Illustration & Design
De Stijl
Style guide
Horizontal and vertical black lines divide red, yellow, blue and white rectangles into a strict orthogonal composition.
The visual language
What is De Stijl?
De Stijl builds order from horizontal and vertical lines and primary-color planes. Interlocking rectangles simplify contours while white fields and black bands help describe the forms. Its geometry stays orthogonal, retaining the original image through recognizable positions and connections.
De Stijl is a historical art and design movement; this treatment emphasizes orthogonal forms and asymmetrical balance.
Offset rectangles suggesting a figure, with small red-blue accents, make white areas actively shape the composition.
How the style changes different subjects
- Portrait
- Geometric contours and color shapes reduce facial detail, emphasizing placement, proportion and open space.
- Landscape
- Lines, planes and grids organize buildings and terrain around spatial order rather than texture.
- Objects
- Circles, rectangles and straight lines break objects into balanced compositional elements.
- Subjects
- Choose geometric buildings, tools, clear figures or orderly object arrangements with distinct colors and scales.
Bring the style to your photos
Reusable style prompt for De Stijl
Preserve the original framing, identifying features and spatial relationships while translating every form into a De Stijl orthogonal structure. Use only horizontal and vertical black bands with flat rectangular fields of red, yellow, blue and white. Resolve curved silhouettes into carefully stepped rectilinear boundaries, keeping the original visual anchors recognizable. Vary rectangle size and line weight to balance dense and open areas. Let the grid emerge from existing structures rather than overlaying an unrelated pattern. Keep all planes strictly flat, with crisp edges and no diagonal lines, circles, gradients, texture or cast shadows.Use the same style prompt for portraits, landscapes and objects.
Create with this styleKeep exploring
