Glasgow Style
- Mackintosh style
- Glasgow School
Tall thin verticals, a rose motif, and long stretched letterforms in a pale palette.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Glasgow Style is the quiet version of Art Nouveau. It uses the same period vocabulary and then removes nine tenths of it, so what is left has room to be looked at.
The extreme height changes how a reader stands in front of it. The eye travels up and down rather than across, which makes a small sheet feel like a panel in a building.
How it works
Go tall and narrow, and let the stems run the full height. Two or three vertical lines carry the whole composition.
The rose is a geometric spiral, not a drawn flower. Keep the motifs few and repeat them: a rose, a teardrop, a pair of facing figures.
The lettering is stretched vertically, with very tall capitals and crossbars pushed high or low. The palette is pale and slightly grey: oatmeal, rose pink, sage, and a soft black rather than a hard one.
When to use it
Use it for a tea room, a recital, an exhibition, a wedding, anything that wants to feel calm and considered.
Leave it alone when the poster has to shout. The pale palette has almost no contrast at a distance, and the stretched lettering is slow.
Told apart from its neighbours
Art Nouveau fills the sheet with curve and colour. Glasgow keeps the same shapes and empties the sheet around them.
Vienna Secession is the other restrained cousin, but it fills its space with a square grid. Glasgow leaves the space blank.
Where it was used
Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald, with Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair, worked as The Glasgow Four from the 1890s. The Scottish Musical Review poster of 1896 is the sheet everyone borrows from, and the Willow Tearooms carried the same stretched geometry into a room you could sit in.
- Charles Rennie Mackintosh
- Margaret Macdonald
- The Glasgow Four
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own event, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
poster for <event>, Glasgow Style, very tall narrow composition, long vertical stems rising the full height, stylised geometric rose motif, elongated hand-drawn capitals with exaggerated height, pale palette of oatmeal rose pink sage and soft black, large areas of empty paper, <date, time and place> in a small stacked block
What goes wrong
The model returns ordinary Art Nouveau: curling stems, a full sheet, saturated colour. Ask for a very tall narrow composition, only two or three vertical stems, and large areas of empty paper.
The other failure is a drawn botanical rose. Say the rose is a flat geometric spiral of two or three concentric curves.
Leave out
dense pattern, bright saturated colour, wide horizontal layout
Watch for
The height is the style. A square crop kills it before the motifs get a chance.
Questions
Print it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
