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A dictionary of design styles, written from the works themselves.

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MUJI — Mori Masahiro, MUJI Japanese-style tableware, 2004 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0 · © 森正洋デザイン研究所 (Mori Masahiro Design Studio, LLC.)

MUJI

無印良品 / 1980– / Style / Contemporary Branding

A way of letting the raw colour of a material stand as the finish of an industrial product. Unbleached paper, uncoloured plastic and unstained wood are the outside of the thing, and the product name moves off that surface onto a hang tag.

Unbleached paper and uncoloured translucent plastic standing as the colour of the packaging / No name or mark printed on the product itself, the name living only on the hang tag and the price label / Several lines of small type on the hang tag explaining the material and how it was made / Advertising that keeps the product small, with landscape or empty space filling most of the frame

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410

Shōwa Modern — Sugiura Hisui, Tokyo Underground Railway opening poster, 1927 — alternative horizontal poster — Hisui Sugiura — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Shōwa Modern

昭和モダン / 1920s–1930s / Style / Advertising Posters

Prewar Japan's commercial modernism, typified by Sugiura Hisui's Mitsukoshi and subway posters: Deco crossed with nihonga, the modern girl's city and refined lettering drawing the dawn of consumer culture.

Deco crossed with nihonga / The modern girl's city / Stylized lettering / Department stores and transit

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411

Yuefenpai — East Asia Tobacco Company advertising poster, 1930 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Yuefenpai

月份牌 / 1910s–1940s / Style / Advertising Posters

Advertising pictures with a calendar attached, which flowered in Shanghai. Women in qipao rendered in rubbed charcoal and watercolor sold cigarettes and cosmetics while keeping the date, and this East-West hybrid of commercial beauty painting repainted the visual culture of East Asia.

Soft rub-and-paint skin / Qipao beauties / Calendar and product together / East-West interiors

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412

Indian Calendar Art — Oleograph by Raja Ravi Varma — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Indian Calendar Art

インドのカレンダー・アート / 1894– / Style / Popular Prints

The mass-printed gods begun at Ravi Varma's press: oil-painted mythology delivered to homes as oleographs, still printed today as bazaar art shaping India's visual everyday.

The frontality of gods / Oil-style shading and ornament / Saturated festival color / Calendar and advertising frames

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413

Tiki Style — Trader Vic's menu cover — Wikimedia Commons / No restrictions

Tiki Style

ティキ・スタイル / 1934–1960s / revival / Aesthetic / Pop

The Polynesia dreamed up by American bars and restaurants. Carved figures, bamboo, torches and mai tai glasses gave style to a postwar wish to escape. It is an imaginary South Seas, and it should be read together with its history of borrowing from Pacific cultures.

Tiki-carving motifs / Bamboo and rattan interiors / Torches and flame / Tropical drink vessels

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414

Manga Lettering — Unknown artist, Taishō-era manga, hand-drawn katakana scattered across the page — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Manga Lettering

漫画の描き文字 / 1930s– / Style / Lettering

In Japanese manga, sound effects and even the feel of silence are drawn as pictures, from a booming don to a hushed shiin. Hand-lettering turns the texture of a sound into line weight and shape, dissolving the border between image and word inside the panel.

Sound drawn as shape / Weight matched to texture / Placement crossing panels / Even silence written (shiin)

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415

Golden and Silver Age Comic Book Style — Golden Age comic book cover, 1948 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Golden and Silver Age Comic Book Style

黄金期・銀の時代のアメコミ / 1938–1970 / Style / Illustration Styles

A grammar of exaggeration that came out of four colour printing on cheap newsprint. Heavy black outlines fence in every form, areas are filled by overprinted primaries and dot screens, and both motion and sound are drawn as shapes in their own right.

Heavy black outlines of even weight fencing in figures and backgrounds alike / Areas filled by overprinted primaries and a dot screen coarse enough to see / Sound effects hand lettered in capitals inside an outlined burst / Figures stepping out over the panel border, with speed lines drawn along the direction of motion

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416

Ligne Claire — Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin mural (Rue de l'Étuve, Brussels) — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 · © Ferran Cornellà

Ligne Claire

リーニュ・クレール / 1929– / Style / Illustration Styles

The style of uniform outline that Hergé established in Tintin. Nothing casts a shadow and every element carries the same line weight, a democratic picture plane whose clarity became an aesthetic, still flowing from European comics into illustration today.

