Stylogeny combining Frutiger Aero × Glitch Art

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Style combination · Contrasts

Frutiger Aero × Glitch Art

Aero's glossy, seamless interface is the frictionless technology glitch art questions; corrupt one Aero-style screen to show what the gloss hides.

From the research on Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

Mix them and make something Frutiger Aero Glitch Art

FutureFrutiger Aero × Glitch Art2004 · 2001
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Glitch Art, their arrangement from Glitch Art, the finish from Frutiger Aero. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

01

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.

Frutiger Aero Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

Type from Frutiger Aero
Colour from Frutiger Aero
Form from Glitch Art
Composition from Glitch Art
Surface from Frutiger Aero

Glitch Art avoids gloss & highlights and frosted glass: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.

02

The type

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

Display · Frutiger Aero

Future

Fira Sans, standing in for Frutiger (Adrian Frutiger, 1976)

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

03

The colours

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

Frutiger Aero Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

  • #f5fbff ground · 36%
  • #0b5fa5 ink · 14%
  • #22c3c9 accent · 18%
  • #ff00ff accent · 14%
  • #4fb3e8 accent · 10%
  • #00e5ff accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f5fbff;
  --ink: #0b5fa5;
  --accent-1: #22c3c9;
  --accent-2: #ff00ff;
  --accent-3: #4fb3e8;
  --accent-4: #00e5ff;
  --font-display: "Fira Sans", 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.

04

The two styles

2004–2013 · Global / networked Frutiger Aero The glossy, optimistic look of consumer technology from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, retrospectively named in 2017 by the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute after Windows Vista's Aero interface and Adrian Frutiger's humanist sans. Translucent glass panels, glossy orbs and buttons, water droplets, bubbles, auroras, green fields and blue skies fused technology with clean nature, set in airy humanist sans-serifs. 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.

05

More combinations

With Frutiger Aero

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With Glitch Art

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