Stylogenyin the style of Solarpunk

Craft & organic · 2014–present · Global / networked, North America, Latin America & Caribbean

Solarpunk

Also known as Solarpunk aesthetic, Solar-punk

Hopeful eco-futurist imagery born online. The word dates from a 2008 blog post; the look from an August 2014 Tumblr post by the artist Olivia Louise asking for renewable technology with 'an Art Nouveau veneer'. Sunlit painted vistas, or flat, textured cover illustrations thick with foliage, show cities grown over with gardens, stained-glass solar panels, airships, wind power and shared streets full of people, in natural greens and sky blues warmed by gold. It fills book and magazine covers, concept art and animation as the daylit, communal opposite of cyberpunk's neon night.

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An ornate illustrated poster reads “BRIGHTER TOGETHER” above a sunlit, plant-covered city with glasshouses, bridges, waterfalls, wind turbines and sailboats on a canal. In the foreground, a woman tends flowers beside a man, a child and a cat, with flowering vines framing the scene.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

Use it with care

Draw original worlds rather than pastiches of Studio Ghibli films or of living illustrators such as Likhain, Fei Fei Ruan or Stephen Lillie, and do not prompt an image model with their names. Do not use the look to greenwash: Adam Flynn calls luxury condos with a green roof that price out existing communities 'fake Solarpunk urbanism', so show shared, affordable infrastructure and ordinary people. When a scene borrows architecture, dress or symbols from a specific culture (Afrofuturist, Indigenous or other), keep their meanings and credit their makers.

01

How it works

  • Light the future by day: let a dominant sun or a bright sky catch on glass, water and leaves. Some covers set flat foliage on a deep green ground, so a dark ground is allowed, but never cyberpunk's neon night.
  • Grow plants over every structure, with green roofs, terraces, rooftop greenhouses, vines and street trees, so that city and garden read as one continuous place.
  • Show renewable infrastructure as handsome, handcrafted objects (solar panels as stained glass, wind turbines, airships, streetcars, bicycles, sail and kite craft) dressed in an Art Nouveau veneer, never as the smooth, white, geometric 'iPod' future.
  • Fill the scene with people living and working together in markets, farms, workshops and car-free walkways, with specific faces and handmade clothes rather than anonymous crowds.
  • Render it as illustration: painterly digital or watercolour concept art with deep vistas and atmospheric distance, or flat, lightly textured graphic illustration for covers and posters (as on A Psalm for the Wild-Built), in natural greens and blues warmed by sun gold and earth tones.
  • Set display capitals with a crafted, period flavour (Art Nouveau-ornamented, flared or weathered wood-type), either on a small translucent panel over the scene (Sunvault) or stacked large and woven into the foliage (A Psalm for the Wild-Built).

Online speculative-fiction and art communities, above all on Tumblr. The word comes from 'From Steampunk to Solarpunk', a post of 30 April 2008 by John-Robert on the blog Republic of the Bees, which proposed a genre of societies run on renewable power and called the Beluga SkySails kite-assisted cargo ship 'the official, honorary cargo ship of solarpunk', but gave it no visual style. Apparently the first book to carry the name was the anthology Solarpunk: Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável, edited by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro with nine Brazilian and Portuguese authors (Editora Draco, São Paulo, 2012 or 2013; translated into English by Fábio Fernandes for World Weaver Press, 2018); it is a collection of stories, so the period here starts with the look. That arrived on 10 August 2014, when the artist Olivia Louise (missolivialouise) posted a Tumblr moodboard calling for 'updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics', a vision 'very similar to steampunk, but with electronic technology, and an Art Nouveau veneer', with stained-glass solar panels, airships and rooftop greenhouses. Adam Flynn's 'Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto' on Arizona State University's Project Hieroglyph (4 September 2014) took it up as 'an art nouveau Edwardian-garden aesthetic' that 'reminds me of Miyazaki'. Anthology covers (Sunvault, 2017), Becky Chambers's Monk & Robot novellas (from 2021), Solarpunk Magazine (from 2022) and animated advertising such as Chobani's 'Dear Alice' (2021) carried it into print and film

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
Ornament-free, Chrome & 3D render, Gloss & highlights, Fluorescent & neon, Glitch, Ironic & self-aware, Modular grid

Palette

  • #f4ecd2
  • #e8b445
  • #4f8a3c
  • #2f9fae
  • #b8652f
  • #2b4a3a

Typefaces

  • Swash, Art Nouveau-flavoured upper- and lowercase display lettering, as in Solarpunk Magazine's orange masthead

    Issue #14, 2024

  • Wide, flared capitals with sun-wheel O's on a translucent title panel over the painting, as on the Sunvault cover

    2017

  • Weathered, condensed wood-type capitals stacked large over a flat, textured illustration, as on A Psalm for the Wild-Built

    2021

Known for

  • Olivia Louise (missolivialouise), 'Here's a thing I've had around in my head for a while!' on her Tumblr blog Land of Masks and Jewels

    (10 August 2014), listed by Rhys Williams as the 'Original Aesthetic Solarpunk Post': a moodboard of cityscapes by other artists, photographs of a plant-covered façade, a stained-glass conservatory and a garden greenhouse, and four character designs of her own, asking for 'Natural colors! Art Nouveau! Handcrafted wares! … Airships! Stained glass window solar panels!!!' and 'Communal greenhouses on top of apartments!'

