Twenty Design Styles

From the empty page of minimalism to the ornament of Victorian print: where each style came from, how to spot it, and how designers make it today.

Design · Visual styles · 20 min

A design style is a set of choices that travel together: a palette, a kind of type, a way of filling or emptying a page, and a mood people recognise in a second. Knowing the styles by name helps you brief a client, search for references and break the rules on purpose. This post walks through twenty of them, from the strict grid of Swiss design to the glowing ribbons of aurora gradients. For each one you get a short history, the signs that give it away, a recipe of colours, type and tools, and a poster drawn in that style. **All twenty posters are original illustrations made for this post**, so they show the language of each style without copying anyone's art.

Styles are rarely invented from nothing. Most have a root moment, such as a movement, a new technology or a film, and then return years later when a new generation finds them. The chart lines the twenty up by those roots: Victorian ornament from the 1830s, Surrealism from André Breton's 1924 manifesto, Swiss design from 1950s Zürich and Basel, pixel art from late-1970s arcade machines, and the newest, glassmorphism and aurora gradients, from the screens of the late 2010s. The hollow dots mark revivals, and many arrive two to four decades after the original, once a look is old enough to feel nostalgic but not yet historical.

Minimalism

Minimalism strips a design down until every remaining element has a job. It grew out of 1960s Minimal art, where Donald Judd and Agnes Martin reduced sculpture and painting to boxes, grids and lines, and it found its design motto in Dieter Rams's *Weniger, aber besser*: less, but better. On a page that means generous empty space, one or two typefaces, a strict alignment and neutral colours with a single accent. The empty space is not leftover; it is the strongest element on the poster, pushing the eye straight to the red circle. Product sites, apps and luxury packaging speak this language because it reads as calm and confident. Its risk is blandness: with so little on the page, every spacing and type decision is exposed. Figma and Illustrator are the usual tools, and the real work happens in the spacing values rather than in the drawing.

Maximalism

Maximalism is the reply the architect Robert Venturi gave to "less is more" in 1966: "Less is a bore." It celebrates pattern on pattern, clashing colour, layered ornament and type that shouts. The Memphis Group, founded in Milan in 1981 by Ettore Sottsass, made it famous with squiggles, terrazzo prints and candy colours, and it has returned in fashion, interiors and brand identities since the late 2010s. Good maximalism is still organised. In the poster, the rays, dots, flowers and stripes all repeat the same four colours, and the type sits dead centre, so the chaos has a spine. Without that limit it turns into noise. Designers build it in Illustrator with pattern swatches and the Repeat tools, then layer textures and photography in Photoshop.

Surreal design

Surreal design borrows the logic of dreams: ordinary objects in impossible places, scale that makes no sense, light that follows its own rules. The movement began with André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and painters such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte gave it its signature of crisp, realistic rendering applied to absurd ideas. That combination is still the key. The door in the illustration is drawn plainly, with a believable shadow on the floor, which is exactly why the night sky inside it, the staircase into a cloud and the eye in the sky feel unsettling. Today the style lives on album covers, fashion campaigns and social media art, usually built by compositing photographs in Photoshop or by modelling a scene in Blender or Cinema 4D. Generative tools such as Photoshop's Generative Fill make the ideas quicker to sketch, but the strongest surreal images still start from one clear, strange idea.

Swiss design

Swiss design, also called the International Typographic Style, came out of Zürich and Basel in the 1950s. Josef Müller-Brockmann, Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder built it on the grid, flush-left text with a ragged right edge, objective photography and sans-serif type; Helvetica and Univers were both released in 1957 and became its signature faces. The result looks rational because it is: every element sits on a column, and the asymmetry is calculated. In the poster, the huge lowercase word and the tilted red bar look free, but the word, the text blocks and the small labels all start on the faint six-column grid behind them. Müller-Brockmann's book *Grid Systems in Graphic Design* (1981) is still the manual. In practice you set up layout grids in InDesign or Figma first, choose one sans-serif family, and let size and position do the work that colour and ornament do in other styles.

