Skip to content

Period

1980s graphic-design styles

Styles that began in the 1980s, by the year the atlas gives for when each took shape. Stylogeny describes 17 of them. The earliest began in 1980, the latest in 1988. Of these, 8 are still in use.

← 1970s 1990s →

The 17 styles

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

Chicha Poster1980–present · Latin America & CaribbeanFluorescent 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 Typography1980–1998 · North AmericaGraduate-school experimentation, centred on Katherine and Michael McCoy's Cranbrook design programme, that applied post-structuralist literary theory to the page.
Jamaican Dancehall Signs & Sleeve Art1980–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe street graphics of Jamaica's dancehall era.
NSK Retro-Avant-Garde1980–present · Central Europe, Southern EuropeThe 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.
Pixação (São Paulo Tag Reto)1980–present · Latin America & CaribbeanThe name-writing of São Paulo's pixadores, which since the 1980s has covered walls and façades and, from the 1990s, the upper floors of tower blocks.
Solidarność & Polish Underground Graphics1980–1989 · Eastern EuropeThe graphic language of Poland's Solidarność movement, from the August 1980 shipyard strike to the semi-free election of 4 June 1989.
Memphis Design1981–1988 · Southern EuropeThe Milan collective founded by Ettore Sottsass, whose furniture, laminates and objects (first shown in September 1981) became a graphic language of their own.
Pardhan Gond Painting (Jangarh Kalam)1981–present · South AsiaPainting on paper and canvas by Pardhan Gond artists of Patangarh and Bhopal, begun when Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, recruited Jangarh Singh Shyam in 1981; the style was later named Jangarh Kalam after him.
Emigre & Early Digital Type1984–1998 · North AmericaRudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko's magazine and type foundry, launched in 1984 alongside the first Macintosh, turned the computer's low-resolution constraints into a new typographic idiom.
Demoscene Graphics (Cracktros, Demos & Text-Mode Art)1985–present · Northern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe, North America, Global / networkedThe graphics of the demoscene, a mainly European community of coders, graphicians and musicians that grew from the intros software crackers added to pirated Commodore 64 and Amiga games in the mid-1980s.
Ghanaian Movie Poster1985–2005 · Sub-Saharan AfricaHand-painted posters commissioned by Ghana's mobile video clubs from about 1985, painted by apprenticed sign painters on stitched flour sacks to advertise VHS screenings of Hollywood, Hong Kong, Nigerian and Indian films.
Madinah Mushaf (King Fahd Complex Qur'an Page)1985–present · Middle East & North Africa, Global / networkedOne fixed page for the Qur'an across much of the Muslim world: Uthman Taha's fully vowelled Naskh in fifteen justified lines, written so that every page ends at the end of a verse (the late Ottoman âyet-berkenar layout), inside a floral frame, with sura titles in framed cartouches and verse numbers in small round medallions.
Out-of-Square Hangul Typography1985–present · East AsiaA Korean typographic movement that frees Hangul from the equal square in which metal and photo type had always set each syllable.
Techno-Futurist Graphics1986–2002 · Western Europe, East AsiaElectronic-music and video-game graphics of the late 1980s and 1990s that turned corporate modernism into a sci-fi consumer fantasy.
ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics1987–1995 · North AmericaThe 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'.
Global Village Coffeehouse1988–2003 · North AmericaThe 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.
Rave & Acid House Graphics1988–2000 · Western EuropeThe pocket-sized promotional art of acid house, rave and early techno, handed out in record shops and car parks to advertise all-night parties.

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.

Where they come from

Their branches

All periods