Illustration Techniques
The same figure, rendered in six different illustration traditions — pick one to see how the technique itself becomes the message. Runs in your browser — no server call, no tracking.
Silhouette
Named after Étienne de Silhouette, an 18th-century French finance minister known for austerity — cheap paper-cutout portraits became mockingly associated with his name around 1759, and it stuck as the term for any solid-shape, no-detail figure.
Pictogram
Simplified symbolic figures trace back to prehistoric cave art and hieroglyphic writing, but the modern, systematized pictogram — the kind used on signage worldwide — comes from Otto Neurath's Isotype system, developed in 1920s Vienna to communicate statistics across language barriers.
Woodcut & Engraving
One of the oldest printmaking techniques, practiced in China centuries before Gutenberg, and refined into an art form in Japan through ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") — the style behind Hokusai's "The Great Wave." Every line is physically carved away from a block, which shapes the technique's bold, high-contrast look.
Isometric & Flat Vector
Isometric projection was formalized as an engineering drawing standard in the 19th century, long before software illustration adopted it as a stylistic choice for tech and product graphics. Flat vector illustration grew out of Swiss modernist graphic design's rejection of ornamental detail in favor of geometric clarity.