Y2K design

Y2K design captures the optimism of the turn of the millennium, roughly 1997 to 2004, when the internet was new and the future looked shiny. Its ingredients are liquid chrome type, iridescent pastels, bubbles, translucent plastic like Apple's 1998 iMac G3, wireframe globes and sparkles everywhere. It ran through music videos, mobile phone screens and early websites, then came back strongly around 2020 through fashion and social media, often led by people too young to remember the original. The chrome on the "2000" here is just a gradient with a sharp dark band in the middle, the same trick designers once pulled off with Photoshop's gradient and Bevel and Emboss tools. Today Blender and Cinema 4D render real chrome, while Illustrator or Figma handle the flat pastel layers around it.

Editorial

Editorial design is the craft of magazines, newspapers and long reads: making a lot of text and a few strong images feel like one story. Its modern form owes much to Alexey Brodovitch, art director of *Harper's Bazaar* from 1934 to 1958, who used white space, cropped photography and dramatic scale. The signs are a big masthead, often in a high-contrast serif, one commanding image, cover lines in a clear hierarchy, and small details such as issue numbers and a barcode. The cover here belongs to a magazine that doesn't exist, but it follows the real conventions: the model's hair overlaps the masthead, the headline is the second-largest thing on the page, and small sans-serif lines support it. Adobe InDesign is the industry standard for this work, with Affinity Publisher and QuarkXPress as alternatives, and the style has moved onto the web as long-form article layouts like this one.

Pixel art

Pixel art treats every single pixel as a deliberate brushstroke. It was born of limits: arcade machines and home consoles of the late 1970s and 1980s had tiny resolutions and small palettes, so artists placed each dot by hand. The Nintendo Entertainment System, for example, drew a picture just 256 by 240 pixels. Those limits became an aesthetic, kept alive today by games such as *Stardew Valley* (2016) and *Celeste* (2018) and by icons and avatars everywhere. Good pixel art avoids blurry edges, uses a handful of colours and suggests detail rather than drawing it; the scene here sits on a 40 by 50 grid with a limited palette, shading done by swapping one colour for a darker one, and a checkerboard dither where the sky bands meet. Aseprite is the favourite tool, with Pyxel Edit and Photoshop's Pencil tool as alternatives. Always enlarge pixel art with nearest-neighbour scaling so each pixel stays sharp.

Clay style

Clay style looks soft enough to squeeze: rounded shapes, matte surfaces, pastel colours, gentle shadows and a cheerful, toy-like character. Its roots are in stop-motion animation such as Aardman's Wallace and Gromit, first seen in 1989, but the recent trend comes from 3D illustration. From around 2020, apps and websites filled up with puffy rendered characters and icons, and in interface design the look picked up the name "claymorphism". The effect depends on light more than shape. Each blob here is a radial gradient with a bright spot at the top left and a darker edge, plus a soft shadow underneath, which is a hand-made version of what a 3D renderer calculates. Blender, Cinema 4D and the browser-based Spline are the common tools; in CSS, two inner shadows and one outer shadow on a rounded box give a flat version of the same feel.

Glassmorphism

Glassmorphism makes interface panels look like frosted glass: a translucent card that blurs the colourful shapes behind it, finished with a thin light border and a soft highlight. Microsoft's Aero Glass in Windows Vista (2007) and the Acrylic material in its Fluent Design System (2017) were early versions, and Apple's macOS Big Sur made it fashionable in 2020, the same year the name "glassmorphism" spread among designers. It only works when there is something vivid behind the glass, which is why the coloured blobs here keep drifting behind the card. On the web the whole effect is one CSS property, backdrop-filter: blur(), and in Figma it is the Background blur effect. The danger is legibility: text over a blurry, moving background can fail contrast checks, so keep the glass slightly opaque and the text bold.

Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is the look of "high tech, low life": rain-slick streets, towers of neon signs, deep purples cut by electric magenta and cyan. It comes from fiction more than from design, above all Ridley Scott's *Blade Runner* (1982), William Gibson's novel *Neuromancer* (1984) and Katsuhiro Otomo's *Akira* (1988), and the video game *Cyberpunk 2077* refreshed it for a new audience in 2020. Its graphic signs are glow, glitch and darkness. The title here is three copies of the same word, nudged apart in magenta, cyan and white to imitate a misaligned screen, and each sign's glow is a blurred copy laid under a sharp line. Designers build this in Photoshop with layer glows, in After Effects with glow and RGB-split effects, and in Blender or Unreal Engine for full 3D cities.