  • Likhain, a Filipina artist, cover painting for Sunvault

    Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland (Upper Rubber Boot Books, 29 August 2017): a visibly curving earth holding a green city criss-crossed by water under a dominant sun, in expressionist strokes that Rhys Williams finds reminiscent of Van Gogh's The Sower

  • Fei Fei Ruan, cover art for Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

    (Tordotcom, 13 July 2021), the first Monk & Robot novella and winner of the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novella: flat, textured foliage in ochre, orange and green on a near-black green ground, winding ochre paths, the robot Mosscap among the leaves and the tea monk Dex seated on the wagon, under large stacked, distressed condensed capitals

  • Stephen Lillie, cover art for Solarpunk Magazine Issue #14 (Eugene, Oregon, March/April 2024)

    a mottled green bear with antlers of bare branches and sprouting shoots, standing in a sunlit yellow-green wood crossed by shafts of light, drawn in ink line over soft textured colour under a swash, Art Nouveau-flavoured orange masthead

  • The Line, London (director Bjørn-Erik Aschim, art director Antoine Perez), 'Dear Alice' for Chobani (July 2021), scored by Joe Hisaishi

    an animated farming future of sparkling solar panels, floating windmill blimps and fruit-picking robots, framed as 'a love letter from a grandmother to a granddaughter'

  • Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Topcraft, 1984) and Studio Ghibli's Castle in the Sky (1986), and Wakanda in Marvel Studios' Black Panther (2018), cited as examples of the aesthetic; Flynn found that Louise's post 'reminds me of Miyazaki'

03

Make something in this style

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

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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 styleSolarpunk2014–present · Global / networked, North America, Latin America & Caribbean

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

Sources

  1. Miss Olivia Louise, 'Here's a thing I've had around in my head for a while!', Land of Masks and Jewels (Tumblr, 10 August 2014), listed by Williams (2019) as 'Original Aesthetic Solarpunk Post': https://missolivialouise.tumblr.com/post/94374063675/heres-a-thing-ive-had-around-in-my-head-for-a
  2. John-Robert, 'From Steampunk to Solarpunk', Republic of the Bees (30 April 2008): https://republicofthebees.blogspot.com/2008/04/from-steampunk-to-solarpunk.html
  3. Mary Woodbury, 'Wild Authors: Fábio Fernandes', Artists & Climate Change (26 September 2019): https://artistsandclimatechange.com/2019/09/26/wild-authors-fabio-fernandes/ (the Lodi-Ribeiro anthology, Editora Draco, São Paulo, 2012, nine authors from Brazil and Portugal, 'the book that seems to be the first using the term solarpunk'; World Weaver Press translation, 7 August 2018); The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 'Solarpunk': https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/solarpunk (dates the Draco edition 2013)
  4. Adam Flynn, 'Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto', Project Hieroglyph, Arizona State University (4 September 2014): https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/
  5. Rhys Williams, '"This Shining Confluence of Magic and Technology": Solarpunk, Energy Imaginaries, and the Infrastructures of Solarity', Open Library of Humanities 5, no. 1 (2019): 60, https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.329 (open-access copy: https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/177061/1/177061.pdf) (Louise's 'Art Nouveau veneer'; light as solarpunk's recurring figure; the Sunvault cover's 'expressionist techniques reminiscent of Van Gogh's "The Sower"'; solar panels 'colored like jewels', quoted from the story 'Summer Project' (Arseneault and Pierson 2014), and 'stained-glass-windowfuls', quoted from S. Norja's poem 'Sunharvest Triptych' in Sunvault (2017: 219))
  6. Suzanne Jacobs, 'This sci-fi enthusiast wants to make solarpunk happen', Grist (10 November 2015): https://grist.org/business-technology/this-sci-fi-enthusiast-wants-to-make-solarpunk-happen/
  7. Upper Rubber Boot Books, 'Sunvault is official!' (29 August 2017): https://upperrubberboot.com/sunvault-is-official/ and 'Sunvault cover – pencils' (18 April 2017): https://upperrubberboot.com/sunvault-cover-pencils/
  8. Tor.com (now Reactor), 'Introducing Monk & Robot, a New Series by Becky Chambers' (16 April 2020): https://reactormag.com/2020/04/16/introducing-monk-robot-a-new-series-by-becky-chambers/
  9. Stash Media, 'Chobani "Dear Alice" Spot by The Line' (13 July 2021): https://www.stashmedia.tv/?p=80320; Matthew Hart, 'Solarpunk Anime Scored by Ghibli Composer Shows Bright Future', Nerdist (22 December 2021): https://nerdist.com/article/dear-alice-solarpunk-anime-short-studio-ghibli-composer/
  10. Wikipedia, 'Solarpunk' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk), 'A Psalm for the Wild-Built' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Psalm_for_the_Wild-Built), 'Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (film)' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausica%C3%A4_of_the_Valley_of_the_Wind_(film)) and 'Castle in the Sky' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_in_the_Sky)
  11. Solarpunk Magazine, 'Solarpunk Roleplaying and Issue 14' (18 March 2024): https://solarpunkmagazine.com/solarpunk-roleplaying-and-issue-14/ (cover art by Stephen Lillie); OPB Think Out Loud, 'New digital magazine focuses on hopeful science fiction' (3 November 2021): https://opb.org/article/2021/11/03/digital-magazine-solarpunk-hopeful-science-fiction (based in Eugene, Oregon; first issue due January 2022)
  12. Hannah Steinkopf-Frank, 'Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It's About the End of Capitalism', Vice (2 September 2021): https://www.vice.com/en/article/solarpunk-is-not-about-pretty-aesthetics-its-about-the-end-of-capitalism/ (Flynn's 'fake Solarpunk urbanism')

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