Low poly

Low poly began as an apology and ended as a preference. Console and desktop hardware of the 1990s could push only a few hundred triangles per character, so models were built at the edge of what the machine could draw and their silhouettes came out angular whether the artist wanted that or not. Once the budget lifted, plenty of people kept the angles, because a form made of a few big facets is legible at any size, cheap to animate, and carries a graphic confidence that a smoothed mesh loses. The style is now a deliberate choice rather than a limit, which is the same arc pixel art and chiptune music took.

The look rests on flat shading. A renderer normally interpolates the surface normal across each triangle so neighbouring faces blend into a curve, which is what makes a sphere look like a sphere rather than like a stack of plates. Turn that off and every triangle takes a single value computed from its own facing, so the boundary between two faces is a hard line. That hard line is the entire aesthetic: the polygon count only matters because it decides how many of those lines you get. Illustrators reach the same result without a renderer at all, by drawing the facets flat and picking each fill by hand, which is what the specimen here does.

As illustration it does a specific job. Facets give a form volume without asking for texture, gradients, or a light rig, so a low poly object drops into a flat layout without fighting it. It also scales down to an icon, since the shapes are large. Its closest relative on this site is isometric illustration: both are stylizations that state their geometry out loud rather than hiding it, though one is about projection (no vanishing point, parallel edges) and this one is about surface (few faces, no smoothing). Plenty of work uses both at once.

Two cautions worth stating. Faceting reads as intentional only when the count is consistently low, so a scene where one object is coarse and its neighbour is dense looks unfinished rather than styled. And low poly leans hard on lightness steps between adjacent faces to describe form, which means a palette with too little range flattens the whole model into a silhouette. Pick the steps first, then build the geometry that shows them.