Stylogeny in the style of Supergraphics

Try

Postmodern · 1966–2026 · North America

Supergraphics

Also known as Supergraphic, Environmental supergraphics, Sea Ranch supergraphics

Oversized stripes, numerals, letters and abstract shapes painted directly onto walls, floors and ceilings, wrapping across architectural planes so that a room reads larger, deeper or differently shaped. It took Swiss-trained flat colour and sans-serif type off the page and made the graphic the surface of the building. It later became a standard tool of environmental graphic design for wayfinding and branding.

Make something in this style Get advice in this style Mix it with another style

Huge black letters spelling “MOVE” fill a slanted cream band across a geometric poster. Red, blue, yellow and teal shapes surround the lettering, with a large yellow circle above, three cream dots at upper right and diagonal blue-and-cream stripes below.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

01

How it works

  • Paint the graphic at architectural scale directly on the wall, floor or ceiling, not on a panel hung there.
  • Wrap the shape across corners, doors and planes so it redefines the room's apparent size and depth.
  • Use flat, saturated colour fields and bold stripes with no shading; any sense of depth comes from wrapping the geometry across planes, not from modelling.
  • Set letters, numerals and arrows in a plain sans-serif large enough to be read as architecture.
  • Let the graphic ignore the architecture's joints where that makes the space feel different, and use it to guide movement through the building.

California and New York in the mid-1960s; Barbara Stauffacher Solomon's painted interiors at The Sea Ranch, California, brought the method to a wide American audience

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
Floral & vegetal, Abundant decoration, Skeuomorphic material, Grain & noise, Script, Blackletter, Classical text block, Naturalistic depiction

Palette

  • #e63b2e
  • #f6b800
  • #0b5cad
  • #f2efe6
  • #1d1d1b
  • #2fa58b

Typefaces

  • Helvetica

    typical, not documented

  • Univers

    typical, not documented

  • Futura

    typical, not documented

Known for

  • Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, painted interiors at The Sea Ranch, California (mid-1960s), including the Moonraker Athletic Center bathhouse graphics with architect Charles Moore (published in Progressive Architecture, March 1967)

  • Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, week-long supergraphics studio for the Yale Art and Architecture building elevators (1968), to which Charles Moore invited her

  • C. Ray Smith, who named the work in 1967 in his writing on Supermannerism

  • Deborah Sussman (Sussman Prejza), environmental graphics in the same large-scale tradition, including the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics look

  • Lance Wyman, Mexico 68 environmental graphics and wayfinding

    see mexico-68

  • Morag Myerscough, contemporary large-scale painted and applied interiors (UK), part of the 2000s resurgence

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Supergraphics’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 style Supergraphics 1966–2026 · 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

Often taken for

Supergraphics has no real works recorded yet, so these are its nearest styles by its choices alone, with the choices that tell them apart.

— means the choice isn’t among the style’s recorded choices. Critics recorded each work’s choices with the styles’ descriptions in view, so this shows whether the descriptions hold together, not proof that they are right.

06

Combine it with

Styles Supergraphics pairs well with or plays against, from the research. Each is worked out as a combination: which style gives the type, the colours and the forms.

Every style combination

07

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, Supergraphics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergraphics)
  2. Wikipedia, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Stauffacher_Solomon)
  3. Wikipedia, Deborah Sussman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Sussman)
  4. Wikipedia, Lance Wyman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Wyman)

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