Graphic design movements18
Arts and Crafts
Flat repeating plant pattern, a heavy border, and lettering that looks hand cut.
Art Nouveau
Whiplash curves, a woman with long hair, and lettering bent to follow the line.
Vienna Secession
Art Nouveau squared off: grids of small squares, gold, and severe drawn capitals.
Glasgow Style
Tall thin verticals, a rose motif, and long stretched letterforms in a pale palette.
Art Deco
Stepped forms, a sunburst, and gold on black with everything symmetrical.
Streamline Moderne
Horizontal speed lines, rounded corners and chrome, all leaning forward.
Bauhaus
Circle, square and triangle in primary colours, arranged off centre.
Constructivism
Hard diagonals, red and black, photomontage, and type set at an angle.
De Stijl
Black rules, white fields, and three primary rectangles. Nothing else.
Swiss StyleITS
A strict grid, one accent colour, and Helvetica doing all the talking.
Mid-century Modern Graphic
Flat cut shapes, a warm muted palette, and printed texture over the top.
Wayfinding
Looks like a transport sign: icons, arrows, colour-coded routes and a clear rule system.
Contemporary Editorial
A big elegant serif headline, one full-bleed photograph, and a lot of air.
Push Pin Studios
Flat decorative illustration in a borrowed historical style, with drawn lettering to match.
Memphis
Squiggles, confetti, clashing pastels and shapes that have no job.
New Wave Typography
The Swiss grid taken apart: letterspaced words, stepped rules and type at angles.
Grunge Typography
Layered dirt, damaged letterforms and text that fights the image.
Brutalist Graphic Design
Raw default type, heavy black blocks and layout that refuses to be pleasant.
Art movements as posters21
Japonisme
Western subject arranged the Japanese way: flat colour, a high viewpoint and asymmetric empty space.
Victorian Broadside
A wall of wood type: every line a different face, every line a different size.
Belle Epoque Lithograph
A joyful figure mid-movement, flat lithographic colour, and the title hand-drawn around her.
Pre-Raphaelite Illustration
Jewel colour, medieval dress, and a figure looking somewhere sad and specific.
Futurist
Words thrown across the sheet at speed, with force lines and no baseline.
Vorticism
Hard angular planes driving into a vortex, and enormous block capitals.
Suprematism
Flat geometric shapes floating on white, tilted, with nothing behind them.
Dada Collage
Cut newspaper, mismatched photographs and type at every angle, glued into nonsense.
Cubist Exhibition Poster
One subject broken into facets and shown from several angles at once.
Expressionist Woodcut
Gouged black lines, angular distorted figures, and white where the knife took the block away.
Neue Sachlichkeit
Cold hard-edged realism, an unflattering portrait, and a flat airless light.
Surrealist
One impossible object in an ordinary place, painted as though it were completely normal.
Orphism
Overlapping colour discs and arcs, saturated, with the colour doing all the work.
Concrete Art
A visible mathematical system: a grid of shapes built by a rule you can work out.
CoBrA
Thick raw brushwork, bright colour and figures drawn like a child would draw them.
Minimalism
One element, placed exactly, on a very large empty field.
Op Art
Black and white patterns precise enough to make the flat sheet appear to move.
Pop Art
Commercial imagery blown up: Ben-Day dots, thick black outlines and flat primaries.
Psychedelic Sixties
Melting hand lettering that fills every gap, in colours that vibrate against each other.
Big Eyes
A large-eyed melancholy child, painted in murky colour against a bleak background.
Graffiti and Street Art
Spray paint on a real wall: interlocking letterforms, drips, overspray and paste-up edges.
Print and reproduction looks11
Risograph
Two or three fluorescent inks, misregistered, with grain and visible overprint.
Screenprint Pop
Thick opaque ink in big flat areas, with hard edges and one layer slightly out.
Halftone Newsprint
A photograph reduced to coarse dots on grey paper, with ink bleeding into the fibres.
Mimeograph
Faint purple ink on cheap paper, blotchy, with letters that have started to fill in.
Stamp and Letterpress
Bold inked shapes with slight imperfections, pressed into thick paper you can feel.
Etching and Engraving
Tone built entirely from fine parallel lines, the way a banknote is drawn.
Cyanotype
White lines on deep Prussian blue, with brush marks at the edge of the coating.
Cut Paper
Organic shapes cut with scissors, laid flat on colour, with the scissor marks left in.
Botanical Scientific Illustration
A specimen drawn precisely, labelled, and laid out like a page from a reference book.
Monochrome and One Accent
Black, white, and one loud colour used only where it has to be looked at.
Penny Dreadful
A lurid wood-engraved scene at the worst possible moment, under a screaming title.
Handmade and folk9
Child Paint with Pro Typography
A genuine child's poster paint picture, with sharp professional typography laid over it.
School Cutout Collage
Torn sugar paper stuck down with visible glue, cotton wool clouds and wonky letters.
Crayon Folk Handmade
Wax crayon on rough paper, drawn by somebody who is not a drawer.
Punk Photocopied Fanzine
Third-generation photocopy: crushed blacks, ransom-note letters and everything slightly skewed.
Zine Cut-and-Paste
Everything literally stuck down: photocopies, tape, handwriting and typewriter slips.