Pop art

Pop art took the imagery of advertising and comic books and hung it in galleries. It began with the Independent Group in London in the 1950s, where Richard Hamilton made his famous collage in 1956, and exploded in 1960s New York with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Its language is easy to spot: flat primary colours, heavy black outlines, speech bubbles, sound effects and Ben-Day dots, the printing method Benjamin Day introduced in 1879 to build tones from small coloured dots. Everything in the poster, from the dot field to the burst behind "POW!", is a pattern or a flat shape with a thick outline. Photoshop's Color Halftone filter and Illustrator's halftone patterns recreate the dots, and the secret is restraint with colour: three inks and black are enough.

Retro

Retro design borrows from a past many viewers remember fondly, most often the 1950s to the 1980s. This poster leans on the 1970s: warm oranges, browns and mustard, stacked rainbow arches, chunky rounded lettering and a layer of grain that imitates old print. Retro differs from a historical style like Victorian because it cares less about accuracy than about feeling; it picks a few signals of an era and exaggerates them. Brands use it for nostalgia and warmth, which is why it shows up on food packaging, craft drinks and music. The secret ingredient is imperfection: a slight texture, a palette faded as if by sunlight, edges that aren't too crisp. Procreate and Photoshop with texture brushes add the wear, type foundries sell many fonts revived from old catalogues, and the one used here, Shrikhand, is a free Google font with the same chunky feel.

Collage art

Collage builds an image from fragments: torn paper, cut photographs, newsprint, tape and paint. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso glued paper into their pictures from 1912, and the Dada artists, Hannah Höch above all, turned photomontage into a sharp political tool. Collage feels handmade and a little rebellious because the cuts show; edges are rough, scales clash and nothing pretends to be one photograph. In the poster every paper shape has a torn outline and a slight rotation, the tape is translucent, and the letters look cut from different magazines, the ransom-note style that punk flyers made famous in the late 1970s. Some designers still work with scissors and a scanner. Digitally, Photoshop layer masks and scanned paper textures do the job, and Procreate is popular for building collages on an iPad.

Vector art

Vector art is built from mathematical paths instead of pixels, so it scales from a phone icon to a billboard without losing sharpness. Its curves are Bézier curves, developed by the engineer Pierre Bézier for car design at Renault in the 1960s, and Adobe Illustrator brought them to designers in 1987. The style that comes with them is clean: flat colour fills, smooth edges, geometric shapes and often no outlines at all. The landscape here is pure vector, and one hill is shown selected as it would be in an editor, with its anchor points and the handles that steer each curve; watch the handle swing and the hill reshape with it. Illustrator, Affinity Designer, the free Inkscape and Figma all work this way, and they save to SVG, the web's vector format, which is also how every picture in this post is drawn.

Futuristic

Futuristic design imagines tomorrow, and every era's tomorrow looks different. The Space Age of the 1950s and 60s gave us boomerang shapes, Googie diners and the clean white interiors of *2001: A Space Odyssey* (1968); today's version is darker and sleeker, borrowed from science-fiction film interfaces and space-agency graphics. Its signs are deep backgrounds, glowing gradients, thin lines, generous letter-spacing and wide geometric type such as Orbitron, used here. Small technical details, like coordinates, tick marks and corner brackets, suggest precision without saying anything specific. Motion matters too, so the satellite on its orbit and the scan line are part of the look. Designers draw the interface layer in Figma or Illustrator, render planets and objects in Cinema 4D or Blender, and animate screens in After Effects.

Handwritten

Handwritten design uses lettering, scripts and doodles to feel personal, as if a real person made it just for you. It has always existed on signs and posters, but it boomed in the 2010s with the hand-lettering and brush-script trend, helped by tablets: the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil arrived in 2015, and Procreate became the standard drawing app for letterers. The charm comes from irregularity, so lines wobble, baselines tilt, and words get underlined and circled the way they would in a notebook. In the illustration the doodles draw themselves in, which is how the style often appears in animation. Many brands pair one handwritten word with a tidy sans serif so the page stays readable. Letterers often sketch in Procreate and then trace the shapes as vectors in Illustrator; the font here is Caveat, a free Google font.