Uniform-weight outlines / The absence of shadow / Flat color / Background and figure treated equally

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417

Turkish Republican Poster — Flyer for the film Ateşten Gömlek, 1932 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Turkish Republican Poster

トルコ共和国期ポスター / 1920s–1950s / Style / Regional Graphics

The early republic's advertising style built almost single-handedly by İhap Hulusi: flat figures, clean color fields and Latin-script lettering fusing graphics with the state's modernization.

Flat figure drawing / Clean color fields / The new Latin script promoted / Modernization as subject

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418

Cubism — Juan Gris, Still Life with a Guitar, 1913 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Cubism

キュビスム / 1907–1925 / Style / Avant-garde

A pictorial revolution that freed the subject from a single viewpoint, reassembling facets seen from multiple angles on one flat plane. The fractured planes and muted palette of the Analytic phase, then the newspaper collage and lettering of the Synthetic phase, gave twentieth-century graphic design its founding premise: the picture is not a window onto reality but a field of construction.

Multiple viewpoints presented at once / Subjects broken down into facets / Muted earth tones and grey gradations / Collage of newsprint and lettering

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419

Fauvism — Henri Matisse, Open Window, Collioure, 1905 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Fauvism

フォーヴィスム / 1904–1908 / Style / Avant-garde

A short-lived movement that severed colour from the depiction of its subject, slamming pure hues onto the canvas as flat planes. The brushstroke itself carries the contour, and adjacent complementaries make the surface vibrate. It became the starting point for every later design that uses colour as a device of emotion.

Pure colour straight from the tube / Complementaries set directly side by side / Bare white ground left unpainted / Rough brushstrokes doubling as contours

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420

Orphism — Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Windows on the City, 1912 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Orphism

オルフィスム / 1912–1914 / Style / Geometric Abstraction

An abstraction that returned colour and movement to Cubist fragmentation, painting light itself through rings of simultaneous contrast. Rotating discs and a refracted spectrum generate time and vibration within a static surface. One of the first practices to translate the theory of simultaneous colour contrast into form.

Concentric circles and rotating discs / Hues arranged in spectral order / Divisions made by intersecting arcs / Simultaneous contrast of colour

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421

Rayonism — Mikhail Larionov, Rayonism, Red and Blue (Beach), 1911 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Rayonism

レイヨニスム / 1912–1914 / Style / Avant-garde

A Russian abstraction that declared its subject to be not objects themselves but the crossing of light rays reflected from them. Sharp diagonal bundles of lines intersect, dissolving the object into an interference pattern of light. It marked the point where Russian abstraction broke away from Cubism.

Sharp bundles of diagonal lines / Planes formed where lines intersect / Disappearance of the object's contour / Layering of a restricted palette

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422

Purism — L'Esprit Nouveau, no. 1 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Purism

ピュリスム / 1918–1925 / Style / Modern Design Movements

A movement that attacked Cubism's drift into decoration and called for a return to forms fit for the machine age. Standardized objets-types such as bottles, glasses and guitars are painted within a horizontal-vertical order and a restrained palette. Through the journal L'Esprit Nouveau it became a norm for modern architecture and graphics.

Silhouettes of standardised everyday objects / Compositions built on horizontals and verticals / A restrained number of colours / Contour lines of overlapping forms

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423

Cloisonnism — Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon, 1888 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Cloisonnism

クロワゾニスム / 1888–1895 / Style / Fin de Siècle Art

A manner of painting named after the partitions of cloisonné enamel: flat fields of colour enclosed by heavy contour lines. It brought the way of seeing of ukiyo-e prints and stained glass into oil painting, abandoning shaded volume in favour of colour laid down from memory. The technique that prepared the flatness of the poster.

Thick, dark contour lines / Flat colour fields without shading / Decoratively simplified shapes / Colouring drawn from memory

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424

Les Nabis — Pierre Bonnard, France-Champagne poster, 1891 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Les Nabis

ナビ派 / 1888–1900 / Style / Fin de Siècle Art

A group of painters who called themselves prophets, setting out from the declaration that a picture is essentially a flat surface covered in a certain order. They extended interiors and daily life into decorative panels, lithographs, book illustration and stage design, dissolving the boundary between fine and applied art.

