Style combination · Contrasts

Acid Graphics × Glitch Art

Acid graphics renders polished chrome and adds glitch as a finish; glitch art breaks the file and keeps what comes out. Decide whether a brief wants spectacle or exposure.

From the research on Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

Mix them and make something Acid Graphics Glitch Art

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Glitch Art, their arrangement from Acid Graphics, the finish from Glitch Art. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Acid Graphics / New Ugly Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

Type from Acid Graphics: Experimental & distorted
Blackletter
Colour from Acid Graphics: Fluorescent & neon
Dark ground
Form from Glitch Art: Rectilinear
Non-representational
Composition from Acid Graphics: Visual tension
Collage & layering
Surface from Glitch Art: Glitch
Grain & noise

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Acid Graphics

Noise

Tilt Warp, standing in for Liquid-chrome and melted custom lettering

Text · Glitch Art

An art and design practice that makes digital failure the picture. Artists deliberately corrupt image and video files or short-circuit hardware: they edit a JPEG's bytes (databending), delete a video's keyframes so one shot smears into the next (datamoshing) or sort pixels into streaks. Compression blocks, torn scanlines, shifted colour channels and raw code replace drawing, and the colour comes from the fault. Rosa Menkman and GLI.TC/H framed it as a critique of seamless technology; designers took it onto record sleeves and fonts, music videos onto MTV in 2009, and it became a stock filter.

Space Mono; Glitch Art used Raw file bytes opened as text (databending in a text editor) and Operating-system interface fonts caught in error messages and cascading windows, as in JODI's My%Desktop

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Acid Graphics, with a counter-accent from Glitch Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Acid Graphics / New Ugly Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

#000000 ground · 36%
#ffffff ink · 14%
#ccff00 accent · 18%
#ff00ff accent · 14%
#00e5ff accent · 10%
#3d5afe accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #000000;
  --ink: #ffffff;
  --accent-1: #ccff00;
  --accent-2: #ff00ff;
  --accent-3: #00e5ff;
  --accent-4: #3d5afe;
  --font-display: "Tilt Warp", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Space Mono", monospace;
}

Use it with care

Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics: Glitch video and animated glitch effects often flicker: keep flashes to three or fewer in any one second, and be stricter with saturated red, to meet WCAG 2.3.1 and protect people with photosensitive epilepsy. Datamoshing and databending usually start from someone else's footage or photographs, so clear the rights before corrupting them for commercial work. When a datamosh or pixel-sort look follows a particular artist's process, credit it; the 2009 music videos overtook the artists who developed the technique.

The two styles

Large silver lettering reading “Night RUSH” fills the top of a black poster crowded with spiky chrome forms, reflective spheres, orbit-like rings and starbursts. Neon pink, lime green and blue pixelated patches and fine grid lines fill the spaces between the metallic shapes.

2016–present · Global / networked, Western Europe, Central Europe Acid Graphics / New Ugly A late-2010s club and poster style that updates 1990s rave graphics with modern 3D tools: liquid-chrome and melting lettering, neo-tribal spikes, wireframes, op-art patterns and acid-green palettes on black, mixed with blackletter and stretched grotesques. Associated with David Rudnick, Studio Cryo and Anja Kaiser and collected on Instagram's @acidgraphix, it overlaps with the 'New Ugly' turn towards deliberate antidesign.

A grainy monochrome close-up of a face looking upward is repeated and overlapped beneath dense neon pink, green, cyan and orange digital interference. Large distressed lettering across the top reads “SIGNAL.”

2001–present · Global / networked, Western Europe, Central Europe, Northern Europe, North America Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics An art and design practice that makes digital failure the picture. Artists deliberately corrupt image and video files or short-circuit hardware: they edit a JPEG's bytes (databending), delete a video's keyframes so one shot smears into the next (datamoshing) or sort pixels into streaks. Compression blocks, torn scanlines, shifted colour channels and raw code replace drawing, and the colour comes from the fault. Rosa Menkman and GLI.TC/H framed it as a critique of seamless technology; designers took it onto record sleeves and fonts, music videos onto MTV in 2009, and it became a stock filter.

More combinations

With Acid Graphics

All 12 combinations with Acid Graphics

With Glitch Art

All 15 combinations with Glitch Art

Every style combination