Style combination · Contrasts

Analog Horror Graphics × Plain Tobacco Packaging

Both frighten with the flat, mandatory voice of an official warning: plain packaging does it for real, in print, with matt drab brown, clinical photographs and Helvetica capitals; analog horror fakes it on a screen and lets the signal decay. Borrow plain packaging's uncompromising flatness for a fictional warning screen, and save the noise for the moment the threat appears.

From the research on Analog Horror Graphics

Mix them and make something Analog Horror Graphics Plain Tobacco Packaging

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Plain Tobacco Packaging, their arrangement from Plain Tobacco Packaging, the finish from Analog Horror Graphics. 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 Plain Tobacco Packaging

Type from Analog Horror Graphics: All caps
Monospace
Colour from Analog Horror Graphics: Flat fields
Dark ground
Form from Plain Tobacco Packaging: Rectilinear
Naturalistic depiction
Composition from Plain Tobacco Packaging: Central symmetry
Single focal point
Surface from Analog Horror Graphics: Grain & noise
Glitch

The type

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

Display · Analog Horror Graphics

Civic

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 · Plain Tobacco Packaging

A packaging language written into law to strip tobacco of persuasion. Since Australia's Tobacco Plain Packaging Act 2011 (all retail packs from 1 December 2012), logos, brand colours, imagery and embossing are banned: every pack is a rigid, matt rectangle in Pantone 448C 'drab dark brown', chosen in consumer testing as the least appealing colour. Clinical photographs of disease under bold Helvetica capitals fill most of the front and back, and the brand survives as one small centred line of grey sans-serif, with the variant name on a smaller line below. More than twenty countries followed.

Inter; Plain Tobacco Packaging used Lucida Sans (Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes) and Helvetica (Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann, 1957)

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Analog Horror Graphics, with a counter-accent from Plain Tobacco Packaging. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Analog Horror Graphics Plain Tobacco Packaging

#0b0b0b ground · 36%
#ececec ink · 14%
#bfbf00 accent · 18%
#ffd100 accent · 14%
#bf0000 accent · 10%
#c8102e accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0b0b0b;
  --ink: #ececec;
  --accent-1: #bfbf00;
  --accent-2: #ffd100;
  --accent-3: #bf0000;
  --accent-4: #c8102e;
  --font-display: "Big Shoulders", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

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.

Plain Tobacco Packaging: Graphic health warnings show real disease and are official public-health instruments; WHO's warning database lists the Australian Government as the owner of its warning images, which it may license to other countries free of charge. Use the shock imagery only for genuine health communication, never as decoration or as a parody that could mislead about a product's risks, and check the terms before reproducing a country's actual warning photographs or mandated layouts. Respect the dignity of the people pictured, never generate imagery that could pass for an official warning, and do not turn the drab-pack look into anti-brand styling for tobacco, vaping or nicotine products, which would make a tool against persuasion persuasive again.