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Design references usually write an aesthetic up as a confident paragraph. The confidence is the problem: it hides which parts are the movement's own rules, which are period habits, and which the writer made up to fill a gap.

This one keeps those apart on the page. It costs us the smooth read. What you get back is a reference you can build from without guessing which sentences will hold.

Visual language 101

What is a visual language?

A set of rules for how something looks, together with the argument those rules are making and the things they refuse. The refusals matter as much as the requirements: Swiss Style is identified less by using a grid — everyone uses a grid — than by declining to add a second signalling device once the grid is there.

Aesthetic, style, movement, technique

These are different kinds of thing. A movement was formed by people who argued about it. A technique is a production method that leaves marks. A visual world belongs to a piece of fiction. A mood is a register several languages can reach.

This corpus cannot currently tell them apart. Every record is typed as a visual language. Distinguishing the kinds is an open question, not a distinction we are hiding.

How visual languages combine

Badly, if you are not careful, because two languages can legislate the same area in incompatible ways. Swiss Style forbids ranking by size alone; another language may require it. Combining them means deciding which rule wins, and that decision is not in the corpus. Mix shows the collision rather than resolving it.

How to communicate visual direction

The practical tool this project offers is the distinction between kinds of claim. “Use a neutral grotesque” is a constraint the language requires. “Four to twelve columns” is our operationalisation. Saying which one you mean is most of the work — a brief that mixes them produces a design that satisfies nobody, because nobody could tell which parts were negotiable.

Kinds of claim

Every rule carries a label for what kind of claim it is and how it is established. A designer should be able to ask “is this part of the aesthetic, or your recommendation?” and get an answer without reading a footnote.

How it is evidenced

A second, separate label: how the claim is established. The kind of claim never stands in for it.

Graded by our research brief · No source attached

A research brief graded this documented, but no source is attached yet. A grade is not a source.

From our catalogue entry

Stated in Aesthetary’s existing catalogue entry. An outside source is named only where one is linked to the claim.

Our reading

Aesthetary’s conclusion from the material. No single source says it.

Not researched yet

No research has been done here. An unresearched area is not permission and not a blank to fill in.

No grade recorded

The record holds no evidence grade for this. It is not our decision and not an outside source; the record simply does not say.

Where a rule’s kind already says how it is established (From our catalogue entry; Graded by our research brief · No source attached; Documented), browsing pages print only that. Other rules add the evidence where it is missing or where nobody has researched the area, and mark any claim with an outside source linked to it. Agent guides always print both.

The twelve areas

Every Aesthetic is described in the same twelve areas, and every surface means the same thing by each: Color on Mix is Color on Build and on this page. Ten of them carry an overall position, so two questions get asked about each and answered separately: does something have to be here, and if it is, does the language say how to handle it? Hierarchy and Density are researched as dimensions and hold rules, but have no overall position of their own.

Layout

How the surface is divided and what governs where things sit.

Typography

Letterforms, their roles, and how text is set.

Color

How many colors do work here, and what each is for.

Imagery

Photography, illustration and what pictures are allowed to do.

Surface

Texture, material and grain — what the page is made of.

Interface

Elevation, radius, borders: the handling of interface parts.

Motion

Movement, transition and timing.

Motif

Repeating decorative marks and ornament systems.

Technique

The production method the look depends on.

Form

Three-dimensional organisation, where a language has one.

Hierarchy

What ranks first, and by what means: size, weight, colour, position.

Density

How full the surface is, and how much rest it allows.

Some rules describe the Aesthetic rather than a part of its design: where it comes from, what it is called. Those are Context, shown apart and never scored. A few rule areas do not yet map to one of the twelve and are shown under their own name.

The distinction that does the most work is the last one in the key. “The language lets you choose” and “nobody has looked into it” read the same in a normal write-up, and they are opposite instructions. Silence never becomes permission here.

Writing systems

A rule like “set it vertically, read right to left” belongs to Japanese, not to manga. Carry it into an English-language build and you have not implemented the aesthetic; you have mangled a writing system.

So rules can be scoped to a script. Where a rule has no script recorded, this site says exactly that. No writing system recorded. That does not mean Latin — it means nobody has established which script this describes.

A gap we have not closed

Since V2.3 an Element can record which writing system its reading order belongs to, and since V2.5 it can record that someone checked and the direction belongs to none. Either way the instruction is handed over carrying what was established. Where neither is recorded, the product withholds it from build guidance and shows it as an open decision — and an unrecorded left-to-right counts exactly as an unrecorded right-to-left. Manga's page shows this working: the right-to-left rules are marked Japanese, and the Element that carries panel order is held back from the build instructions, because the Element has no way to record which script it means.