Style combination · Contrasts

Glitch Art × PC Music Graphics

Later hyperpop and glitchcore lean on glitchy, cluttered, datamoshed edits that corrupt the image; PC Music keeps the surface flawless.

From the research on PC Music Graphics

Mix them and make something Glitch Art PC Music Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Glitch Art, their arrangement from PC Music Graphics, the finish from Glitch Art. 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.

Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics PC Music Graphics

Type from PC Music Graphics: Experimental & distorted
Colour from Glitch Art: Fluorescent & neon
Complementary clash
Form from Glitch Art: Rectilinear
Non-representational
Composition from PC Music Graphics: Isolated object
Single focal point
Surface from Glitch Art: Glitch
Grain & noise

PC Music Graphics avoids glitch and grain & noise: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.

The type

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

Display · PC Music Graphics

Fine

Tilt Warp; PC Music Graphics used Custom display lettering after Rudolf Koch and Berthold Wolpe, with a Renaissance, woodcut feel and Comic Sans and other early-web system defaults, quoted knowingly

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 PC Music Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics PC Music Graphics

#0a0a0a ground · 36%
#00ff41 ink · 14%
#ff00ff accent · 18%
#f2ff1f accent · 14%
#00e5ff accent · 10%
#e0151f accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0a0a0a;
  --ink: #00ff41;
  --accent-1: #ff00ff;
  --accent-2: #f2ff1f;
  --accent-3: #00e5ff;
  --accent-4: #e0151f;
  --font-display: "Tilt Warp", 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.