Design Styles Explained
12 Movements and Where Their Names Come From

It is a period, not a style: the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837 to 1901. It covers several very different looks, from the Gothic Revival, one of the new styles of Victorian England, to Arts and Crafts, which by the close of the 19th century had become the dominant style for middle- and upper-class British homes. The most common mix-up: a poster with flowing plant tendrils and a woman with swirling hair is usually Art Nouveau, not Victorian.

SOURCE The Royal Family (royal.uk); V&A on the Gothic Revival and on Arts and Crafts.

Yes. Tate describes Art Nouveau as a style that emerged in the 1890s, with sinuous lines and flowing shapes based on plants; it flourished in the first decades of the 20th century and was killed off by the First World War. Tate's key examples include Guimard's Paris Métro entrances and Tiffany glass; the V&A adds the poster artist Alphonse Mucha. The name is usually traced to Siegfried Bing's Paris gallery, which he opened in 1895 and called L'Art Nouveau, though a Belgian journal had used the phrase in the 1880s.

SOURCE Tate, "Art Nouveau"; V&A.

Yes, as a rule. Tate calls Art Deco a design style of the 1920s and 1930s with a geometric character, which it puts down to the influence of Cubism, though plant forms and curves remained in some Art Deco design. New York's Chrysler Building, built 1928–30, is described by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission as one of the outstanding examples of Art Deco architecture.

SOURCE Tate, "Art Deco"; New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (1978).

The name came decades later. In its own day the look was often called style moderne. "Art Deco" is short for the 1925 Paris exhibition, the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. The short name appeared in the title of a 1966 exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and Bevis Hillier's 1968 book, Art Deco of the 20s and 30s, is credited with making it the style's name.

SOURCE The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission; Art Deco Society of Los Angeles.

It was a school first. The Bauhaus was established by Walter Gropius at Weimar in 1919, moved to Dessau in 1925–6 and to Berlin in 1932, where it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. The name joins the German words for building (bau) and house (haus). The look people now call "Bauhaus" takes its name from the school, whose influence, in Tate's word, was immense.

SOURCE Tate, "Bauhaus".

The name has more than one origin story. Tate traces it to Le Corbusier's béton brut, French for raw concrete, with a deliberate pun on "brutal"; his Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, inaugurated in 1952, is called a founding work of Brutalism by the Fondation Le Corbusier. The Swedish architect Hans Asplund later said he coined "new brutalism" in 1950, in a playful comment on Villa Göth, a dark-brick house in Uppsala; his account was published in the Architectural Review in 1956. The first reference in England that Irénée Scalbert records is Alison Smithson's 1953 description of a house project in Soho, and the critic Reyner Banham made it famous with his essay "The New Brutalism" in 1955. Tate says Banham gave the French word a punning twist, to express the horror with which this concrete architecture was greeted in Britain. Tate does not mention Asplund, and Asplund's is his own later account, so we leave the question open: what is clear is that the phrase existed before Banham made it famous.

SOURCE Tate, "Brutalism"; Fondation Le Corbusier; SOS Brutalism, "Villa Göth"; Irénée Scalbert, "The New Brutalism 1953-1956".

The phrase existed, but it was rare. Merriam-Webster dates its first known use to 1953. It caught on after the writer Cara Greenberg's 1984 book, Mid-Century Modern: Furniture of the 1950s. Greenberg has said her book popularised the term and that she was not aware of its earlier use when she and her editor chose the title.

SOURCE Merriam-Webster; Cara Greenberg, interviewed by Dezeen (2024).

The group was from Milan; the name nods to Tennessee and to Egypt. Ettore Sottsass met a group of younger designers in his Milan apartment in December 1980, and their first collection opened at the Arc '74 showroom in Milan in September 1981. The name came from a Bob Dylan song, "Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again)", stuck on repeat on Sottsass's record player. The writer Barbara Radice, who was there, said everyone liked the name for its mix of blues, Tennessee, rock'n'roll, American suburbs and Egypt's ancient capital.

SOURCE Design Museum, London; Memphis Milano.

Helvetica is a product of it, not the whole of it. The Swiss Style, also called the International Typographic Style, is known for the grid, and usually involves an asymmetrical layout, sans-serif type and a preference for photographs over illustrations. Helvetica was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann, director of the Haas type foundry, as Neue Haas Grotesk, and renamed Helvetica in 1961.

SOURCE Print magazine (2020); The Brooklyn Rail (2007).

The word is from 1889–90. The physician Henry Colley March coined skeuomorph in "The Meaning of Ornament", in the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society's Transactions for 1889, printed in 1890. He meant ornament that comes from the way things used to be made: the look of binding, basketry, wattlework or weaving carried over into other objects. Apple's textured software made the word widely known; TIME repeated a legend in 2013 that the leather stitching in Apple's calendar app was based on the upholstery in Steve Jobs's jet. In June 2013 Apple unveiled iOS 7, completely redesigned with what it called a cleaner, simpler look.

SOURCE March, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society (1890); TIME (2013); Apple (2013).

The name is new; the look is not. The name is credited to the designer Michał Malewicz, and the style became popular after Apple's macOS Big Sur update in 2020. A "glass" look was already part of Windows Vista's Aero interface, which reached consumers on 30 January 2007. The look came back with a new word.

SOURCE Interaction Design Foundation; Microsoft.

It began as an art movement in the United States. Tate describes Minimalism as abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s. It emerged in the late 1950s with artists such as Frank Stella, whose Black Paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959, and flourished with Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Robert Morris. Tate traces its influences to earlier abstract art, including the Russian Constructivist and Suprematist movements of the 1910s and 1920s. The phrase "less is more" is older still: it is a line in Robert Browning's 1855 poem Andrea del Sarto.

SOURCE Tate, "Minimalism"; Browning, Andrea del Sarto (1855).