A dictionary of design styles, written from the works themselves.
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385
自動ピアノロール / 1896–1930s / Style / Notation Systems
A recording medium of rolled paper on which the punched holes are the performance itself. It marks the turn from scores read by people to codes read by machines, and it is the ancestor of the punch card and the digital sequencer.
Rows of perforations / The scrolling roll / Machine-readable music / Performance physically recorded
386
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スペクトログラム / 1940s– / Technique / Diagrammatic Expression
A visualization that maps sound onto a plane of time, frequency and intensity. From birdsong research to the DAW screen it became the standard way to see the shape of a sound, and artists have since taken to hiding pictures inside it.
The time-frequency plane / Intensity as shading / Voiceprint patterns / Hidden-image play
387
サイマティクス / 1787– / Technique / Diagrammatic Expression
The experiment of seeing sound as a pattern in matter, beginning with the Chladni figures that sand draws on a vibrating plate. Each frequency brings out its own geometry, which makes this the oldest device for witnessing how sound and form correspond.
Chladni figures / Standing waves in sand and powder / A pattern for every frequency / The directness of the apparatus
388
ラバノーテーション / 1928– / Style / Notation Systems
A notation that turns bodily movement into one vertical staff read from the bottom upward. The shape of a symbol carries direction, its shading carries level, its length carries duration, and its position across the staff says which part of the body moves.
Symbols stacked without gaps on a vertical staff read from the bottom upward / Symbol shapes giving nine directions, with the centre line separating right from left / Shading inside each symbol standing for low, middle or high level / Symbol length equal to duration, with tick marks for beats and bar lines crossing the staff
389
折り図 / 1950s– / Style / Diagrammatic Expression
The dotted-line-and-arrow language systematized by Akira Yoshizawa for writing three-dimensional folding onto flat pages. Mountain and valley folds read across languages, and the crease pattern became an object of mathematics.
Mountain and valley line styles / Arrows guiding each step / Sequential step diagrams / The geometry of crease patterns
390
編み図 / 19th century– / Style / Notation Systems
The sheet music of handwork, where stitches become symbols laid out on a grid. Japan's JIS stitch symbols compress each operation into one figure, so the pattern is visible before it is read, unlike the written-out instructions relied on in the West.
The grid of stitch symbols / One stitch, one symbol / Row and stitch coordinates / Correspondence to the finished fabric
391
点字 / 1824– / Style / Symbol Systems
A tactile writing system Louis Braille designed at fifteen, giving every letter a two-by-three cell of dots. Sizing that cell to a single fingertip is a rare case of ergonomics and typography arriving at the same answer.
The 2x3 dot cell / Dimensions fit to the fingertip / Left-to-right tactile reading / The materiality of embossing
392
国際信号旗 / 1857– / Style / Symbol Systems
The flag system for spelling letters and set phrases at sea. High-contrast geometry chosen solely for distant legibility became a masterpiece collection of abstraction born from function.
High-contrast geometry / Designed for distance / One flag, one letter / Hoists strung to the masthead
393
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天気図 / 1851– / Style / Diagrammatic Expression
The atmosphere drawn on one sheet with isobars, front symbols and weather signs. Making invisible pressure fields visible through the density of curves became the public's scientific graphic, from newspapers to television.
The density of isobars / Cold and warm front symbols / The weather-symbol system / Highs and lows labeled
394
回路図 / 1890s– / Style / Diagrammatic Expression
An engineering language that draws circuits with standardized symbols and orthogonal lines. Discarding physical placement to record only connection, it arrived at a topological way of drawing well before the transit map did.
Standardized component symbols / Orthogonal wiring / Junction dots / Abstraction from physical layout
395
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フローチャート / 1921– / Layout / Diagrammatic Expression
The Gilbreths invented this process diagram for work analysis. Its grammar of shapes gives a diamond to every decision and a rectangle to every process, and by way of programming it became the common language for thinking in steps.
A grammar of shapes / The decision diamond / Arrows of flow / Start and end terminals
396
洗濯表示 / 1958– / Style / Symbol Systems
Four figures, the tub, the triangle, the square and the circle, carry garment care across any border. Washing, bleaching, drying and ironing all compress onto a tag a few millimeters wide, information design worked at the smallest possible area.
