A dictionary of design styles, written from the works themselves.
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Search by style name or describe what you are making. Name matches come first; purpose, desired effect and medium add relevant alternatives.
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6
モダニズム / 1920s–1970s / Style / Functionalism
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Replaces ornament with reasoned form and aims at universality. The particular answers stand as their own entries, and Bauhaus, Swiss, Minimalism and Streamline Moderne are all separate solutions arrived at from this one stance.
Simplification / Clear hierarchy / Function first / Universal forms
368
ペルシャ庭園 / 6th century BC– / Style / Garden Styles
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The origin of the chahar bagh, quartered by crossing water channels: a walled paradise of water and shade built against the desert. It gave the word paradise its meaning and the garden its archetype from Islam to the Mughals.
Fourfold division by water / Axial basins and channels / The walled paradise / Shaded avenues
457
ノヴェチェント・イタリアーノ / 1922–1943 / Style / Painting Techniques
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A movement that, after the avant-garde had dismantled form, sought a return to the mass and stillness of Italian classicism. Simplified, solid bodies, subdued earth colour and emphatically frontal composition became the vocabulary of interwar public building and mural painting. A leading case of the return to order, and one that has to be read together with its closeness to the regime.
Simplified, solid bodies / Emphatically frontal composition / Subdued earth colour / Mass recalling classical sculpture
610
古典期ギリシャ美術 / c. 480–323 BCE / Style / Historical Styles
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Classical Greek art ordered observed bodies into ideal proportion and balance, using contrapposto, calm expression and controlled movement to present citizens, gods and heroes as harmonious norms.
Contrapposto with weight on one leg and opposed shoulder and hip / Balanced anatomy combining observation and idealization / Restrained expression and clear contour even in action / Drapery revealing bodily structure and movement
492
クロスメディアバー / 2003–2013 / Layout / Platform Screen Languages
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Sony's trademarked interface language for its consoles and televisions. As the official manual puts it, the horizontal row shows system features in categories and the vertical column shows the items available under each category, and the single point where the two cross lights up gold to say where you are. Everything else stays pale blue on a dark field.
A horizontal row and a vertical column cross slightly left of center, and only the item at that crossing glows gold / Text labels appear for the selected item alone; the rest of the rows are icons only / The ground is one near black navy and the icons are thin pale blue outlines rather than filled shapes / Left and right move through categories, up and down through items, but it is the rows that slide while the crossing stays put
113
ムガル細密画 / 16th–19th centuries / Style / Persian and Indian Painting
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Condenses court life, history, nature and story into a small plane through precise brushwork, gold, pigments, ornamental borders and multiple viewpoints.
Precise brushwork / Gold and opaque watercolor / Ornamental borders / Multiple viewpoints
549
パワー・ドレッシング / 1970s–1980s / Style / Fashion History
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Dress that makes workplace authority visible. In the 1980s the sharply tailored, big-shouldered suit became a sign of upward mobility for women and men, enlarging and hardening the silhouette while also carrying the pressure to conform.
Padded jackets widening the shoulders / A fitted waist and inverted-triangle silhouette / Dark worsted cloth and pinstripes / Coordinated suit, shirt, tie or pumps
274
ロシア・イコン / 10th–17th century / continuing / Style / Icon Painting
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The icon tradition inherited from Byzantium uses reverse perspective, gold grounds and stylized bodies so that the panel becomes a window for prayer rather than a picture to look at. Rublev's Trinity marks its spiritual summit.
The timelessness of gold ground / Reverse perspective / Stylized bodies / The image as object of prayer
498
エクスプローラブル・エクスプラネーション / 2011– / Technique / Reading on the Web
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The name Bret Victor gave, in a March 2011 essay of the same title, to writing that embeds a running model inside the prose. Numbers in the body text carry a dotted underline and can be dragged, and pulling one rewrites the rest of the sentence and the figure beside it at the same time. He described the result as a written argument whose assertions are backed by explorable computational models.
Numbers inside the running text sit on a dotted underline and turn blue when touched / Dragging one of those numbers rewrites the following sentence and the neighboring figure at once / Figures are not quarantined in a separate sandbox but sit continuous with the paragraphs around them / Untouched, the piece still reads, because the default values already make the figures meaningful
182
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クーフィー体 / 8th century onward / Style / Calligraphic Traditions
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Keeps the uprights short and draws the horizontals long, massing letters of straight strokes and right angles into a band of even height.
Horizontals drawn long / Short angular uprights / Letters turning at right angles / Lines massed into an even band
210
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パッラーディオ主義 / 1550s– / 17th–18th century revival / Style / Historical Styles
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Palladio distilled proportion, the temple front and strict symmetry from Roman antiquity into a formula for the villa. His Four Books carried it to Britain and America, where it became the archetypal correct face of public architecture.
