A dictionary of design styles, written from the works themselves.
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337
花札 / 18th century– / Style / Games and Play
Japanese cards that compress twelve months of flowers, birds, wind and moon into 48 sheets. Their bold flat-color stylization against black came out of a long history of redesigning the deck to slip past bans, and it was where Nintendo began.
Monthly flower-and-bird designs / Black borders, flat color / Extreme simplification / Ribbon and animal combinations
338
博物図譜 / 18th–19th century / Style / Natural History Illustration
The name for the naturalist's plates that showed unknown life as both taxonomy and wonder, with botanical illustration sitting under it as the branch that narrowed to plants. The symmetrical compositions of Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur became the junction where science plates flowed into Art Nouveau's language of form.
Symmetrical specimen layouts / Taxonomic completeness / Precision beside ornament / Systematic plate numbering
339
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カリグラフィー復興 / 1906– / Style / Type Classification
The modern revival of Western writing begun when Johnston rebuilt the foundational hand from medieval manuscripts. Through the Underground letters and Gill, the written hand became a source of modern design.
The broad pen's angle / The foundational skeleton / Reconstruction from manuscripts / The breathing of letter and space
340
楽譜表紙 / 1820s–1920s / Style / Printed Ephemera
Lithographed covers kept alive by the piano in the parlor. Illustration of the song's scene combined with ornamental lettering into a single picture, and before the record sleeve existed this was how music was shown.
Scenes of the song / Ornamental title lettering / Lithographic color / Publishers' stock frames
341
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伊勢型紙 / Muromachi period– / Technique / Stencil Printing
Dyeing stencils cut from persimmon-tannin laminated paper: drill, tool and stripe cutting produce continuous patterns so fine that the stencils themselves startled fin-de-siècle Europe as an art of line.
Cut continuous patterns / The brown of tannin paper / Hairline parallel stripe cutting / Positive-negative design
342
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絵双六 / Edo period– / Layout / Games and Play
Japan's pictorial board sheets dividing one page into a story of squares. Careers and pilgrimages arranged in spiral progressions show the sugoroku sheet as ancestor of information design and game UI.
Spiral or field progression / A scene in every square / Start and goal / A narrative held on one sheet
343
プロヴォーク / 1968–1970 / Style / Photography Movements
The magazine Provoke called itself provocative materials for thought. Working through are-bure-boke, coarse grain and blur and lost focus, it stripped photography of tidy meaning and gave seeing back its rawness.
Rough grain (are) / Blur and defocus affirmed / High-contrast black / Fragmentary framing
344
タイポロジー写真 / 1959– / Style / Photography Movements
The Bechers' method of shooting one kind of structure under identical conditions and hanging the results in a grid. Repetition under overcast light, dead-on and without people, turns individuals into types, and by way of the Düsseldorf school it became a grammar of contemporary photography.
Grid presentation / Even overcast light / Strict frontality / Typification through repetition
345
ニューカラー / 1976– / Style / Photography Movements
The art photography of the everyday in color, legitimized by Eggleston's MoMA show. Dye-transfer density gave banal scenes gravity and overturned the rule that color was vulgar.
Nameless everyday scenes / Dye-transfer saturation / Casual oblique composition / The intensity of red
346
決定的瞬間 / 1932- / Technique / Photographic Techniques
A way of shooting that waits for the event and the shape of the frame to coincide, then releases once. Cartier-Bresson set it out in his 1952 book and made using the whole uncropped frame part of the method.
The frame used to its edges, uncropped / A black border left by the full negative / Figure and background aligning for one instant / A street sharp into the distance
347
グループf/64 / 1932–1935 / Style / Photography Movements
A manifesto for straight photography from Weston, Adams and their circle, who took as their banner the edge-to-edge sharpness of an aperture stopped to f/64. Rejecting the haze of Pictorialism, they held that large-format precision and full tonal range were themselves the beauty of a photograph.
All-over deep focus / Large-format precision / A rich grayscale / Directness refusing manipulation
348
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フォトエッセイ / 1936–1972 / Layout / Publishing and Editing
The page form LIFE perfected: photographs edited into narrative arcs. Spread-scale contrasts, opening and closing images and the voice of captions gave photography a story grammar.
Sequenced narrative arcs / Size contrast across spreads / The full-page key image / Captions that narrate
349
FSAドキュメンタリー / 1935–1944 / Style / Photography Movements
The documentary program of Depression-era America's Farm Security Administration. Lange's Migrant Mother and 270,000 archived negatives defined the public role of documentary.