Calavera
Skeletons doing ordinary things, cut as a relief print in black with hot flat colour.
Pennsylvania Dutch
Symmetrical folk motifs, hex stars and blackletter, drawn as a hand-illuminated certificate.
Madhubani
Every gap filled with pattern, figures with huge outlined eyes, and a double-ruled border.
Rosemaling
Flowing C and S scrolls of painted flowers, with a loaded brush and a visible highlight stroke.
Place and era14
Polish Poster School
A painted metaphor instead of the film: one strange image, hand lettering, and no stars.
East German DEFA
One bold flat graphic idea, hand-painted, on cheap paper with a limited ink budget.
German Expressionist Film Poster
Buildings that lean, shadows painted onto the walls, and a figure stretched out of shape.
Hong Kong Cinema Poster
A collage of painted faces and action, packed edge to edge, with huge Chinese characters.
Ukiyo-e Woodblock
Flat colour behind a black keyblock line, printed on absorbent paper with visible wood grain.
Taisho Modern
Japanese and Art Deco at once: a modern girl, flat colour, and vertical Deco lettering.
Japanese Minimal Poster
One quiet element, an enormous amount of empty space, and a vertical line of small type.
Golden Age Travel Poster
One idealised view, flat airbrushed colour, and the place name in big clean capitals.
Neon Diner Americana
Glowing neon tubes against a night sky, with chrome, chequerboard and a hand-painted sign.
Festival of Britain
Spindly line drawing, molecular shapes and a cheerful postwar optimism about science.
Shanghai Calendar Poster
An airbrushed woman in a qipao, soft as a photograph, selling something in the corner.
Italian Futurist Typography
Futurism grown up and sold: mechanical letterforms built from blocks, in red and black.
Brazilian Tropicalia
Tropical colour, collage and psychedelia crashed together, deliberately and joyfully.
Zagreb School Animation
A wiry expressive line, flat washes that miss the edges, and a lot of bare paper.
Propaganda and protest7
WPA New Deal
Bold flat silkscreen shapes, a confident diagonal, and a short instruction in friendly capitals.
Soviet Propaganda
A heroic worker painted from below, red everywhere, and one shouted slogan.
Soviet Space Programme
A cosmonaut against the stars, a red orbital arc, and an optimism about outer space.
North Korean Propaganda
Saturated painted figures mid-stride, a rising diagonal, and colour turned past realism.
Atelier Populaire
One black stencil image on coloured paper, screened overnight, with a handwritten line.
Cuban OSPAAAL
Flat psychedelic colour, a symbolic silhouette and a slogan, printed as a magazine insert.
ACT UP
One accusation set in plain heavy type, on black, with a single graphic symbol.
Music scenes10
Rave and Acid Graphics
Neon on black, a smiley, warped type and every effect the software had.
Drum and Bass Flyer
Early 3D renders and fractals, chrome type, and a much darker palette than the rave next door.
Reggae Sound System Flyer
Red gold and green, a lion, and every sound system named in a different typeface.
80s NYC Hip Hop Flyer
Hand-drawn symmetrical borders, airbrushed display lettering, and a full bill in black and white.
Factory Records
Almost no information, borrowed classical or industrial imagery, and a catalogue number.
4AD Records
A photograph of something unidentifiable, layered and soft, with type dissolved into it.
Festival Indie Lineup
One central graphic, then the whole bill stacked underneath in strict size order.
Heavy Metal Concert Poster
One airbrushed apocalypse, a spiked blackletter logo, and everything in shades of black.
Blaxploitation Movie Poster
A painted hero in a dynamic pose, hot funk colours, and a tagline in chunky 70s type.
Skateboard Graphics
A cartoon or a logo pushed to the edge of taste, screened flat on a coloured ground.
Screen and digital10
NASA Worm Modernist
One continuous rounded logotype, a strict grid, and a red stripe holding it together.
Psychedelic Seventies Corporate
Rainbow stripe arcs, bulbous bubble type and an earth-tone palette from a brochure.
Designers Republic
Fake corporate marks, warning symbols, numbers and Japanese text, all with no meaning.
Y2K Chrome
Liquid chrome, lens flares and translucent blue, from a moment that thought the future was glass.
Vaporwave
A Greek bust, a pink and cyan grid, Japanese text and the melancholy of a dead shopping mall.
Synthwave
A neon grid running to a striped sunset, chrome type, and a purple sky full of haze.
Glitch Art
An image breaking: channels shifted, scan lines displaced, blocks repeating where data was lost.
Pixel Art
Every pixel placed on purpose, on a small grid, with a palette of sixteen colours.
Low Poly
Everything made of flat triangles, each a single colour, with the facets clearly visible.
Contemporary Flat Illustration
Clean vector shapes, a soft modern palette, and figures simplified past anatomy.
Three rules under all of them
- Name the style, then its parts
- A model answers to Art Deco. It answers better when the next clause names the shapes, the palette and the type.
- Say where the words go
- Without a place for them, the title lands on top of the picture. Give it a band, a panel or a cartouche to sit in.
- Ask for the defect
- Clean is the average. Misregistration, paper grain and a torn edge only arrive when the prompt asks for them by name.
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