Stylogenyin the style of Vienna Secession

Craft & organic · 1897–1918 · Central Europe

Vienna Secession

Also known as Wiener Secession, Secessionstil, Wiener Werkstätte style

The Viennese break with academic art led by Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann and Alfred Roller, which pulled Art Nouveau toward the square, the grid and the flat plane. Its exhibition posters, the journal Ver Sacrum and Wiener Werkstätte graphics enclose stylised figures and dense geometric lettering in rectangular frames, in black, white and gold, with severe symmetrical clarity.

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A symmetrical decorative print shows a woman with closed eyes, black hair, and a green robe holding a red flower before a large gold halo. Mirrored flowering plants, checkerboard panels, and geometric borders surround her beneath the word “SOLACE.”
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

01

How it works

  • Compose within a square or strongly rectangular frame and lock elements into blocks, bands and panels.
  • Draw custom capitals that interlock and stretch to fill their rectangle, even at some cost to legibility.
  • Replace Art Nouveau's tendrils with squares, chequers, dots and stylised flowers in strict repetition.
  • Use black, white and gold as the core palette, adding one or two flat accent colours.
  • Leave generous white margins around a centred, symmetrical arrangement of image and text.
  • Design lettering, ornament, objects and architecture as one Gesamtkunstwerk.

Vienna, Austria-Hungary

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
Whiplash line, Diagonal axis, Collage & layering, Eclectic mixing, Straight photography, Illusion of depth

Palette

  • #f4f1e8
  • #141414
  • #b8913a
  • #a3282a
  • #3b5e4a

Typefaces

  • Alfred Roller's elongated, interlocking block capitals

  • Koloman Moser's geometric display lettering

  • Rudolf von Larisch's ornamental lettering

    Unterricht in ornamentaler Schrift, 1905

Known for

  • Gustav Klimt

    poster for the 1st Secession exhibition, 1898

  • Koloman Moser

  • Alfred Roller

    poster for the 14th Secession exhibition, 1902

  • Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte

    1903–1932

  • Joseph Maria Olbrich

    Secession Building, 1897–98

  • Ver Sacrum

    1898–1903

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Vienna Secession’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 styleVienna Secession1897–1918 · Central Europe

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

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. Philip B. Meggs & Alston W. Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design
  2. Jane Kallir, Viennese Design and the Wiener Werkstätte (1986)
  3. Vienna Secession, history of the association (secession.at)

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