Stylogenyin the style of Push Pin Style

Pictorial & machine age · 1954–1980 · North America

Push Pin Style

Also known as Push Pin Studios, Push Pin Graphic

The eclectic illustrative style of New York's Push Pin Studios, founded by Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel. Against the neutrality of the Swiss style it raided Victorian wood type, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, comics and folk art, drawing everything with bold contours, flat colour and invented display lettering, and made illustration and personal wit central to graphic design again.

Make something in this styleGet advice in this styleMix it with another style

A red-haired woman in a flowing purple dress rides a giant flying black-and-white cat beneath a smiling golden sun. Large orange lettering reading “SUNRIDER” crowns the scene, with a coastal village below and flowers decorating the border.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

01

How it works

  • Plunder historical styles (Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, comics) and recombine them with conscious wit.
  • Draw figures and objects with a heavy, even contour and fill them with flat, bright colour.
  • Design or redraw display lettering for each job, often inventing a new alphabet.
  • Let the illustrator-designer's personal voice and humour lead the concept.
  • Frame images in revived borders, cartouches and decorative panels when they add period flavour.

Push Pin Studios, New York

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Modular grid, Grotesque & neo-grotesque, Ornament-free, Rational & objective, Straight photography, Flush left, ragged right

Palette

  • #f4e9cf
  • #1b1b1b
  • #e0512f
  • #f2b632
  • #2e86ab
  • #9b4f96

Typefaces

  • Baby Teeth

    Milton Glaser, Photo-Lettering Inc., 1960s

  • Glaser Stencil

    Milton Glaser, 1970

  • Blimp

    Seymour Chwast, Photo-Lettering Inc., c. 1970

  • Artone

    Seymour Chwast, Photo-Lettering Inc., 1968

  • Revived Victorian wood-type and Art Nouveau display faces

Known for

  • Push Pin Studios

    founded 1954

  • Seymour Chwast

  • Milton Glaser

    Bob Dylan poster for Columbia Records, 1966–67

  • Edward Sorel

  • Reynold Ruffins

  • The Push Pin Graphic

    1957–1980

  • 'The Push Pin Style' exhibition, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris

    1970

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Push Pin Style’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

Rule out a choice, read the prompt, or blend in another style: take this brief to Mix styles.

04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This stylePush Pin Style1954–1980 · North America

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

06

Sources

  1. Seymour Chwast, Steven Heller & Martin Venezky, The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration (2004)
  2. Milton Glaser, Graphic Design (1973)
  3. Philip B. Meggs & Alston W. Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.