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Period

1940s graphic-design styles

Styles that began in the 1940s, by the year the atlas gives for when each took shape. Stylogeny describes 20 of them. The earliest began in 1940, the latest in 1949. Of these, 11 are still in use.

← 1930s 1950s →

The 20 styles

Oldest first. Each has its own page: its design choices, where it comes from, and real works.

American Mid-Century Modernism1940–1970 · North AmericaThe American synthesis of European avant-garde form with wit, pragmatism and commercial clients, led by Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Lester Beall, Bradbury Thompson and Saul Bass.
Hand-Painted Bollywood Poster1940–1999 · South AsiaThe painted publicity of Bombay's Hindi film industry, at its height from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Literatura de Cordel Woodcut1940–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe cover art of Brazil's literatura de cordel, pocket chapbooks of verse whose single picture is a small woodcut cut in soft umburana wood and printed in black above a plain letterpress title.
Ndebele Geometric Painting1940–present · Sub-Saharan AfricaThe mural tradition of Southern Ndebele women, who paint homestead walls and gateways, and later canvases and objects, with bold, symmetrical geometric designs.
Bengali Modernist Book Cover (Prachchhad)1943–present · South AsiaA literary book-jacket culture that began at Calcutta's Signet Press in 1943, where Satyajit Ray and later Purnendu Pattrea made the hand-drawn Bengali title the main image of the cover.
UPA & Cartoon Modern1944–1960 · North AmericaThe modern cartoon of United Productions of America (UPA) and the 1950s films, commercials and books it inspired.
Googie & Atomic Age1945–1965 · North AmericaThe 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).
Vietnamese Propaganda Poster (Tranh cổ động)1945–present · Southeast AsiaThe state poster art of Vietnam from the 1945 August Revolution to today.
Jeepney Art1946–present · Southeast AsiaThe decoration of the Philippine jeepney, the shared taxi built from surplus US Army jeeps after 1945 and later from locally fabricated stainless-steel bodies by firms such as Sarao and Francisco Motors.
Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP)1946–1989 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe hand-pulled silkscreen poster of Puerto Rico, begun by Irene Delano's workshop in 1946–47 and grown in the government's Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO, 1949) and the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña's print workshop under Lorenzo Homar (1957–73).
Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics)1947–1986 · Southern EuropeThe house style of Editorial Bruguera's humour cartoonists in Barcelona from 1947 to 1986, named the 'Escuela Bruguera' by Terenci Moix in 1968.
Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance)1947–present · Southern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America & CaribbeanThe photo-romance of the Italian women's weeklies: a melodrama told in staged photographs, first printed by Il mio sogno and Bolero Film in May 1947 and copied from France to Brazil.
Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type1947–present · Middle East & North AfricaArabic redrawn for the machine rather than the reed pen.
Onitsha Market Pamphlets1947–1980 · Sub-Saharan AfricaCheap, stapled pamphlets of romance, advice, drama and political biography, written by students, clerks, journalists and traders and printed by jobbing letterpress shops around Onitsha Main Market in eastern Nigeria from the late 1940s.
Pakistani Truck Art1947–present · South AsiaThe total decoration of Pakistan's trucks and buses, which grew from company marks and saints' portraits painted in the late 1940s into a workshop art in which painters, metalworkers, woodcarvers and reflective-tape specialists collaborate on each vehicle.
Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics)1947–present · East Asia, Global / networkedThe black-and-white narrative comic of postwar Japan, from Tezuka Osamu's Shin Takarajima (1947) to the weekly boys' magazines of 1959 and 1968 and the paperbacks that collect them.
Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia)1948–1996 · Latin America & CaribbeanThe adult adventure comics of Buenos Aires newsstand magazines, from Misterix (1948) and Oesterheld's Hora Cero (1957) to Skorpio and Fierro; the humour line of Patoruzú, Rico Tipo and Mafalda is another tradition.
Bonelli Fumetto (Italian Popular Adventure Comics)1948–present · Southern EuropeThe house format of Milan's Bonelli publishing house and its imitators (Tex, Zagor, Dylan Dog, Nathan Never): monthly newsstand paperbacks of 16 x 21 cm with about a hundred black-and-white pages, each a long episode of a serial hero.
French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan)1948–1979 · Western EuropeThe humorous street poster of post-war Paris, which took off in 1949 when Raymond Savignac and Bernard Villemot showed their rejected projects together and Savignac's Monsavon cow, its udder filling a bar of soap, went up on the walls.
Hurufiyya Calligraphic Modernism1949–present · Middle East & North AfricaA pan-Arab and Iranian modern-art movement, begun by Madiha Omar in the late 1940s, that freed the letters of the Arabic script from text and used them as abstract visual units.

The design choices they share

The choices these styles make more often than the 359 styles in the atlas as a whole, most telling first.

Hand-letteringin 19 of 20
Angular & zigzagin 9 of 20
Comic & cartoonin 10 of 20
Painterly brushworkin 12 of 20
Warm & approachablein 10 of 20
Playful & wittyin 14 of 20
Eclectic mixingin 8 of 20
Offset printingin 12 of 20

Where they come from

Their branches

All periods