Style combination · Contrasts

Analog Horror Graphics × Glitch Art

Henty traces analog horror to the 'glitch aesthetics' of earlier internet horror. Glitch art breaks a digital file and makes the damage the subject; analog horror dates the damage to a dying VHS tape or a weak broadcast signal and uses it to hide what is happening. Keep the noise in service of the story, not as the picture.

From the research on Analog Horror Graphics

Mix them and make something Analog Horror Graphics Glitch Art

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Glitch Art, their arrangement from Analog Horror 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.

Analog Horror Graphics Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

Type from Analog Horror Graphics: All caps
Monospace
Colour from Analog Horror Graphics: Flat fields
Dark ground
Form from Glitch Art: Rectilinear
Non-representational
Composition from Analog Horror Graphics: Sequential narrative
Full bleed
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 · Analog Horror Graphics

Daydream

Big Shoulders, standing in for 'Grainy VCR text onscreen' (Kok, 2022): the blocky, fixed-width lettering of tape-deck on-screen displays and station character generators, sometimes scrolling across the picture; The Mandela Catalogue's captions are often lowercase ('suspect identified', 'answers lie beneath'), the exception to the capitals rule

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 Analog Horror Graphics, with a counter-accent from Glitch Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Analog Horror Graphics Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

#0b0b0b ground · 36%
#ececec ink · 14%
#bfbf00 accent · 18%
#ff00ff accent · 14%
#bf0000 accent · 10%
#00e5ff accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0b0b0b;
  --ink: #ececec;
  --accent-1: #bfbf00;
  --accent-2: #ff00ff;
  --accent-3: #bf0000;
  --accent-4: #00e5ff;
  --font-display: "Big Shoulders", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Space Mono", monospace;
}

Use it with care

Analog Horror Graphics: Fake emergency alerts can be mistaken for real ones: in the United States 47 CFR § 11.45 bars transmitting EAS codes or the Attention Signal, or a recording or simulation of them, outside real emergencies and authorised tests, so keep real alert tones, codes and agency names out of anything that may be broadcast, and label a fictional warning as fiction. Keep strobing static and flashing alert screens to three flashes a second or fewer (WCAG 2.3.1). Invent the seal and flag on a fictional alert screen: real national emblems can be protected by law, and Indonesian law forbids showing the Garuda Pancasila damaged or altered from its prescribed shape, colours and proportions (first in Law 24/2009, since moved into the Criminal Code and narrowed by the Constitutional Court). The blue Peringatan Darurat Garuda is also a living pro-democracy protest symbol, not a horror prop. The genre corrupts other people's footage (The Beginner's Bible in The Mandela Catalogue), so use public-domain or licensed material. Gemini Home Entertainment's creatures grew out of 'classic internet creepypastas surrounding Skinwalkers or the Wendigo' (Kok, 2022). The skin-walker belongs to Navajo (Diné) tradition and is rarely discussed with outsiders, and Native critics such as Adrienne Keene have objected to non-Navajo writers using it; the wendigo comes from Algonquian folklore. Do not turn these or other Indigenous beliefs into monsters for a design.

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.