Imagery · Photographic
Treated photography
Duotone, high-contrast or posterised photographs.
A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under imagery: what kind of pictures, if any?
- styles make it
- 75
- as a defining choice
- 12
- as a usual one
- 31
- now and then
- 32
- avoid it
- 0
Styles defined by it 12
For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.
Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial ModernismThe 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.
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.
- Bossa Nova Sleeve Modernism (César Villela and Elenco)The 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.
- Greek Tourism Modernism (EOT)The modernist image of Greece made for the National Tourism Organisation (EOT) by Michalis Katzourakis, its art adviser in 1960-1967, and by Frederick Carabott, who advised it until 1967; in 1962 the two also founded the K&K Athens Advertising Centre.
Munich 1972 Olympic Design (Otl Aicher)The visual programme Otl Aicher's department made for the 1972 Munich Olympics, the 'cheerful Games' meant to show a democratic, modest West Germany.
Pop Achorado (Peruvian Agrarian Reform Posters)Posters for the Peruvian military government's agrarian reform, made in Lima from 1969 by Jesús Ruiz Durand and colleagues at the state's reform publicity office.
Stencil Street ArtPictures cut rather than drawn: a photograph is reduced to two or three flat tones, cut into card and sprayed onto a wall, usually uninvited, so one hard-edged figure appears in the street, in black with at most one accent colour.
NSK Retro-Avant-GardeThe retro-avant-garde of Neue Slowenische Kunst, founded in Ljubljana in 1984 by Laibach, IRWIN and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, with Novi kolektivizem as its design department.
- 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.
Glitch Art & Datamosh GraphicsAn art and design practice that makes digital failure the picture.
Weirdcore & DreamcoreAn internet aesthetic popularised on Reddit, TikTok and YouTube in the early 2020s, with dreamcore as its softer, pastel, cloud-filled sister.
Styles that often use it 31
A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.
Surrealist GraphicsLaunched by André Breton's 1924 manifesto, Surrealism sought the marvellous in dreams, chance and the unconscious.
- Nippon Kōbō & Tōhōsha Photo-Propaganda Magazines (NIPPON & FRONT)Luxury photo-propaganda magazines that imperial Japan sent abroad, 1934–45.
Drum Magazine & Sophiatown PhotojournalismThe picture magazine of Black urban Africa in the 1950s.
West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow)The art-film and culture poster Hans Hillmann developed from 1953 for the West German distributors Neue Filmkunst and Atlas Film, which his Kassel student Gunter Rambow took with Gerhard Lienemeyer into staged photo posters for theatre, publishers and protest.
Pop Art GraphicsPop turned the commercial imagery of post-war consumer culture (comics, packaging, celebrity photographs and advertising) into both its subject and its method.
Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC)The poster culture of revolutionary Cuba, produced for the film institute ICAIC and the solidarity organisation OSPAAAL.
Tropicália Graphic DesignThe graphic language of Brazil's Tropicália, foreshadowed by Rogério Duarte's poster for Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964), which already devours Ulm modernism, and set by his 1968 covers for Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.
Chicano Screenprint PosterThe screenprinted poster of the Chicano Movement and its heirs, made from the mid-1960s in community workshops across California and the Southwest for farmworker strikes and boycotts, teatro, dances, anti-war marches and immigrant rights.
- Black Panther Party GraphicsThe visual language of the Black Panther Party, created largely by its Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas, for the weekly newspaper The Black Panther.
Chilean Unidad Popular & Nueva Canción GraphicsThe graphics of the Nueva Canción Chilena and Allende's Unidad Popular, 1967–1973.
Hipgnosis Photographic Concept SleeveThe sleeves the London studio Hipgnosis made for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, 10cc and others from 1968 to 1983.
- Swiss Punk / New Wave TypographyA 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.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective)The posters and identities of Grapus, a Paris collective founded in 1970 by Communist Party members who had met in the 1968 poster workshops.
Australian Poster Collective ScreenprintsScreenprinted posters from the political poster collectives and community workshops that spread across Australia from Sydney's Tin Sheds, where Earthworks began in 1971.
Lebanese Civil War Party PosterThe posters that some twenty parties and militias pasted on the walls of Beirut and other towns between 1975 and 1990, marking each quarter as one faction's territory.
- Punk & DIY ZineThe graphic voice of punk rock in fanzines, record sleeves and gig flyers: images and words cut from newspapers, typed or scrawled, pasted down and run off on a photocopier.