Portraits preserving dignity / Living conditions described / The archive as state project / Field information in captions
350
リアリズム写真運動 / 1950–1958 / Style / Photography Movements
The postwar Japanese movement Domon Ken led under 'absolutely unstaged, absolute snapshots.' Hiroshima and Children of Chikuho faced society directly, drawing amateur monthly contests into the reconnection of photography and life.
The unstaged principle / Social subjects faced directly / Close wide-angle work / Coarse-grained prints
351
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ロモグラフィー / 1992– / Style / Photographic Genres
A movement that wrote the accidents of the Soviet LC-A toy camera into a charter. Vignetting, color casts and cross-processed saturation were all affirmed under ten rules and the instruction not to think but to shoot, which made it the forerunner of post-digital love for analog.
Heavy vignetting / Cross-process color shifts / Multiple-exposure chance / Shooting from the hip
352
ダゲレオタイプ / 1839–1860s / Technique / Photographic Techniques
The first practical photography, fixing an image directly onto a silvered plate. A one-of-a-kind picture reversed as in a mirror and housed in velvet like jewelry is where the experience of owning an image begins.
The mirrored silver plate / A unique reversed image / Jewel-like cased presentation / Painfully fine detail
353
インスタント写真 / 1948– / Technique / Photographic Techniques
Polaroid made the picture appear on the spot. The white-bordered square, the soft color of chemical development and the fact that only one copy exists became a language of intimacy that outlived digital and carries on in Instax.
The white-bordered square / Tender drifting color / The wait for development / One-of-a-kind materiality
354
ステレオ写真 / 1850s-1930s / Technique / Photographic Techniques
Two views of one scene taken from slightly separated positions, mounted side by side and sent to each eye through a viewer so the scene reads as depth. Placing an object large in the foreground to force that depth was the standard move.
Two nearly identical views side by side / A curved card mount / An object set large in the foreground / Description printed on the back
355
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名刺判写真 / 1854–1900s / Style / Publishing and Editing
Disdéri patented a card-sized portrait made in quantity. Printing eight poses on a single glass plate made portraiture cheap enough to democratize it, and the collecting of celebrity cards and the album culture around them are where the shared face begins.
Card-sized mounts / Full-length studio poses / The studio's logo on the back / Album collecting
356
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心霊写真 / 1862–1930s / Style / Photographic Genres
The 19th-century trade in ghosts produced by double exposure. From Mumler's portrait of Lincoln's widow to the séance boom, it fed on the very belief that a photograph proves something, a style built from media deception and desire.
Translucent superimposed figures / Composites with mourning portraits / The séance-record format / Staged evidentiality
357
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スナップショット美学 / 1888– / 1960s art adoption / Style / Photographic Genres
An aesthetic that takes the failures of amateur photography since Kodak, the tilted horizon, the head cut off at the edge, the flatness of the flash, and claims them on purpose. The intimacy of the family album became a grammar for art photography from Winogrand to Goldin.
Tilted framing / Subjects cut by the frame / Direct flash / Album intimacy
358
顕微鏡写真 / 1840s– / Technique / Photographic Genres
Scientific photography that records, through a microscope, structures the eye cannot reach. Bentley's snowflakes proved the scientific image could be beautiful, and that claim runs on through polarized color and fluorescence to the Nikon Small World of today.
Structures beyond sight / Specimens on black / Polarized and fluorescent color / The wonder of symmetry
359
プリクラ / 1995– / Style / Photographic Genres
Japan's photo-sticker culture: doodles, mori enhancement and big-eye retouching plus tiny shareable stickers completed the grammar of edit-then-share selfies before social media existed.
Mori and big-eye retouching / Doodles and stamps / Tiny stickers to share / Staged booth lighting
360
枯山水 / Muromachi period– / Style / Garden Styles
A Japanese garden that uses no water at all, representing waterscape and cosmos through raked sand and set stones. The fifteen rocks of Ryōan-ji compose by subtraction, and minimalists worldwide still cite them as the archetype for designing emptiness.
Water implied in raked gravel / Asymmetric stone groupings / A fixed viewpoint from the veranda / Radical subtraction
IndexStyle is not a list of every term used around design. An independent entry must describe a visual language that can be recognised, reproduced and distinguished from its neighbours. Editorial standard