Tub, triangle, square and circle / The prohibition X and temperature dots / Compression into millimeters / International standardization
397
錬金術記号 / medieval–18th century / Style / Symbol Systems
The signs that recorded substances and operations between secrecy and sharing. The system binding planets to metals vanished into chemical notation, but survives as the graphics of mystery, quoted to this day.
Planet-metal correspondences / Geometry composed with crosses / Cipher-like secrecy / Tables handed down
398
校正記号 / 16th century– / Technique / Symbol Systems
A sign language that corrects a typeset page through dialogue with its margins. The back-and-forth of deletion and stet, and the Western dele, were refined alongside the history of printing into an editing protocol that stands behind every typeset work, this dictionary included.
Lines pairing text and margin / Deletion and restoration exchanges / Insertion and transposition signs / The hierarchy of red
399
アクア / 2000–2014 / Style / Apple UI
Mac OS X's design language of buttons you want to lick. Jelly gloss, pinstripes, deep shadows and the genie effect staged digital components as objects you could touch, and set the terms for UI throughout the 2000s. What the web made of it with images is Web 2.0 Gloss.
Gel-gloss buttons / Pinstriped grounds / Deep drop shadows / Metaphors of water and light
400
ルナ / 2001–2006 / Style / Microsoft UI
Windows XP's look: blue taskbar, green Start button, rounded windows and a meadow wallpaper repainting the gray office machine as household optimism.
The blue taskbar / The green Start button / Rounded frames / Meadow-and-sky optimism
401
エアロ / 2006–2012 / Style / Microsoft UI
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
402
メトロ / 2010–2015 / Style / Microsoft UI
Windows Phone's flat language, which cast type rather than icons in the lead role. Large typography, flat-color live tiles and layouts that run off the edge of the screen transplanted the clarity of transit signage into UI, opening the flat era ahead of iOS 7.
Type as the hero / Flat-color tiles / Compositions running off-screen / Chrome eliminated
403
ブラシドメタル / 1999–2007 / Style / Apple UI
The hairline-metal windows of iTunes and Safari: a skeuomorphic branch that speaks an app's purpose through material, bringing pro-gear trust to the desktop.
Hairline metal surfaces / Rivet-like details / Equipment metaphors / Gray tonal ranges
404
ヴォーティシズム / 1914–1918 / Style / Avant-garde
Britain's avant-garde detonated in the magazine BLAST: diagonal machine-cut lines, blunt heavy type and lists of blasts and blessings turning typography into a declaration of war.
Diagonal machine-cut lines / Blunt heavy type / The BLAST/BLESS lists / The dynamics of the vortex
405
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コブラ / 1948–1951 / Style / Avant-garde
A postwar avant-garde that linked Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Holding up the directness of children's drawings and folk art, it painted rough-brushed creatures in primary colors and turned distrust of refinement into an international style.
The directness of children's drawing / Rough-brushed creatures / Colliding primaries / The refusal of planning
406
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エミグレ / 1984–2005 / Style / Type Classification
The magazine and foundry that turned digital coarseness into an aesthetic the moment the Mac appeared: bitmap faces, colliding layers and a defense of difficulty at the center of the 1990s design debates.
Bitmap typefaces / Colliding layers / An experiment per issue / Challenges to readability
407
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アメリカ近代ブックジャケット / 1940s–1950s / Style / Publishing and Editing
The jacket style Lustig built at New Directions: suggestion by sign and abstraction instead of illustration, turning literary covers into small modern artworks and raising postwar American book design.
Abstract suggestion of content / Compositions of sign and shape / Hand lettering with type / Series coherence
408
恩地孝四郎の装幀 / 1910s–1950s / Style / Publishing and Editing
Book design that treats the cover as a print in its own right rather than as a frame for a picture. Representational illustration gives way to abstract shapes and flat colour, and the title lettering sits inside that surface as one of its parts.
Covers built only from abstract shapes and flat colour, with no representational illustration / Title lettering drawn by hand rather than set in type, sitting on the same surface as the image / Few colours, with form made by overlapping planes instead of outlines / The bare colour of the paper left showing, with the image laid straight onto it
409
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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
410
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
411
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
412
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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
413
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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
414
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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)
415
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
416
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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
417
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
418
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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
419
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
420
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
421
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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
422
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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
423
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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
424
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
425
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
426
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
427
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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
428
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
429
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
430
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
431
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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
432
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
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