Temple-front portico / Strict symmetry / Plans from proportion / Central dome
232
ホワイトキューブ / 1930s– / Style / Exhibition Design
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White walls, even light and an unadorned room, so that only the work stands up. MoMA made it standard, and though O'Doherty's criticism exposed it as an institution disguised as neutrality, it remains the default for showing contemporary art.
White walls / Even lighting / The isolated artwork / Context erased
330
家紋 / Heian period– / Style / Symbol Systems
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Japan's crest system that geometrizes plants, animals and objects with compass and line alone. Some twenty thousand patterns designed in black-and-white reversal completed the scalable mark centuries before logo design.
Geometry within the circle / Balance in black-white reversal / Extreme abstraction of nature / Compass-and-ruler construction
360
枯山水 / Muromachi period– / Style / Garden Styles
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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
458
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イタリア合理主義 / 1926–1943 / Style / Modern Architecture
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An Italian movement that set out to make the abstraction of modern architecture and the classicism of the Mediterranean hold at the same time. What looks like a white box is in fact carrying ancient proportion in the rhythm of its bays, the depth of its overhangs and the planes of its marble. A textbook for refusing to set the modern against the traditional.
White volumes and a regular rhythm of bays / Deep overhangs and bands of shadow / Marble set against glass / Classical proportion, translated
459
ストリップト・クラシシズム / 1920s–1950s / Style / Modern Architecture
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The manner of government and memorial building in which classical architecture is shorn of ornament, leaving only proportion, axis and the rhythm of the columns. That it still reads as classical without ornament made it a cheap means of speaking authority. Important as a case in which the minimal and the intimidating live together.
The rhythm of columns stripped of ornament / A strong axis and symmetry / Smooth planes of stone / Walls without large openings
464
新古典主義 / 1760s–1830s / Style / Historical Styles
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A movement that turned back to ancient simplicity, prompted by the excavations at Pompeii and reacting against the decorative excess of Rococo. Contours are hard, color is held down, and the subjects preach civic virtue. States of the revolutionary period chose this style as their own face.
Hard, clear contour lines / A restrained number of colors / Ancient subjects and dress / Shallow, stage like space
732
リチャードソニアン・ロマネスク / 1870s–1890s / Style / Historical Styles
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A late-nineteenth-century American architectural style in which H. H. Richardson recast medieval Romanesque round arches as rough masonry, deep openings, asymmetrical towers and low-spreading masses. Rather than surface decoration, stone weight, shadow depth and broad arches grouping entrances gave churches, libraries, courthouses and stations their public force.
Broad, deeply recessed round arches grouping entrances and windows / Thick rough-faced masonry crossed by bands of contrasting stone / Asymmetrical towers with conical roofs above a low horizontal silhouette / Openings stepping back into the wall, with carving confined to capitals and voussoirs
478
文人画 / 11th century– / Style / East Asian Painting
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A Chinese painting tradition that values scholarly cultivation and personal expression. Brushwork relates to character and the study of earlier paintings, while image, poetry, calligraphy and seals interact. Detail, colour and professional practice vary by artist and period; the tradition is not limited to unpaid work by nonprofessional painters.
Calligraphic brushwork and references to earlier painting / Relations among image, poetry, calligraphy and seals / Ink tones and, in some works, light colour / Personal expression through subject and brushwork
117
リキッドガラス / 2025– / Style / Apple UI
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Unifies the floating control and navigation layer as a fluid glass material that refracts and adapts to the content beneath.
Dynamic refraction / Concentric corner radii / Floating control layers / Reflected background color
401
エアロ / 2006–2012 / Style / Microsoft UI
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The translucent glass UI of Vista and 7: frosted window frames, live thumbnails and GPU-composited depth making 'through glass' the OS's standard vocabulary.
Frosted frames / Reflections and highlights / Live thumbnails / GPU-composited depth
2
バウハウス / 1919–1933 / Style / Functionalism
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Makes function and play coexist through the circle, triangle and square.
Elementary shapes / Primary colors / Functional beauty / Visible structure
112
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イスラム幾何学文様 / 8th century– / Technique / Ornament
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Divides, repeats and combines circles, squares, polygons and stars, building infinite extension and order on a finite plane.
Compass construction / Star forms / Repeating units / Interlacing lines
222
曲木家具（トーネット） / 1859– / Technique / Furniture and Interiors
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Thonet's chair No. 14 reduced steam-bent beech to a handful of parts, the first industrial furniture to ship knocked-down and be made in quantity. Rational components and an elegant curve arrived together, which is why it is called the origin of modern design.
Steam-bent curves / Reduction to few parts / Knock-down shipping / Lightness and mass production
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