Making visual language legible.
Aesthetary is a structured, evidence-backed reference system for visual languages — what defines them, how they differ from their neighbours, and how they can be combined. It records the rules behind a look, says where each rule came from, and states plainly when nobody knows.
Why it exists
We have a lot of words for how things look: Swiss, Brutalist, Y2K, Art Deco, editorial, risograph, cyberpunk, dreamy. Each carries a great deal of implicit visual information, and almost none of it is written down.
So two people use the same word and picture different things. A brief says editorial and means four incompatible things to four readers. And a model asked for Swiss Style reproduces the surface signals — a grid, a sans-serif — without the logic underneath, because that logic was never recorded anywhere it could be learned from.
Aesthetary exists to make that knowledge explicit enough to check, disagree with, and build from.
What we're building
It begins as a reference. Each visual language is decomposed into its rules, the argument it makes, the things it refuses, and the evidence behind every claim. You can see how confusable neighbours actually differ, read several languages against the same structured questions, and find where the research is thin — because thin is marked rather than filled in.
That reference is the foundation for something larger: combining visual languages deliberately, and keeping the result readable by machines as well as people. Mix is the first step in that direction and is partly built.
Browse the collection · Mix Aesthetics · Machine-readable records
Who founded it
Aesthetary was founded by Annie Vickrey, a digital producer, designer and builder whose work spans digital strategy, UX, operations, websites and product development.
The project came out of working closely with AI-assisted design and development tools and hitting the same wall repeatedly: translating visual judgment into language precise enough for a person and a machine to act on the same way. “Make it feel more editorial” is a real instruction that survives no translation at all.
Her role is to have identified that problem and to be building the system for investigating it. The authority behind any individual claim comes from evidence, sources and method — and eventually from expert contributors — rather than from the founder.
A reference that shows its work
Every claim carries what kind of claim it is: something the language requires, something its practitioners did, a contemporary recommendation, or our own reading. Those are kept apart on the page.
Where nobody has established something, the record says so instead of guessing. Silence never becomes permission.
Where to go next
- Explore visual languages →All 73 Aesthetics in the collection, each on its own page with the research behind it.
- Read the methodology →How claims are separated by kind, and what this project will not do.