Art Deco

The name comes from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, though it was applied retrospectively in the 1960s, and the style ran from roughly 1920 to 1940 across buildings, posters, cars, radios, and lift doors. The recognisable parts are a short list. Compositions are symmetrical about a vertical axis and pushed upward, so the eye climbs rather than scans. Geometry is stepped like a ziggurat or fanned like a sunburst, with chevrons, zigzags, and concentric arcs. Metal is the material being suggested, usually gold or chrome, over a deep saturated ground of emerald, oxblood, or midnight blue. Type is display capitals, geometric, widely letter spaced, with high contrast between thick and thin strokes and no lowercase in sight. The later, faster branch of the family is Streamline Moderne, which drops the ornament for rounded corners, horizontal speed lines, and porthole windows.

It is worth setting against Swiss style, because both are made of geometry and the resemblance stops there. Swiss modernism is asymmetric, set flush left on a visible grid, with ornament treated as dishonest and a single accent doing all the work. Deco is symmetric, ornamental on purpose, and its geometry is decoration rather than structure. One is a system for organising information; the other is a costume for suggesting luxury.

Interfaces borrow it in a narrow set of places: private banking and wealth products, hotels and restaurant booking, spirits and fragrance, awards and gala pages, and the occasional cinema or theatre site trading on the period. What they usually take is the frame and the type rather than the whole vocabulary, since a stepped gold border and a letterspaced capitalised heading carry the reference on their own, and a full sunburst behind a form does not survive contact with a real task.

The pitfalls are mostly typographic. Letter spaced capitals are slow to read and get slower at small sizes, so keep them for headings and leave body copy alone. High contrast display faces lose their thin strokes at interface sizes and on low resolution screens. Gold rendered as a gradient has no single colour to measure, so contrast has to be checked against its darkest stop rather than its brightest, and thin gold hairlines on a dark ground will fail well before they look like they should. Symmetry also fights common layout habits: a centred axis is beautiful for a title card and painful for a settings page, so treat the style as a cover and let the interior of the product go back to being legible.