Bohemian

Bohemian, or boho, design takes its name from the artists who lived unconventional lives in nineteenth-century Paris, and its look from the counterculture, travel and folk crafts of the 1960s and 70s. It is warm and earthy: terracotta, sand, rust and sage, natural textures, macramé, woven kilim patterns, pampas grass, arches and suns. Rather than a strict system, boho is a mood of collected things that don't quite match. The illustration layers an arch, a sun, sage hills, swaying grasses, a macramé hanging and a woven border in six earth tones. The style is common in interiors, wedding stationery, fashion and wellness brands. Designers paint it in Procreate or Illustrator with textured brushes, and template tools such as Canva have made the boho palette widely available. When a design borrows a pattern from a specific culture, it is worth knowing where that pattern comes from.

Graffiti

Graffiti design brings the energy of the street onto the page. Modern graffiti grew up in Philadelphia and New York in the late 1960s and 1970s, when writers covered subway trains with tags, throw-ups and full-colour pieces, and the interlocking "wildstyle" letters became an art form of their own. Its signs are thick outlines, letters that lean and overlap, drips, spray haze, highlights and a brick or concrete wall behind. The "FRESH" here follows the classic build: a dark shadow offset behind, a heavy black outline, a white keyline, a gradient fill and a few sparkles, with paint drips running down. On walls, writers work with spray cans; for print and screen, artists sketch with Procreate or Photoshop spray brushes and refine the letters as vectors in Illustrator.

Aurora

Aurora design, often called aurora or mesh gradients, uses soft, glowing bands of colour that melt into each other like the northern lights. It spread across technology websites and app backgrounds from the late 2010s as a warmer alternative to flat colour, and it often moves slowly behind the content. The colours are usually greens, teals, blues and violets on a dark base, and the shapes are large and heavily blurred so no edge is visible. The illustration does exactly that: three wave shapes, each a gradient, blurred and drifting at different speeds over a night sky. In Figma the effect comes from big blurred ellipses (Layer blur), Illustrator offers Gradient Mesh and freeform gradients, and on the web it is made with CSS blur or a small WebGL shader. Keep text on a calm patch, since the bright bands lower contrast.

Victorian style

Victorian style belongs to the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837 to 1901, the age of industrial printing. New presses and chromolithography made ornament cheap, so posters and packaging filled every inch with borders, flourishes, engraved illustrations and many typefaces at once: wood type, serifs and scripts on a single sheet. The palette is deep burgundy, bottle green, gold and parchment. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement pushed back against factory-made ornament, which says something about how heavy it could become. The label here uses the conventions: symmetry, an oval medallion with engraved line shading, a ribbon banner, corner curls and three typefaces in a clear order. Today the style appears on whisky, barbershops, apothecary brands and steampunk. Designers build it in Illustrator with ornament brushes and engraving textures, and fonts such as IM Fell, a digital revival of seventeenth-century types, give the period feel.

Find your style on the map

Choosing a style starts with the feeling you need, not the trend of the year. The map places all twenty on two axes, from calm to loud and from digital to handmade, as a rough editorial guide rather than a measurement. Calm, digital styles such as minimalism, Swiss design and glassmorphism suit products that need to look trustworthy and easy to use. Loud, handmade styles such as graffiti, collage and maximalism suit brands that want to feel alive and personal. Many of the best designs mix two neighbours on the map, like a Swiss grid with one handwritten word, or a futuristic interface softened by aurora colour. Tap any dot to jump back to that style.

Sources and further reading

• Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. Purvis, *Meggs' History of Graphic Design* (Wiley, 6th ed. 2016)
• Josef Müller-Brockmann, *Grid Systems in Graphic Design* (Niggli, 1981)
• Robert Venturi, *Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture* (MoMA, 1966)
• Dieter Rams, ten principles of good design ("Weniger, aber besser")
• André Breton, *Manifeste du surréalisme* (1924)
• William Gibson, *Neuromancer* (1984); Ridley Scott, *Blade Runner* (1982)
• Michal Malewicz, "Glassmorphism in user interfaces" (UX Collective, 2020)
• Barbara Radice, *Memphis: Research, Experiences, Failures and Successes of New Design* (Rizzoli, 1984)
• Fonts used for the posters are from Google Fonts: Archivo, Playfair Display, Caveat, Press Start 2P, Orbitron, Permanent Marker, Bangers, Shrikhand, Fredoka, IM Fell English, Rubik Mono One and Amatic SC

*Every poster in this post is an original illustration drawn in your browser in the spirit of its style, not a copy of any real artwork. Dates on the timeline and positions on the map are approximate and editorial.*