Design System
A design language of fragmentation, simultaneity, and multiple perspectives. Analytical earth tones meet Synthetic boldness.
The muted earth tones of Analytical Cubism -- ochre, umber, slate -- anchored by the collage textures of Synthetic Cubism. Like Braque's palette knife dragging pigment across layered newsprint.
Analytical Cubism (1909-1912) favored a restrained palette of browns, greys, and ochres -- the better to dissect form without the distraction of color. Synthetic Cubism (1912-1919) reintroduced bolder hues alongside collaged materials: newspaper, wallpaper, sand. This palette bridges both phases.
Three typefaces in dialogue: Archivo Black for angular display, Space Grotesk for geometric headings, Source Serif 4 for body text that echoes newspaper columns in a Braque collage.
JOURNAL
In Synthetic Cubism, Picasso and Braque pasted fragments of newspaper directly onto their canvases. Typography became material -- no longer merely communicating words, but existing as texture, plane, and collage element. The letterforms themselves became objects to be seen from multiple angles.
A geometric progression from 4px to 128px. Like the faceted planes of a Juan Gris still life, each interval creates depth through measured relationships.
Geometric progression visualized as faceted planes, each step doubling the previous -- a Cubist rhythm in space.
Faceted and angular, as if carved from intersecting planes. Hover effects shift perspective, echoing the Cubist principle that no single viewpoint reveals the whole truth.
"I do not seek, I find. The object is to show what I have found, not what I am looking for." -- Pablo Picasso
Inputs offset and slightly rotated, as if fragments of a collage laid upon the canvas. The form itself becomes a composition of intersecting planes, recalling the papiers colles of Braque and Gris.
Multi-plane overlapping panels, each card a composition of layered surfaces. Like a Cubist still life, the viewer perceives depth not through perspective but through the overlap and offset of planes.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shattered classical perspective. Five figures rendered from simultaneous viewpoints -- a revolution on canvas.
Houses at l'Estaque reduced architecture to geometric facets. Cezanne's lesson taken to its ultimate conclusion -- nature as cylinder, sphere, cone.
The most methodical Cubist. Gris began with abstract geometric structures and derived recognizable forms from them -- Cubism in reverse.
Leger's "tubism" translated Cubist ideas through cylindrical forms. His figures became machines -- robust, industrial, built from interlocking volumes. Where Picasso fragmented, Leger solidified.
Orphic Cubism brought color back to the center. Delaunay's Simultaneous Windows series proved that pure chromatic contrasts could create form without line -- Cubism set free from monochrome.
"The world is not what I see but what I know. I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them." -- Pablo Picasso
Geometric fragments communicating status and category. Each alert is a shard of information, angular and direct. Badges mark and classify like the stenciled letters Braque painted onto his collages.
The philosophical foundations of Cubist design: deconstruction, simultaneity, the rejection of a single fixed viewpoint. These principles, born in the studios of Montmartre, remain radical over a century later.
Reject the tyranny of a single viewpoint. Show an object from above, below, and beside simultaneously. In design, this means presenting information through multiple lenses -- never assume one angle tells the whole story.
Break the whole into geometric fragments to understand how the parts relate. Deconstruct interfaces into their essential planes, then rebuild them with intention. As Picasso said: "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."
Present multiple states, views, or moments at once. Cubism collapsed time and space onto a flat plane. In UI, this translates to layered information, where context and detail coexist without hiding one behind the other.
Cubism abolished Renaissance perspective but created a new kind of depth through overlapping planes and shifting angles. Design can achieve the same: layers and offsets suggest dimensionality without illusionistic shadow or gradient.
Synthetic Cubism introduced real materials -- newspaper, wallpaper, sand -- into painting. Embrace the materials of your medium. A screen is flat; do not pretend otherwise. Let texture come from honest use of type, color, and geometry.
Cezanne advised treating nature as "the cylinder, the sphere, the cone." Cubism took this literally, reducing the visible world to angular facets. In design, strip away the decorative until only the geometric skeleton remains.
"The goal I proposed myself in making Cubism? To paint and nothing more. And to paint seeking a new expression, divested of useless realism, with a method linked only to my thought." -- Juan Gris