Avant-garde
前衛
Dictionary entry
- Constructivism 1910s–1930s / Style
Turns a message into motion with diagonals and hard contrast.
- Experimental Type 1980s– / Style
Pushes letters from something read toward something seen and felt.
- Post-Modernism 1970s–1990s / Style
Doubts the single right answer and mixes quotation, irony and ornament as play.
- Deconstructivism 1980s– / Style
Dismantles an achieved order and makes tension and instability the new structure.
- Dada 1916–1920s / Style
Deliberately dislocates meaning and order, making authority itself the material of the joke.
- Italian Futurism 1909–1940s / Style
Converts speed, noise and shock into the size and trajectory of letters, setting the quiet page in motion.
- Expressionism 1905–1930s / Style
Paints what was felt rather than what was seen — warped form, violent strokes, unnatural color moving the age's anxiety straight onto the surface.
- Surrealism 1924–1950s / Style
The movement that forced reality's objects into impossible meetings under the logic of dream and the unconscious. Dépaysement spread from painting into photography, film and advertising as the grammar of impossible adjacency.
- Vorticism 1914–1918 / Style
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.
- Cubism 1907–1925 / Style
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.
- Fauvism 1904–1908 / Style
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.
- Merz 1919–1948 / Style
A one-man movement flying a word clipped from a bank advertisement as its banner, building compositions solely from refuse—tickets, wrapping paper, torn type. Its attitude of treating rubbish as building material, and its abstract placement of typographic fragments, decisively shaped the vocabulary of collage and magazine design.