Typography · Typographic treatment
Wide letterspacing
Airy, generously spaced letters, usually capitals.
A design choice in Stylogeny’s vocabulary, under typography: what do the letters look like, and how are they set?
- styles make it
- 39
- as a defining choice
- 3
- as a usual one
- 15
- now and then
- 21
- avoid it
- 4
Styles defined by it 3
For these styles it is one of the choices that make the style.
- Nippon Kōbō & Tōhōsha Photo-Propaganda Magazines (NIPPON & FRONT)Luxury photo-propaganda magazines that imperial Japan sent abroad, 1934–45.
- 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.
VaporwaveAn internet-born microgenre and visual aesthetic that remixes the debris of late-20th-century consumer culture (Windows 95 dialogs, classical busts, palm trees, mall interiors, Japanese text, early 3D renders) in pastel pinks and cyans.
Styles that often use it 15
A characteristic choice: usual in these styles, though not essential.
Neoclassical Book TypographyThe Enlightenment book stripped of Renaissance woodcut decoration.
Art DecoThe glamorous modern style named after the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which disciplined ornament into geometry: sunbursts, chevrons, stepped forms and sleek stylised figures rendered in lacquer-smooth colour with metallic accents.
- Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22)The print side of São Paulo's Modernismo (1922-29), set in jobbing print shops.
Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era)The pictorial posters that the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA, 1929), state tourist bureaux, railways and shipping lines commissioned to sell Australia abroad and at home.
- AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield)The political photomontage John Heartfield made for the communist weekly AIZ from 1930 to 1938, in Berlin and, from 1933, in Prague exile.
- 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.
Minimalist Graphic DesignModernism reduced to its barest means, informed by 1960s Minimal art and Japanese emptiness: one image or line of type, vast white or neutral space, a monochrome or near-monochrome palette and meticulous typographic detail.
- 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.
City Pop IllustrationThe painted look of Japanese city pop record sleeves and magazine covers, fixed by Hiroshi Nagai's sleeve for Eiichi Ohtaki's A Long Vacation (1981) and Eizin Suzuki's for Tatsuro Yamashita's For You (1982).
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.
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.
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.
Hipster Artisanal RevivalThe trade-mark look of the 2007–2018 craft boom, which dressed new coffee roasters, breweries and stationers as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century firms.
Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)The look of Kinfolk, the slow-living quarterly founded in Portland in 2011 and run from Copenhagen since 2015, and of the indie lifestyle titles and Instagram feeds that copied it.
Book Blob (Abstract Colour-Blob Literary Fiction Cover)The default jacket of US literary fiction around 2019–2023: soft, overlapping blobs of saturated colour fill the cover edge to edge (cobalt, pink, orange-red, deep green, mustard).
Styles that use it now and then 21
An occasional choice in these styles.
- Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Traditionc. 1180–present
- Renaissance Book Typographyc. 1460–1600
- Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics1500–present
- Emblem Book (Motto, Picture & Epigram)1531–1724
- Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards1639–present
- Cuban Tobacco Lithography (Habilitaciones & Marquillas)1845–present
- Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)1887–present
- German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung)1895–1933
- Italian Fascist Graphics (Romanità & Exhibition Photomontage)1921–1943
- Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop)1934–present
- Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid)1935–1972
- Brazilian Concrete Design1951–1975
- British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert)1958–present
- ECM Sleeve Aesthetic (Munich)1969–present
- Contemporary Chinese Book Design ('Most Beautiful Books of China')2003–present
- Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering2005–present
- Synthwave / Outrun2006–present
- Lucerne Poster Scene (Neubad & Südpol Posters)2007–present
- DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism2012–2022
- Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic2017–present
- Instagram Slideshow Activism (Social-Justice Infographics)2020–present
It often goes with
Choices that the styles making it make more often than the atlas as a whole.
- Nostalgic & retroin 19 of 39
- Humanist & Garalde serifin 13 of 39
- Pastelin 16 of 39
- Restrained accentsin 26 of 39
- All capsin 27 of 39
- Geometric sansin 16 of 39
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
- Tight setting