World region
Global and networked graphic-design styles
Styles that took shape across borders rather than in one region: through global media, trade, networks and the web. Stylogeny describes 66 of them. The earliest began in c. 1180, the latest in 2022. Of these, 54 are still in use.
The 66 styles
Oldest first. Each has its own page: its design choices, where it comes from, and real works.
- Madinah Mushaf (King Fahd Complex Qur'an Page)One 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.
- Black Metal GraphicsThe visual language of black metal, fixed by Norway's second wave in the early 1990s, now worldwide, since the 2010s borrowed by mainstream acts (Szpajdel's Rihanna and Metallica logos, 2016).
- Internet Ugly & Meme VernacularA deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014.
- 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.
- YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face')The custom thumbnail of YouTube's creator economy: a 16:9 still made to be read at fingernail size in a feed of recommendations.
- VTuber Avatar and Stream GraphicsThe graphic kit of virtual YouTubers, streamers who perform behind an animated anime-style character instead of their own face.
- Lo-fi Anime AestheticThe look of YouTube's 24/7 lo-fi hip hop streams.
- Neo-BrutalismA friendly, commercial descendant of web brutalism that keeps its blunt boxes but adds candy colour: thick black outlines, hard unblurred offset shadows, flat saturated fills and chunky sans-serif type on conventional, usable layouts.
- Palestinian Watermelon and Keffiyeh GraphicsGraphics of Palestinian identity and of solidarity with Palestinians, made by Palestinian artists, the diaspora and supporters worldwide and shared mainly online, above all since the Gaza war began in October 2023.
- Woman, Life, Freedom Protest Graphics (Iran and the Diaspora)Posters and digital graphics made in Iran and the diaspora after Mahsa (Jina) Amini died in morality-police custody in September 2022.
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.
- Web & CSSin 45 of 66
- Motion & broadcastin 29 of 66
- 3D renderin 24 of 66
- App & OS interfacein 25 of 66
- Gradientsin 34 of 66
- Illusion of depthin 33 of 66
- Technological & futuristin 27 of 66
- Fluorescent & neonin 24 of 66