About the family

The suffix comes from the Greek -geneia, origin or descent, as in phylogeny, the descent of species. Stylogeny took it first, because it classifies graphic-design styles the way biologists classify organisms: by what they descend from and by the traits they carry. Each later site took the suffix along with the method.

Stylogeny

An atlas of graphic-design styles, at stylogeny.com.

Lumogeny

An atlas of photographic styles, at lumogeny.com.

Quotogeny

An atlas of quotations, at quotogeny.com.

Morphogeny

A lab of style generators, at morph.ogeny.app.

Lumogeny is the public site of an atlas called Photogeny. A fifth member, Glossogeny, keeps the writing style of brands; it works inside client projects and has no public site.

Time runs along the trunk, one step per day. A line starts on the day work on that site began, taken from the first entry in its version history, and joins the site it grew from. Every site is live, so every line runs to the day this page was built. A line’s length shows age, not size.

In three dimensions each branch leaves the trunk in its own direction; laid flat, the tree is the figure at the end of the home page. The numbers beside each name are read from the sites’ own pages whenever this page is built.

Van Riel Online Services builds and runs all four. Much of the research is done with AI and then checked by program; each site’s about page says exactly how, and labels every picture a machine made.

Questions, corrections and ideas: info@vanriel.eu.

This site is set in Inter by Rasmus Andersson, with JetBrains Mono for dates and addresses. Each name appears in its own site’s face: Fraunces (Undercase Type) for Stylogeny, Archivo (Omnibus-Type) for Lumogeny, Literata (TypeTogether) for Quotogeny and Jost (indestructible type*) for Morphogeny. All six are under the SIL Open Font License.

The tree is drawn live with three.js. The screenshots were taken from the live sites. The site sets no cookies and does not track you.