Style combination · Contrasts

Glitch Art × Grunge Typography

Grunge scanned in photocopier grain and dirt and layered type on the Mac; glitch art breaks the file and lets the codec make the damage. Pick analogue distress or digital failure deliberately rather than stacking both.

From the research on Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

Mix them and make something Glitch Art Grunge Typography

Oversized distressed letters spell “STATIC DRIFT” against a black background filled with fluorescent green, cyan, magenta and orange blocks. Horizontal streaks, pixel fragments and grain break up the lettering and surrounding colour. — AI-generated by Stylogeny from the recipe below, and checked against it: the type from Grunge Typography, the form from Glitch Art, the composition from Grunge Typography. 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.

Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics Grunge Typography

Type from Grunge Typography: Experimental & distorted
Eclectic mixing
Colour from Glitch Art: Fluorescent & neon
Complementary clash
Form from Glitch Art: Rectilinear
Non-representational
Composition from Grunge Typography: Broken grid
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 · Grunge Typography

Loud

Rock Salt; Grunge Typography used Template Gothic and FF Trixie

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

Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics Grunge Typography

#0a0a0a ground · 36%
#00ff41 ink · 14%
#ff00ff accent · 18%
#a8322d accent · 14%
#00e5ff accent · 10%
#ff2a00 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0a0a0a;
  --ink: #00ff41;
  --accent-1: #ff00ff;
  --accent-2: #a8322d;
  --accent-3: #00e5ff;
  --accent-4: #ff2a00;
  --font-display: "Rock Salt", cursive;
  --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.