Compositions conceived as decorative panels / Reversals of pattern and ground / Harmonies of muted intermediate tones / Subjects of interiors and daily life

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425

Neo-Impressionism — Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–86 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Neo-Impressionism

新印象主義 / 1886–1900 / Style / Geometric Abstraction

A method that replaced Impressionist intuition with optical theory, setting down dots of unmixed pure colour to be blended on the retina. The discipline of Divisionism and Pointillism tackled, in advance, the same problems as later halftone printing, mosaic and pixel-based image construction.

Dots placed at even intervals / Vibration from juxtaposed complementaries / Pure colours never mixed / A framing effect from a dotted border

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426

Symbolism — Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, c. 1876 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Symbolism

象徴主義 / 1886–1910 / Style / Fin de Siècle Art

An international movement that sought to visualise the inner life through forms and colours suggesting dream, myth and idea, rather than describing the outer world. Blurred contours, closed eyes, ornamentalised plants and emblems are placed as presences whose meaning is never spelled out. It created the vocabulary of fin-de-siècle posters and book decoration.

Subjects of dream and myth / Contours that dissolve into vagueness / Ornamentalised plants and emblems / A deep, muted colour range

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427

Socialist Realism — Portrait of Lenin by Isaak Brodsky, 1925 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Socialist Realism

社会主義リアリズム / 1932–1988 / Style / Printmaking and Social Movements

A realism codified as the state's official style in 1934, depicting workers and leaders in idealised form. It rejected avant-garde experiment in favour of imagery legible to everyone, repeating the regime's narrative through low viewpoints, forward-striding crowds and the light of a bright future. Important as a rare case in which a state decreed a style.

Heroicised figures of workers / Monumental compositions seen from below / Healthy skin and bright light / Crowds striding forward

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428

Lettrism — grammeS, journal of the Ultra-Lettrist group, inside page — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Lettrism

レトリスム / 1946–1970s / Style / Experimental Typography

A Paris-born movement that freed the letter from its duty of carrying meaning, treating sound and shape themselves as the material of the work. From surfaces paved with unreadable characters, to hypergraphy's proliferating signs, to marks scratched directly into film stock, it expanded the experiment of handling letters as physical matter.

Surfaces paved with unreadable characters / Handwriting mixed with type / Hypergraphy of proliferating signs / Letters handled as painterly material

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429

Situationist Graphics — Internationale situationniste magazine, no. 1, 1958 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Situationist Graphics

シチュアシオニスト・グラフィックス / 1957–1972 / Layout / Printmaking and Social Movements

The practice of détournement: hijacking existing images from advertising, comics and film, and swapping only the speech-balloon text to invert their meaning. Its knack for betraying dominant imagery from the inside, at no production cost, runs in a straight line to later culture jamming and internet memes.

Appropriated images with replaced text / Comic panels and speech balloons / Long theoretical captions / The grain of rough reproduction

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430

Art Informel — Composition by Wols — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · © G.Garitan

Art Informel

アンフォルメル / 1945–1960 / Style / Postwar Abstract Painting

A postwar European abstraction that refused both geometric composition and figuration, making the surface out of matter and the traces of the act itself. Thickly piled paint, scratches, stains and tears present a state before form. The source of all design that pushes the physicality of material to the front. Tachisme names the same paintings seen from the speed of the gesture, and Lyrical Abstraction names them seen from the lyric side.

Traces of impasto and scratching / Stains that never settle into form / A range of earth and ash tones / Tears and exposure of the support

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431

Tachisme — Hans Hartung, T46-17, 1946 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0 · © Pedro Ribeiro Simões from Lisboa, Portugal

Tachisme

タシスム / 1945–1960 / Style / Postwar Abstract Painting

A European abstraction named for the tache, or stain, which gives the leading role to the chance of a brushmark and a drip. Planned composition is abandoned, and the speed at which paint lands and runs becomes the order of the surface. Within Art Informel this is the name that fixes on the swiftness of the gesture.

Accumulations of stains and drips / Marks of rapid gesture / Arrangements without a centre / Contrast with reserves of white ground

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432

Spatialism — Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Kröller-Müller Museum — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Spatialism

スパツィアリズモ / 1947–1968 / Style / Italian Avant-garde

An Italian movement that slashed and punctured the canvas to open painting from two-dimensional illusion into actual space. The darkness behind the cut appears as real depth, and the support itself becomes the work. The precedent that turned breaking a material's surface into a formal language.

Slits and punctures in the canvas / Surfaces painted a single colour / Darkness appearing behind the cuts / Presentation of the support itself

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Editorial policy

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

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