Stylogeny combining Glitch Art × Internet Ugly

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Style combination · Contrasts

Glitch Art × Internet Ugly

Deep-fried memes also pile up JPEG damage, but as a joke for a crowd to copy; glitch art makes the damage its subject. Borrow the re-saving, not the punchline.

From the research on Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

Mix them and make something Glitch Art Internet Ugly

RIOTRIOTRIOTGlitch Art × Internet Ugly2001 · 2003
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Glitch Art, their arrangement from Glitch Art, the finish from Glitch Art. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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 Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

Type from Internet Ugly
Colour from Internet Ugly
Form from Glitch Art
Composition from Glitch Art
Surface from Glitch Art

02

The type

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

Display · Internet Ugly

Riot

Anton, standing in for Impact (Geoffrey Lee, Stephenson Blake, 1965), set white with a black outline

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

Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

  • #ffffff ground · 36%
  • #000000 ink · 14%
  • #00a2e8 accent · 18%
  • #ff00ff accent · 14%
  • #ff7f27 accent · 10%
  • #00e5ff accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ffffff;
  --ink: #000000;
  --accent-1: #00a2e8;
  --accent-2: #ff00ff;
  --accent-3: #ff7f27;
  --accent-4: #00e5ff;
  --font-display: "Anton", 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.

Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular: Most meme templates are photographs of real people, often children, or licensed stock. Success Kid is Laney Griner's son: the photo has been licensed to advertisers, and in January 2020 she sent a cease-and-desist letter to a congressman whose fundraising campaign used it without permission. Distracted Boyfriend is microstock, and its photographer says use without a proper licence is not allowed. License a template or make a new picture for commercial or political work. Check what a format means now: some characters that spread through 4chan were taken up as hate symbols (the ADL listed Pepe the Frog, Matt Furie's 2005 Boy's Club character, in 2016, while noting that most uses are not hateful). Reaction images of Black people posted by non-Black users and brands read as digital blackface (Lauren Michele Jackson, Teen Vogue, 2017), and deep-fried memes came out of Black Twitter, so credit where formats come from. When brands and campaigns borrow a format, its makers often protest or drop it (Douglas).

04

The two styles

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. 2003–present · Global / networked, North America Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular A deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014. Figures are drawn with a mouse in MS Paint, photos are found and crudely pasted together, and captions shout in white Impact capitals with a black outline, top and bottom, or in Comic Sans. Re-saving and 'deep-frying' wear the pixels down. The joke's setup and punchline are the layout, and every template is made for a crowd to copy; some are clean stock photos that only the labels make a meme.

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More combinations

With Glitch Art

All 15 combinations with Glitch Art

With Internet Ugly

All 18 combinations with Internet Ugly

Every style combination