World region
Graphic-design styles from North America
Styles that took shape in North America, alone or together with other regions. Stylogeny describes 76 of them. The earliest began in c. 1180, the latest in 2020. Of these, 40 are still in use.
The 76 styles
Oldest first. Each has its own page: its design choices, where it comes from, and real works.
- Northwest Coast Formline DesignThe two-dimensional design system of the northern Northwest Coast nations, painted, carved and woven onto boxes, house fronts, robes and hats, and printed as serigraphs since the 1960s.
- Black Panther Party GraphicsThe visual language of the Black Panther Party, created largely by its Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas, for the weekly newspaper The Black Panther.
- 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.
- Ultras Graphics (Curva Banners and Tifo)The 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.
- Punk & DIY ZineThe graphic voice of punk rock in fanzines, record sleeves and gig flyers: images and words cut from newspapers, typed or scrawled, pasted down and run off on a photocopier.
- Internet Ugly & Meme VernacularA deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014.
- 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.
- 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.
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 26 of 76
- Motion & broadcastin 23 of 76
- Geometric sansin 25 of 76
- Fluorescent & neonin 20 of 76
- Offset printingin 43 of 76
- All capsin 43 of 76
- Technological & futuristin 20 of 76
- Full bleedin 33 of 76