Styles gallery
The same drawing of me, redrawn by code in twenty visual styles, from a cave wall to a handheld screen. Scroll to jump from one era into the next. Nothing here is an image: every plate is live JavaScript on a canvas.
Tap a plate to watch the jump
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Tap a plate to watch the jump
Tap a plate to watch the jump
Tap a plate to watch the jump
Tap a plate to watch the jump
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Tap a plate to watch the jump
Tap a plate to watch the jump
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Select a plate to open its insight panel.
Reading room
The notes behind the gallery, with the plates as evidence. Every claim is cited in the research; the pictures are drawn live by the same engine.
I started this gallery expecting style to be a matter of taste. The research says otherwise. Almost every style on this page is a technology plus one rule about the human body. Blown ochre and a silhouette. A three-stage kiln and a profile. Pot-metal glass and a lead line. A burin and a swelling stroke. A silkscreen and a colour cap. A phosphor and a four-shade budget.
That is why the tombstone under every plate has a "drawn with" line. It names the technique this plate borrows, because the technique is the style. Change the tool and the look follows; keep the tool and even a very different culture arrives at something similar.
The figure in every plate is the same rig, the same geometry, the same glasses and quiff. Only the medium changes. The rule each era applied to a body is the second half of its style, and the five poses of the jump cycle play against it.
Egypt shows each part from its clearest angle. Byzantium faces you and will not move. Gothic figures sway from the hip. Constructivism tilts the whole body onto a diagonal. A sprite has four frames and no in-betweens.
Palette is not taste either, it is supply. Ice Age painters had earths and soot, so there is no blue, no green and no white until Egyptian blue is manufactured around 2500 BC. Cobalt makes Delft and Chartres blue. The same imported Prussian blue is in Hokusai's wave and in a cyanotype blueprint. Fresco keeps only the pigments that survive lime. Impressionism arrives with synthetic colours in tubes.
When a plate here looks "right" for its era, it is usually because the palette was restricted to what that era could buy.
Six styles that look unrelated share one rule: a hard cap on the number of colours, plus a visible process error. Constructivism had two cheap inks. Silkscreen drifts between pulls. A wood-type poster lands its red a little off the black. Comics, punk photocopies, risograph and stencil all live in the same family. The look of poverty became the look of urgency.
The engine draws them with one shared base: N colours, a plate offset of a few pixels, a texture overlay. Only N, the palette and the kind of error change.
Things I believed before reading the sources. Each correction is cited in the research notes behind this gallery.
Visitors meet six different kinds of thing under the one word "style", and the word "retro" only makes sense once they are told apart. A medium is a material and a tool, the oldest and most stable kind. A movement is a group with a manifesto and a decade. A living tradition is a community still making it, and is never retro and never merely historical. A platform constraint is a hardware budget, where the look is the limit. A UI trend is a software fashion with a half-life of a few years.
A revival is the only kind that is retro: a dead constraint kept on purpose. Vaporwave is Windows 95 remixed; synthwave is a grid the hardware no longer needs; a risograph today is a choice, not a budget. Every tombstone on this page now names its kind, and the wall can be filtered by it. The platform constraints, the UI trends and the revivals fill the Screen & Pixel room: nineteen plates from teletext to glitch, in order of date.
Line the screens up by bits per pixel and the whole first half of the Screen & Pixel room becomes one sentence. One bit: a Macintosh, every tone a dither or a pattern. Two bits: a Game Boy with four greens, a CGA card with four colours it did not get to choose. Then colour that lives on a coarser grid than the drawing: the Spectrum's two per cell, the C64's four per cell, the NES's three per sprite. Then fifteen per sprite on the 16-bit machines, which is finally enough for a ramp.
The same rig goes up the ladder without changing. What changes is how much of him the hardware can afford to say.
Software fashion swings on one axis: how much depth to fake. Aero in 2007 faked everything, gloss, reflection, lens flare. Skeuomorphism in 2010 faked materials, leather and linen, because touch screens needed to say "press me". Flat in 2013 removed all of it and was measured slower to use. Material in 2014 put one shadow back and called it elevation. Glass in 2020 blurred whatever was behind the panel. Apple's Liquid Glass, in 2025, adds refraction and motion, so the pendulum is on its way back.
None of these is a medium or a movement. They are UI trends, the youngest kind of style in this gallery, with a half-life of three or four years each.
The cleanest test of "retro" on this page is a pair. Windows 95 is a platform constraint: 256 colours, bitmap fonts, bevels because colour was scarce. Vaporwave, fifteen years later, takes that chrome, a marble bust, a palm and a checker floor and plays them back with VHS damage that no screenshot ever had. Same dialog box; one of them is a constraint and the other is a choice.
That is the whole definition of a revival here: a dead constraint kept on purpose. Synthwave keeps a wireframe floor and CRT scanlines it does not need; glitch keeps codec failures and sorts them. Isometric is the odd one out, a pixel-era projection that tech marketing revived in 2015 for how it reads, not for what it saves.