La Movida Madrileña GraphicsThe graphics of Madrid's Movida, the post-Franco scene of new-wave bands, fanzines and night life usually dated from the Canito concert of 9 February 1980 and later backed by the city council.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD)The record sleeves that British art-school designers made after punk, for independent labels and some majors: Barney Bubbles at Stiff, Malcolm Garrett for Buzzcocks, Peter Saville at Factory and 23 Envelope at 4AD.
South African Resistance PosterThe posters of the struggle against apartheid, from the exiled Medu Art Ensemble in Gaborone to the community workshops that served the United Democratic Front and the unions in the 1980s.
Cranbrook & Deconstructivist TypographyGraduate-school experimentation, centred on Katherine and Michael McCoy's Cranbrook design programme, that applied post-structuralist literary theory to the page.
ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist GraphicsThe graphics of New York's AIDS activist movement: the SILENCE=DEATH poster of 1987, a pink triangle above white capitals on black, and the posters, stickers, T-shirts, billboards and bus ads of Gran Fury (1988–1995), ACT UP's 'unofficial propaganda ministry'.
Ghanaian Funeral Poster & BannerThe printed death announcements of southern Ghana, also found elsewhere in West Africa: colour posters, mostly A2, pasted on walls, trees, poles and vehicles, and by the mid-2010s large PVC banners hung at the family house.
Fantasy User Interface (FUI) & Sci-Fi HUDFantasy 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.
Hauntology & Ghost Box DesignSleeves and print that rebuild a misremembered British past from the public graphics of roughly 1958–1978.
- Oaxacan Protest Printmaking & Street Graphics (ASARO)The street graphics of Oaxaca City since the 2006 teachers' strike and APPO uprising, when ASARO, the stencil collective Lapiztola and later workshops such as Colectivo Subterráneos made the colonial centre's walls a newspaper.
Risograph & Indie Print CultureA contemporary culture of zines, art books, posters and prints made on Japanese Risograph stencil duplicators, whose soy-based spot inks (fluorescent pink, yellow, blue, teal) are laid down one drum at a time.
Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)The street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper.
Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)Protest graphics of the Syrian uprising from 2011, made to be photographed and shared online rather than to last on a wall.
- YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face')The custom thumbnail of YouTube's creator economy: a 16:9 still made to be read at fingernail size in a feed of recommendations.
Analog Horror GraphicsA horror genre, mostly on YouTube, that tells its stories through imitation television and home-video graphics rather than actors: emergency-alert screens, station IDs, public-service, educational and instructional tapes, set between the 1960s and early 2000s.
Chilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20)The street graphics of Chile's popular revolt, from 18 October 2019 to the March 2020 lockdowns, when a leaderless movement covered Santiago's Plaza de la Dignidad, the Alameda and other cities' walls.
Styles that use it now and then 32
An occasional choice in these styles.
- African Wax & Fancy Print1880–present
- Kanga (Swahili Message Cloth)1886–present
- Senegalese Sufi Devotional Imagery (Souwère Glass Painting and Amadou Bamba Portraits)1900–present
- London Transport Design1908–1966
- AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield)1930–1938
- Milanese Industrial Modernism (Olivetti, Pirelli, Studio Boggeri)1933–1975
- Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid)1935–1972
- American Mid-Century Modernism1940–1970
- Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance)1947–present
- International Typographic Style1950–1975
- Polish Poster School1950–1990
- Zagreb Modernist Graphics (EXAT 51 to Teatar &TD)1951–1975
- Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design1959–2000
- Di Tella Graphic Design (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella)1960–1970
- Iranian Modernist Graphic Design1960–present
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster)1968
- ECM Sleeve Aesthetic (Munich)1969–present
- Roots Reggae Sleeve Art & Rasta Iconography1973–1985
- Dutch Expressive Postmodernism (Studio Dumbar & Hard Werken)1977–1994
- Solidarność & Polish Underground Graphics1980–1989
- Emigre & Early Digital Type1984–1998
- Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster1992–present
- South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)1995–present
- Tamil Nadu Flex Banners2000–present
- Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular2003–present
- Frutiger Aero2004–2013
- Neo-Swiss Revival2005–present
- Seoul Independent Graphic Design (Small-Studio Scene)2005–present
- Synthwave / Outrun2006–present
- Lucerne Poster Scene (Neubad & Südpol Posters)2007–present
- Vaporwave2011–2017
- Woman, Life, Freedom Protest Graphics (Iran and the Diaspora)2022–present
It often goes with
Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.
- Photomontagein 42 of 75
- Collage & layeringin 43 of 75
- Ironic & self-awarein 38 of 75
- Offset printingin 53 of 75
- Full bleedin 44 of 75
- Found & vernacular imageryin 34 of 75