Tone & intent · Stance
Utopian & idealistic
Design as a means to build a better world.
A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under tone & intent: what should the work make people feel or do?
- styles make it
- 83
- as a defining choice
- 10
- as a usual one
- 41
- now and then
- 32
- avoid it
- 1
Styles defined by it 10
For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.
Santiniketan & Bengal School GraphicsThe nationalist, anti-academic art of Calcutta and Santiniketan, which turned from oil-paint naturalism and chromolithograph gloss to Indian and pan-Asian sources.
SuprematismKazimir Malevich's non-objective art, unveiled with the Black Square at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, reduced painting to pure geometric planes floating in white, infinite space.
Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book DesignThe Yiddish modernist book of the Kultur-Lige, the secular Jewish culture league founded in Kyiv in 1918, and its circle: El Lissitzky, Issachar Ber Ryback, Iosif Chaikov, Boris Aronson and others, who sought a new Jewish art in the shtetl synagogues and tombstones they had recorded and in Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism.
Thaw Modernism (Soviet and Czechoslovak)The light, stylised modernism that replaced Socialist Realist illusionism and Stalinist pomp in Soviet and Czechoslovak graphic and applied design, from the 1956 Secret Speech, the 1957 Moscow youth festival and Expo 58 to the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 (a political cut-off; the manner ran on into the 1970s).
Indian Institutional Modernism (NID)The design culture of independent India's public institutions, banks and broadcasters.
- Casablanca School Graphic ModernismA postcolonial modernism formed at the Casablanca fine-art school under Farid Belkahia, where Mohamed Melehi, Mohammed Chabâa and colleagues set Amazigh rugs and jewellery, painted ceilings and calligraphy beside a Bauhaus-style merging of art, craft and design.
Soviet Central Asian Ornamental ModernismThe monumental art of Soviet Central Asia after the 1966 Tashkent earthquake: a strand of Socialist Realism mixed with Islamic and national ornament.
Afrofuturist DesignA visual language of Black futures that fuses African and diasporic iconography (pyramids and ankhs, Adinkra and Nsibidi glyphs, textile patterning) with spacecraft, cosmic fields and technology.
SolarpunkHopeful eco-futurist imagery born online.
Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)A Franco-Belgian type practice that redesigns written French for gender inclusion inside the word.
Styles that often use it 41
A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.
Arts & Crafts MovementA British-led reform movement that answered industrial shoddiness with honest handcraft, medieval models and the ideal of joy in labour.
Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)The Dutch branch of Art Nouveau, seen mostly in book covers, vignettes and posters.
- German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung)The German reform of the book, from the magazine Pan (1895) to the private presses that ended around 1933.
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.
- Bezalel SchoolThe house style of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, opened in Jerusalem by Boris Schatz in 1906 with E.
Hungarian Revolutionary PosterThe political posters of Hungary's revolutions.
De StijlA 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 ConstructivismConstructivism rejected art for art's sake in favour of the artist-engineer building useful things for the new Soviet society.
Wendingen & Amsterdam School TypographyThe graphic language of Wendingen (1918–1932), monthly of the Amsterdam architects' society Architectura et Amicitia, and its editor H.
- BauhausThe 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.
- Estridentismo (Stridentist) GraphicsMexico's first avant-garde (1921-27), launched when Manuel Maples Arce pasted his manifesto Actual No. 1 on Mexico City walls.
Czech Poetist Book Design (Devětsil)The 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.
Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture BookThin, large picture books made in Petrograd/Leningrad from 1922 to the mid-1930s for Raduga and the Gosizdat children's department led by Samuil Marshak, with Vladimir Lebedev as art editor.
Early Turkish Republican Graphic DesignThe pictorial poster, label and ticket art of the young Turkish Republic, led by İhap Hulusi Görey after his Munich training in Ludwig Hohlwein's orbit, with Münif Fehim Özarman and, after 1943, Kenan Temizan.
Harlem Renaissance Graphic ArtThe illustration, cover and jacket art of the New Negro movement, set by Aaron Douglas after he moved to Harlem in 1925 and studied with Winold Reiss.
Isotype Pictorial StatisticsA 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.
Streamline ModerneThe late, chiefly American phase of Art Deco, in which aerodynamic science became a visual language for a Depression-era culture hungry for progress.
Socialist Realist Propaganda PosterThe official art doctrine of the Soviet Union from 1932, later exported across the socialist world, which replaced avant-garde experiment with legible, heroic realism 'national in form, socialist in content'.
