#contemporary
A cross-section of the catalog tagged contemporary — not a category. Tags pull from multiple categories at once.
Distribution across categories
- Photography 11
- 3D / CGI 8
- Anime & Manga 6
- Cinematic Looks 5
- Mixed Media & Experimental 4
- Era Aesthetics 3
- Painting 2
- Comic & Graphic 2
- Illustration 2
- Print & Poster 2
Styles tagged #contemporary
45 styles
2010s Filtered Photo
This is a real period look, not a joke. Between roughly 2010 and 2015, hundreds of millions of photographs were run through a small set o…
Open style
35mm Film Photography
35mm film photography is the look of the dominant consumer and editorial photographic format of the second half of the twentieth century.…
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Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism was the first internationally dominant American art movement, centered in New York from roughly 1945 to 1960. It s…
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Painterly Editorial Portrait
This look defined what a contemporary celebrity portrait looks like, sitting between editorial photojournalism and produced narrative tab…
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ArchViz / Architectural Visualization
ArchViz (architectural visualization) is the industry-standard 3D rendering style used by architecture firms, real-estate developers, and…
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Bleach Bypass
Bleach bypass (also called skip-bleach) is a film-chemistry technique where the bleaching step of color development is skipped or partial…
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Stylized Low-Poly 3D
"Stylized low-poly" is the free-3D-toolchain idiom that emerged around 2019 and the broader indie-3D online portfolio culture. It is a de…
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Chibi / Super-Deformed
Chibi (literally "short" in Japanese) and its near-synonym SD ("super-deformed") describe a stylistic mode where characters from a host a…
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Clay Render / Plasticine
"Clay render" is a 3D rendering technique that mimics the appearance of classic stop-motion clay animation but produced entirely in softw…
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Deadpan Americana
This deadpan Americana cinematography style — recognizable across decades of American independent and crime-drama filmmaking — has a cohe…
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Cottagecore
Cottagecore is the 2017–present internet aesthetic that romanticizes pre-industrial European rural life. The visual rules are not histori…
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Cross-Processed
Cross-processing is the deliberate misuse of film chemistry: developing color slide film (E-6 process) in negative-film chemistry (C-41)…
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Glitch / Databending
Glitch and databending describe a family of techniques that produce intentional image corruption — usually by editing the binary or compr…
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Golden Hour Naturalism
Golden hour is the roughly 60 minutes after sunrise and before sunset when the sun is low enough that its light passes through more atmos…
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Hard-Surface Sci-Fi
"Hard-surface" is a specific 3D modeling discipline distinct from organic / character modeling — vehicles, weapons, mechs, spacecraft, ro…
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Provocative B&W Fashion
A body of fashion photography shot between the early 1960s and early 2000s with a vocabulary borrowed from film noir, Surrealism, and Wei…
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Ligne Claire
Ligne claire ("clear line") is the Franco-Belgian comic style codified by classic mid-20th-century adventure comics. It is the foundation…
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Photoreal Creature
Big-budget film and game visual-effects studios have spent three decades perfecting photoreal creature work — this is the reference for "…
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Soft Slice-of-Life Anime
A specific contemporary anime aesthetic defines a body of mature slice-of-life TV animation distinct from both painterly studio-fantasy a…
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Lo-Fi Zine / Cut-and-Paste
The lo-fi zine aesthetic — photocopied, hand-assembled, deliberately rough printed matter — emerged from the late-1970s punk scene and th…
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Uncanny Dreamlike
A visual language spanning several decades of American cinema and television is among the most identifiable of the late 20th century. It…
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Documentary Photojournalism
A photographer-owned documentary tradition founded in 1947 as a cooperative — the first of its kind where photographers controlled their…
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Luminous Sky Anime
This anime aesthetic is visually distinct from hand-painted watercolor-style studio anime in three ways: it grew out of digital animation…
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Mixed Photography and Sketch
Mixed photography and sketch is the deliberate combination of photographic imagery with hand-drawn ink, graphite, watercolor, or marker o…
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Modern Indie Comic
"Modern indie comic" describes the visual mainstream of American creator-owned comics from the early 1990s to the present — the wave of a…
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Modern Webtoon
Webtoon is the Korean-originated vertical-scroll digital comic format that has, since roughly 2015, become the dominant comics format glo…
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Nature Editorial Photography
Nature and expedition editorial photography's defining visual identity formed over the second half of the 20th century, in a lineage of a…
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Editorial Ink Cartoon
American literary-magazine editorial illustration and cartooning has run in a coherent visual language for nearly a century. The style is…
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Hyperreal Product Render
"Hyperreal product render" describes the dominant idiom of contemporary product visualization — perfume bottles, watches, sneakers, headp…
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Dada Photo-Collage
Photographic collage as a fine-art form has a continuous lineage from the Berlin Dada movement of the 1910s — where the technique of "pho…
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3D Animated
"3D animated style" is shorthand for a coherent set of CG-character-animation conventions refined by major animation studios since the mi…
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Plein Air Landscape
Plein air ("in the open air") painting is the practice of painting a landscape in front of the landscape — directly, in one or two sittin…
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Risograph
Risograph is a Japanese stencil-duplication printing technology, in production since 1986, that was originally designed for cheap school…
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Cinematic Naturalism
A naturalist but extraordinarily controlled cinematographic visual language, developed by some of the most decorated cinematographers in…
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Painterly Street Color
This painterly color street photography approach captured American cities in color from the late 1940s through the 1970s, at a time when…
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Screen-Printed Concert Poster
The American screen-printed concert poster — also called the gig poster — has a continuous lineage from mid-1960s psychedelic-era posters…
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Soft Pastel Cinema
This soft pastel cinematic style is one of the most internally consistent visual signatures in contemporary auteur film, carried across a…
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Floating Double Dolly
This visual signature includes one of the most distinctive single shots in modern American cinema: the "double dolly," in which the camer…
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Hand-Painted Anime CG Hybrid
Traditional hand-painted anime is famously a hand-drawn 2D animation form, but many landmark feature films from the late 1990s onward hav…
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Swiss International Typographic
The Swiss / International Typographic Style emerged in Zurich and Basel in the late 1940s and dominated corporate and editorial design fr…
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Raw Modern Manga
This influential contemporary mangaka's work is among the most discussed in the world. A string of dark action series and standalone one-…
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High-Energy Cel Anime
A wave of high-energy, line-driven action animation carried forward an earlier studio's tradition into a new generation of TV and streami…
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Monolithic Sci-Fi
A run of contemporary science fiction films has established a coherent visual language for modern sci-fi that everyone else now reference…
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Pastel Symmetric Storybook
This visual language is one of the most imitated in contemporary cinema for a reason: it is rule-based and easy to identify. The rules ar…
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Y2K Frosted Glass
Y2K (roughly 1998–2003) is the consumer-electronics-and-fashion aesthetic of the late dot-com era. The visual rules: translucent and fros…
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