Diagrammatic Expression
図解表現
Dictionary entry
- Isometric Illustration technical drawing–digital / Technique
Keeps depth while looking down from above, explaining relationships among many parts in a single image.
- Hatsusaburō Panoramic Map 1913–1950s / Style
The tourist bird's-eye map style perfected by Hatsusaburō Yoshida: extravagantly curved horizons, exaggerated landmarks and a view that pulls distant cities into one sheet, turning Taishō and Shōwa era travel into pictorial maps.
- Celestial Atlas 17th–19th century / Style
The Baroque celestial atlas layering constellation mythology over observation. Cellarius's Harmonia Macrocosmica marks the summit of an age when scientific diagram could also be decorative art.
- Anatomical Illustration 1543– / Style
The style Vesalius's Fabrica established: muscled bodies posing in landscapes. Scientific accuracy cohabiting with theatrical staging governed the grammar of anatomical plates for centuries.
- Portolan Chart 13th–17th century / Style
The medieval working sea chart crossed by radiating rhumb lines: coastlines and place names in precise sequence on vellum, flags and monsters in the margins — cartography before use and ornament divided.
- Spectrogram 1940s– / Technique
Sound mapped onto a plane of time, frequency and intensity. From birdsong research to the DAW screen, the standard way of seeing the shape of sound — complete with artists hiding pictures inside it.
- Cymatics 1787– / Technique
Seeing sound as material pattern, beginning with Chladni's sand figures on vibrating plates: geometry appearing at each frequency — the oldest instrument for witnessing the correspondence of sound and form.
- Origami Diagram 1950s– / Style
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.
- Weather Map 1851– / Style
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.
- Circuit Diagram 1890s– / Style
Engineering's language of standardized symbols and orthogonal lines. Discarding physical placement to record only connection — a topology of drawing that preceded even the transit diagram.
- Flowchart 1921– / Layout
The process drawing the Gilbreths invented for work analysis. The grammar of shapes — diamond for decision, rectangle for process — passed through programming to become the common language of thinking in steps.