Made of Us & Line 26: two styles about the crowd of everyday life We built two custom Recraft V4 Styles from public-domain works in museum and archive collections. Both look at modern life through the people in it: one builds objects out of tiny people, the other lays our daily habits into tile murals.

1. Made of Us

What if everything we love were made of all the people behind it?

References: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Dance Hall Bellevue (1909/1910) at the National Gallery of Art, and Utagawa Hiroshige's View of Fuji san from the Mountains in the Province of Izu (1858) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. From Kirchner I took the bold Expressionist colour and the thick, outlined brushwork; from Hiroshige, the soft gradients and the calm, layered space. The idea of an object made of people is inspired by yose-e, the playful composite pictures of Edo period Japan. In the posters, everyday objects are built from hundreds of tiny people, one day and one week at a time; in the photographs, real crowds stand together to form the shapes of this month's trends, some of them animated.

2. Line 26

What if a city's metro network had a tile mosaic mural at every station, each one celebrating a habit of life in 2026?

References: Emily Noyes Vanderpoel's Color Analysis from Arabian Illumination (Plate LXVII) from Color Problems (1902), Wassily Kandinsky's Painting with Green Center (1913) at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Theo van Doesburg's Contra Composition (1927–28). From Vanderpoel I took the strict grid of small colour squares and its red, blue, olive and cream palette; from Kandinsky, the expressive curves and layered colour; from van Doesburg, the flat planes and heavy black lines. The result is an imaginary metro network whose stations are named after things we do today, from Tap In and Matcha Line to Run Club and Padel Park, introduced by a street entrance, a network map and the next train arriving, with some murals animated.

Two styles, one subject: the crowd of everyday life, painted person by person and tile by tile.

Prism Hours

What if the glass of 1900 became the material of everything we touch today?

I built a custom Recraft V4 Style from two pieces of glass at the MAK, Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna: an anonymous Bohemian vase in cobalt and gold iridescent glass, donated in 1902, and an English opal glass vase with fine spun threads from before 1900. From the first vase I took the deep blue and silver sheen that shifts at the edges; from the second, the milky translucency and the thin threads that flow inside the glass and glow warm amber at the centre. Both references were cropped to their surfaces so the style learns the material, not the shape of the vases.

Then I let that glass take over modern life: app icons, office and studio interiors, jewellery and clothing, a fashion lookbook, illustrated city scenes, logos, and a poster series built on internet slang, from Doomscrolling and Brain Rot to Soft Launch and Touch Grass. One material from 1900, applied across photo, illustration, icon, logo and graphic design, shows how Art Nouveau glass can still feel like the future.