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World region

Graphic-design styles from Central Europe

Styles that took shape in Central Europe, alone or together with other regions. Stylogeny describes 45 of them. The earliest began in c. 895, the latest in 2018. Of these, 15 are still in use.

The 45 styles

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

Hebrew Micrographyc. 895–present · Middle East & North Africa, Southern Europe, Central Europe, Western EuropeA Jewish scribal art in which lines of minute Hebrew script, usually the Masoretic notes that guard the biblical text, are written so that the line itself draws: interlaced frames and star rosettes on full carpet pages, and animals, knights, fish and grotesques in the margins.
European Heraldryc. 1140–present · Western Europe, Central Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Eastern EuropeThe hereditary identifying devices of medieval Europe's knights and seals, codified into a rule-bound grammar still used by states, cities, churches, universities and families.
Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Traditionc. 1180–present · Central Europe, Western Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, North America, Global / networkedThe broken scripts of the Latin West.
Renaissance Book Typographyc. 1460–1600 · Southern Europe, Western Europe, Central EuropeThe printed book as shaped by humanist Italy and France: roman and italic types modelled on humanist handwriting, a single justified text block set in harmonious proportions within generous margins, and woodcut initials, borders and printer's devices as the only ornament.
Emblem Book (Motto, Picture & Epigram)1531–1724 · Southern Europe, Central Europe, Western EuropeA European book genre in which, from Chrestien Wechel's Paris edition of 1534 on, every page or opening repeats one fixed unit: a short motto, an allegorical picture and an explanatory verse, which only together yield a moral, amorous or religious meaning.
Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards1639–present · Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central EuropeThe standard pattern of French tarot cards, descended from Milanese tarot and recut by card-makers in Paris, Lyon, Avignon, Dijon and Marseille from the 17th century.
Neoclassical Book Typography1757–1830 · Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central EuropeThe Enlightenment book stripped of Renaissance woodcut decoration.
Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen1796–1939 · Western Europe, Central EuropeCheap single-sheet popular prints sold by pedlars across 19th-century Europe, led by the Pellerin imagerie at Épinal and the Neuruppin Bilderbogen.
Japonisme1860–1910 · Western Europe, North America, Central EuropeThe Western absorption of Japanese woodblock prints, textiles and crafts after Japan reopened to trade in the 1850s.
Art Nouveau1890–1910 · Western Europe, Central Europe, Southern Europe, North AmericaAn international 'new art' that sought a modern style free of historical revival, drawing its forms from plant growth and the female figure.
German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung)1895–1933 · Central EuropeThe German reform of the book, from the magazine Pan (1895) to the private presses that ended around 1933.
Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)1896–1944 · Central EuropeThe house style of the Munich satirical weekly Simplicissimus, set by Th.
Vienna Secession1897–1918 · Central EuropeThe 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.
Expressionist Woodcut Graphics1905–1925 · Central Europe, Western EuropeThe graphic arm of German Expressionism, from Die Brücke in Dresden (1905) to the Berlin journals Der Sturm and Die Aktion and Frans Masereel's woodcut novels.
Plakatstil / Sachplakat1905–1920 · Central EuropeThe German 'object poster' launched by Lucian Bernhard's Priester match poster and printed by Berlin's Hollerbaum & Schmidt.
Hungarian Revolutionary Poster1912–1919 · Central EuropeThe political posters of Hungary's revolutions.
Dada1916–1924 · Central Europe, Western EuropeBorn in wartime Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 and spreading to Berlin, Hanover, Cologne and Paris, Dada used chance, absurdity and provocation against the culture that had produced the war.
Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design1917–1924 · Eastern Europe, Central EuropeThe 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.
Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat)1919–1955 · Central EuropeThe Swiss descendant of the German object poster, made in Zurich and above all Basel from 1919 to the early 1950s.
Bauhaus1919–1933 · Central EuropeThe 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.
Czech Poetist Book Design (Devětsil)1922–1938 · Central EuropeThe 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.
Die Neue Typographie1923–1940 · Central Europe, Western EuropeThe programme that turned avant-garde experiment into a functional typographic method, named by Moholy-Nagy in 1923 and codified in Jan Tschichold's 'elementare typographie' (1925) and Die neue Typographie (1928).
Isotype Pictorial Statistics1925–1971 · Central Europe, Western EuropeA 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.
AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield)1930–1938 · Central EuropeThe political photomontage John Heartfield made for the communist weekly AIZ from 1930 to 1938, in Berlin and, from 1933, in Prague exile.
Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster1932–1989 · Eastern Europe, Central Europe, East Asia, Southeast AsiaThe 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'.
International Typographic Style1950–1975 · Central EuropeA post-war refinement of the New Typography in which the mathematical grid, objective photography and neo-grotesque sans-serifs were used to communicate with clarity and neutrality.
Zagreb Modernist Graphics (EXAT 51 to Teatar &TD)1951–1975 · Southern Europe, Central EuropeZagreb graphic design grown from the EXAT 51 manifesto (1951), which tied abstract art to visual communication.
HfG Ulm Systematic Design1953–1968 · Central EuropeThe Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (1953–1968) was founded as the successor to the Bauhaus.
West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow)1953–1990 · Central EuropeThe 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.
Zagreb School of Animated Film1954–1980 · Southern Europe, Central EuropeThe modernist animation of Zagreb Film's Studio for Animated Film, grown from reduced-animation advertisements of 1954-1955 and named the 'Zagreb school' by Georges Sadoul and André Martin after Cannes 1958.
Thaw Modernism (Soviet and Czechoslovak)1956–1968 · Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Northern EuropeThe 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).
Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas)1962–1978 · North America, Central Europe, Western EuropeThe house graphics George Maciunas made from 1962 until his death in 1978 for Fluxus, a network of artists who staged events and sold cheap multiples.
Munich 1972 Olympic Design (Otl Aicher)1966–1972 · Central EuropeThe visual programme Otl Aicher's department made for the 1972 Munich Olympics, the 'cheerful Games' meant to show a democratic, modest West Germany.
Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography1968–1990 · Central Europe, North AmericaA 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.
Ultras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo)1968–present · Southern Europe, Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East & North Africa, Southeast Asia, North AmericaThe graphic language of Italy's organised football supporters, the ultras, from the late 1960s, and of the groups that copied them across Europe, North Africa and beyond.
ECM Sleeve Aesthetic (Munich)1969–present · Central EuropeThe cover language of the Munich label ECM, made since 1970 by Barbara Wojirsch, Dieter Rehm and later Sascha Kleis and Mayo Bucher with co-founder Manfred Eicher.
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.
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.
Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics2001–present · Global / networked, Western Europe, Central Europe, Northern Europe, North AmericaAn art and design practice that makes digital failure the picture.
Neo-Swiss Revival2005–present · Global / networked, Central Europe, Western EuropeA contemporary revival of the International Typographic Style, fuelled by digital re-releases of neo-grotesques and by studios such as Experimental Jetset and Norm: modular grids, flush-left grotesque type, huge tightly set headlines and flat fields of black, white and one signal colour.
Lucerne Poster Scene (Neubad & Südpol Posters)2007–present · Central EuropeLucerne's poster culture for small non-commercial venues (Südpol, Neubad, Treibhaus) and the Weltformat festival.
Natural Wine Label Art2007–present · Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central Europe, Global / networkedThe labels of the natural (low-intervention) wine scene, which grew from Beaujolais into a worldwide network of small growers, bars and importers.
Brutalist Web Design2014–present · Global / networked, Central EuropeA reaction against templated, conversion-optimised web design that exposes the raw materials of the browser: default system fonts, blue underlined links, visible borders, unstyled forms and plain document flow.
Acid Graphics / New Ugly2016–present · Global / networked, Western Europe, Central EuropeA late-2010s club and poster style that updates 1990s rave graphics with modern 3D tools: liquid-chrome and melting lettering, neo-tribal spikes, wireframes, op-art patterns and acid-green palettes on black, mixed with blackletter and stretched grotesques.
Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)2018–present · Western Europe, Central EuropeA Franco-Belgian type practice that redesigns written French for gender inclusion inside the word.

The design choices they share

The choices these styles make more often than the 362 styles in the atlas as a whole, most telling first.

Ornament-freein 21 of 45
Letterpressin 18 of 45
Blackletterin 12 of 45
Limited spot coloursin 35 of 45
Grotesque & neo-grotesquein 21 of 45
Rational & objectivein 16 of 45
Dynamic asymmetryin 21 of 45
Generous white spacein 21 of 45

Their branches

When they began

All regions