What changed
A dictionary is judged by what it leaves out. This is the record of what was added, what was taken down, and why.
- added51 entries added
- addedAdded 32 screen styles. The dictionary was thick on paper and objects and had almost nothing on the first half of the history of screens, from the Apple Desktop Interface of 1987 to Windows 95, HyperCard, Minitel and the Winamp skin.
- fixedStopped the compose page handing ChatGPT a URL that does not exist. It had been joining two entry ids into one and asking for a spec page that was never there.
- retiredDropped eight entries that no institution, archive or signed article could account for. They came from trend pieces that had coined a name, and two of them named a subject rather than a style.
- fixedRe-sourced 42 of the founding 50 entries. All fifty had cited the same single article, which put a school of design and a coinage from a trend piece on equal footing.
- movedCut the families from 164 to 82. Families holding a single entry went from 63 to 2.
- retiredRemoved Motion as a kind, and later removed Motion Graphics as an entry. Both name a medium rather than a style.
- addedFilled nineteen conspicuous gaps. Impressionism was missing while six movements defined against it were already here.
- fixedRewrote entry no.8 as Web Brutalism. Its source, its images and its further reading were all about architecture, which another entry already covers.
- fixedGave every entry its own Best used for, Composition recipe and What to avoid. Until now many carried the same placeholder sentences, which made the dictionary unusable as a reference.
- fixedReconciled 101 entries where the Japanese and the English said different things. Since the other five languages are translated from the Japanese, a split original would have multiplied the error fivefold.
- builtTranslated the body of every entry into Spanish, French, German, Chinese and Korean. Until now those editions carried a translated summary above an English body.
- builtAdded 903 comparison pages, one for each pair the dictionary itself calls related, plus fourteen pairs that readers mix up precisely because they are not related.
- builtAdded a way to put several styles together, which assigns each one a role instead of averaging them, and says where they will fight.
- fixedReviewed every reference gallery by eye. Entries now showing three real works went from 384 to 474.
- movedMoved three marbling techniques and the proofreading marks out of type classification, where they had no business being.
- added362 entries added
- builtPublished the site.
- builtAdded editions in Spanish, French, German, Chinese and Korean, alongside English and Japanese.
- fixedReplaced the reference images of the founding entries. They had been hotlinking a moodboard from someone else's article rather than showing real works.
- retiredFolded away the chronology pages. The entries in them that stand as styles were promoted into the dictionary proper.
- builtOpened the machine surfaces: an MCP endpoint, a JSON API, a design spec and an image prompt per entry.
- added75 entries added
- added53 entries added
- builtStarted the dictionary.
How those decisions are made is written in the Editorial policy