Style combination · Contrasts

Analog Horror Graphics × PS1

Both mine 1990s screens for fear, and Puppet Combo borrows from VHS, but analog horror fakes flat 2D broadcast and tape graphics, while the PSX revival builds navigable, textured 3D spaces. Choose the warning screen or the walkable room.

From the research on PS1 / Lo-Fi 3D Revival (PSX Aesthetic)

Mix them and make something Analog Horror Graphics PS1

A cracked road crosses a deteriorating bridge toward a dark tunnel amid misty conifer forests, with a lone illuminated streetlamp beside it. An enormous shadowy humanoid looms behind the tunnel beneath the title “LAST ROUTE,” while red horizontal glitches and coarse pixelated texture cover the image. — AI-generated by Stylogeny from the recipe below, and checked against it: the type from Analog Horror Graphics, the form from Analog Horror Graphics, the composition from PS1. Not a real or historical work.

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 PS1 / Lo-Fi 3D Revival (PSX Aesthetic)

Type from Analog Horror Graphics: All caps
Monospace
Colour from PS1: Dark ground
Earth & mineral
Form from Analog Horror Graphics: Distortion & exaggeration
Naturalistic depiction
Composition from PS1: Full bleed
Illusion of depth
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

Memory

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 · PS1

Indie games and their artwork that rebuild the look of late-1990s console and PC 3D on modern engines: few polygons, tiny low-resolution textures that warp as the original PlayStation's affine-only mapping did, dithering, grain and distance fog over murky, dark earth tones. Puppet Combo's horror games 'modeled after early PlayStation games and VHS' and Dusk's Quake-like shooter set it going; the Haunted PS1 community made it a scene, with game jams and digital Demo Discs whose menus and manual booklets imitate the era's demo discs.

VT323; PS1 used Bitmap and pixel fonts in capitals for menus and HUDs, in the manner of the PlayStation demo-disc and Namco Museum front ends the Haunted PS1 Demo Discs model their menus on (a working description: the scene has no settled typeface canon) and Title cards and on-screen lettering borrowed from VHS tapes and late-1990s survival-horror title screens, as in Puppet Combo's games modelled on early PlayStation games and VHS

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from PS1, with a counter-accent from Analog Horror Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Analog Horror Graphics PS1 / Lo-Fi 3D Revival (PSX Aesthetic)

#0d0d0c ground · 36%
#c9c2a8 ink · 14%
#6b1d16 accent · 18%
#bfbf00 accent · 14%
#5c5446 accent · 10%
#bf0000 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0d0d0c;
  --ink: #c9c2a8;
  --accent-1: #6b1d16;
  --accent-2: #bfbf00;
  --accent-3: #5c5446;
  --accent-4: #bf0000;
  --font-display: "Big Shoulders", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "VT323", 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.

The two styles

A distressed poster has a blue header with a white broadcasting symbol and the words “STAY INSIDE.” Four numbered black-and-white panels show a house, a hand turning a door lock, a television displaying static, and a television displaying a ghostly human silhouette, with colored glitches scattered throughout.

2015–present · North America, Global / networked Analog Horror Graphics A horror genre, mostly on YouTube, that tells its stories through imitation television and home-video graphics rather than actors: emergency-alert screens, station IDs, public-service, educational and instructional tapes, set between the 1960s and early 2000s. Plain capitals on flat black or blue screens give calm, official instructions that turn sinister, as VHS grain, static, tracking errors and signal breakup half-hide the threat. Usually dated from No Through Road (2009), it takes its broadcast look from Kris Straub's Local 58 (2015), whose slogan 'ANALOG HORROR AT 476 MHz' named it.

A dark, blocky illustration shows a blood-streaked wooden walkway winding along steep cliffs toward a stone building with a lit doorway. A pale moon hangs over misty rock spires and a distant arched bridge beneath the jagged title “HOLLOW RIDGE.”

2015–present · North America, Western Europe, Global / networked PS1 / Lo-Fi 3D Revival (PSX Aesthetic) Indie games and their artwork that rebuild the look of late-1990s console and PC 3D on modern engines: few polygons, tiny low-resolution textures that warp as the original PlayStation's affine-only mapping did, dithering, grain and distance fog over murky, dark earth tones. Puppet Combo's horror games 'modeled after early PlayStation games and VHS' and Dusk's Quake-like shooter set it going; the Haunted PS1 community made it a scene, with game jams and digital Demo Discs whose menus and manual booklets imitate the era's demo discs.

More combinations

With Analog Horror Graphics

With PS1

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