinction Rebellion, the climate movement founded in Stroud in 2018, built by its volunteer Art Group as a free kit anyone may print.
Dark Tech MinimalismThe dark, restrained aesthetic of developer tools and SaaS landing pages since about 2019: near-black grounds, grey type ramps, a neutral grotesque such as Inter, hairline borders, soft radial glows and bento grids of crisp product screenshots.
Styles that use it now and then 23
An occasional choice in these styles.
- Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Compositionc. 0–394
- Chinese Calligraphy & Seal Carving (Shufa & Zhuanke)c. 0–present
- Ethiopian Ge'ez Manuscript & Haräg Illuminationc. 500–present
- Islamic Geometric & Calligraphic Traditionc. 690–present
- Song–Ming Woodblock Book Typography (Songti / Mincho)c. 960–present
- Square Kufic (Bannāʾī)c. 1100–present
- Mongol Bichig Calligraphy & Ugalz Ornamentc. 1204–present
- Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing1822–1956
- Persian Popular Narrative (Lithographs & Coffeehouse Painting)1843–2012
- Celtic Revival Illumination & Lettering1861–1951
- Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)1892–1914
- Russian Futurist Book1910–1920
- West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow)1953–1990
- Dazibao (Big-Character Posters)1957–1980
- Angura Theatre Poster1965–1985
- Chilean Unidad Popular & Nueva Canción Graphics1967–1973
- Pop Achorado (Peruvian Agrarian Reform Posters)1969–1975
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz)1972–2025
- Madinah Mushaf (King Fahd Complex Qur'an Page)1985–present
- Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks)1993–present
- Japanese Dense Web Design1999–present
- Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay2006–present
- Front-of-Pack Warning Octagons (Latin American Food Warning Seals)2016–present
It often goes with
Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.
- Typography onlyin 41 of 60
- Type as imagein 38 of 60
- Horror vacuiin 41 of 60
- Rotated & vertical settingin 28 of 60
- Monochromein 41 of 60
- Pen, brush & inkin 34 of 60
Styles that avoid it
Styles that deliberately leave it out.
Other choices in typography
- Humanist & Garalde serif
- Transitional serif
- Didone
- Slab serif
- Grotesque & neo-grotesque
- Geometric sans
- Humanist sans
- Rounded sans
- Blackletter
- Script
- Brush & pen calligraphy
- Hand-lettering
- Ornamented display
- Condensed display
- Stencil
- Monospace
- Bitmap & pixel
- Experimental & distorted
- All caps
- Lowercase only
- Type as image
- Flush left, ragged right
- Rotated & vertical setting
- Eclectic mixing
- Wide letterspacing