Hebrew Poster Lettering & Early Israeli State DesignThe commercial and state graphics of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine and early Israel, made in Tel Aviv from 1934 by designers who had trained in Berlin and Vienna: Franz Krausz, Otte Wallish and the Shamir brothers.
Spanish Civil War PosterThe poster war waged by the Spanish Republic, its unions and its anarchist, communist and socialist parties against Franco's uprising.
Googie & Atomic AgeThe exuberant commercial modernism of post-war American roadside culture (coffee shops, motels, car washes, bowling alleys and neon signs), named in 1952 by critic Douglas Haskell after John Lautner's Googie's coffee shop in Los Angeles (1949).
- Machine-Age Simplified Arabic TypeArabic redrawn for the machine rather than the reed pen.
Brazilian Concrete DesignA 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.
Zagreb Modernist Graphics (EXAT 51 to Teatar &TD)Zagreb graphic design grown from the EXAT 51 manifesto (1951), which tied abstract art to visual communication.
Cairo–Beirut Arab Modernist Book & Periodical DesignThe illustrated book, magazine and children's-book culture that ran from Cairo's post-1952 publishing houses to the Arab nationalist and leftist presses of Beirut.
Polish Cold War Neon (PRL Neonisation)The neon of People's Poland: after the 1956 thaw a state firm, Reklama, and a planned 'neonisation' set out to make war-ruined Warsaw a European capital of neon.
Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC)The poster culture of revolutionary Cuba, produced for the film institute ICAIC and the solidarity organisation OSPAAAL.
- Mexico 68 Olympic & Metro IdentityThe graphic programme of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and the city's first Metro line.
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.
Chilean Unidad Popular & Nueva Canción GraphicsThe graphics of the Nueva Canción Chilena and Allende's Unidad Popular, 1967–1973.
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.
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.
- 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.
- Roots Reggae Sleeve Art & Rasta IconographyThe record sleeves of roots reggae, from Catch a Fire (1973) until dancehall took over in the 1980s.
Global Village CoffeehouseThe faux-naive, earth-toned illustration style that late-1980s American designers set against Memphis, and that chain cafés, bookstores, packaging and clip art spread through the 1990s.
- South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)A post-apartheid design language launched in Durban in 1995 by Garth Walker's Orange Juice Design and its free, experimental magazine Ijusi (isiZulu for 'juice'), which asked 'What makes me South African, and what does that look like?'.
Y2K FuturismThe optimistic, chrome-plated vision of the future that surrounded the turn of the millennium, spread by consumer electronics, music videos, games, fashion and dot-com branding.
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.
- Frutiger AeroThe glossy, optimistic look of consumer technology from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, retrospectively named in 2017 by the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute after Windows Vista's Aero interface and Adrian Frutiger's humanist sans.
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.
Styles that use it now and then 32
An occasional choice in these styles.
- London Transport Design1908–1966
- ROSTA Windows1919–1922
- Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22)1922–1929
- Die Neue Typographie1923–1940
- Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing)1923–1949
- AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield)1930–1938
- Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)1930–1970
- Scandinavian Functionalism1930–present
- Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement1931–1949
- Milanese Industrial Modernism (Olivetti, Pirelli, Studio Boggeri)1933–1975
- Nippon Kōbō & Tōhōsha Photo-Propaganda Magazines (NIPPON & FRONT)1933–1945
- Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid)1935–1972
- WPA Silkscreen Posters1935–1943
- Bengali Modernist Book Cover (Prachchhad)1943–present
- Vietnamese Propaganda Poster (Tranh cổ động)1945–present
- Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP)1946–1989
- Hurufiyya Calligraphic Modernism1949–present
- International Typographic Style1950–1975
- Situationist Détournement Graphics1956–1972
- Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas)1962–1978
- Total Design & Dutch Functionalism1963–1990
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster)1968
- Ethiopian Revolutionary Poster (Derg Era)1974–1991
- South African Resistance Poster1978–1994
- Out-of-Square Hangul Typography1985–present
- Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design2004–present
- Hauntology & Ghost Box Design2004–present
- Synthwave / Outrun2006–present
- Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)2011–2014
- Data Humanism2014–present
- Latin American Feminist Protest Graphics (Ni Una Menos and the Green Wave)2015–present
- Corporate Memphis2017–present
It often goes with
Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.
- Diagonal axisin 33 of 83
- Geometric primitivesin 44 of 83
- Geometric sansin 27 of 83
- Typography onlyin 39 of 83
- Technological & futuristin 26 of 83
- Limited spot coloursin 60 of 83