Vocabularies on the labels in RISD museum.

Design Vocabulary on the Label


1. Simple appearance
: Vertical and horizontal lines are positioned in layers or planes that do not intersect, thereby allowing each element to exist independently and unobstructed by other elements.

2. Complex dovetailed construction
: Using many screws and wooden wedges in order to joint and reinforce many pieces of wood at angles.

3. A functional chair
: This is a useful chair rather than decorative, focusing on how useful it is. Reducing any decorative factors, this chair stresses the roles and the purpose of chair.

4. De stijl
: From the Dutch for “The Style”, De stijl was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. The artistic philosophy is known as neoplasticism – the new plastic art. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colors.

5. A reduction of form and color
: Simplifying visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and using only primary colors along with black and white.


6. Abstraction
: This does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses color and form in a nonrepresentational way. Viewers can not recognize what the painter draws in the painting. The images are difficult or impossible to identify. We can regard the abstract art as “Non-figurative art” or “Non-objective art.”

7. Looping skeins of color
: There are mixing and overlapping colors on the surface of the canvas spontaneously and they are expressed as free and bounding lines.

8. Dense surface
: A lot of colors exist together on the surface, making a painting have thickness.

9. Scattering
: A painter throws or drops various colors so that they spread all over the canvas. Because of scattering technique, there is no rule or reputation of colors in the painting.

10. Intimate scale
: An Intimate scale encourages close examination of the painting’s construction.

11. hard-edge
: By using strongly contrastive colors just beside each other, outlines of each plane catch viewers’ eyes very well.

12. Geometric abstraction
: Expressing a general idea rather than one relating to a particular object, using regular shapes, such as squares, rectangles, circles and cubes.

13. Equally weighted
: The elements of the painting are arranged equally on either side, giving the painting balance.

14. No reference to three-dimensional forms
: The artist does not adding design considerations in that the object will have only one side, which means that there’s no depth in the painting.