About Cultured Eye: Design
A part of Cultured Eye for anyone who wants to learn to see how objects are made – and to recognise, describe and date them. Built for studying, not just browsing.
The idea is that you learn to look the way you would on a museum tour or at an auction viewing: which material, which technique, which form and which period. The glossary explains the words, the resources show where to see the objects for real, and the exercises show what has stuck.
The exercises ask about the objects – what it is, when it was made, which style it belongs to and who designed it – about the hallmarks of the periods in each category, about the brands and about materials and techniques.
Each card has a level from 0 to 4. A right answer moves it up one step, a wrong one back to zero. The level decides when the card comes back: after ten minutes, a day, three days, a week or three weeks.
The content is general knowledge of the kind found in encyclopaedias, museum catalogues and survey works on design and the decorative arts. Cultured Eye makes no claim to original research.
The texts, translations and questions were produced with the help of AI (large language models) and summarise established design history. They have not been reviewed by a subject expert. Dates refer to the design or the first production; many classics were made for decades, and the boundaries between styles are simplifications.
What is original is the way the material is presented: drawings of the objects and of the details by which a period can be recognised, timelines and tracks country by country, and exercises that come back less and less often the better you know them.
Found a mistake? Report it, and it will be corrected where needed. The same link is at the bottom of every object, designer, brand and category.
The drawings of the objects and details are original, schematic line drawings, not copies of photographs. They show what to look for: the construction, the profile and the small signs of a period.
Photographs are shown only of objects whose design is free to reproduce, and are taken from Wikimedia Commons with the photographer’s name and licence under the image. Objects whose design is still protected are described in text. Names of companies and products are mentioned only to describe the objects.
Progress in the exercises is saved only in this browser. No account is needed.
The image files are loaded from Wikimedia Commons. Visitor statistics are collected only if you have agreed – more on the page Cookies and statistics.
The design section is available in Swedish, English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. All text is kept in language files separate from the code. Names of objects, brands and designers stay in the original language where that is customary.
The look borrows from the drawing office and the modernist poster: off-white paper, black line, heavy sans serif, a strict grid and a single orange signal colour for what to look at. The categories and chapters get colours of their own.
Built with TypeScript, React and Tailwind on Vite. Drawings and diagrams are drawn with SVG and D3. The texts are in language files and the structure of the content in plain data files, so it is easy to correct and extend.