Style combination · Contrasts
Hauntology × Weirdcore
Both rebuild a misremembered past from found pictures and let nostalgia turn eerie, but Ghost Box designs the haunting: a Penguin-style grid, bold grotesque in a ruled band, a flat colour field and an institutional voice. Weirdcore drops grid, brand and author, and lets an anonymous snapshot and one small caption do it. Choose Ghost Box for an archival, designed eeriness and weirdcore for a found, amateur one.
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.
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design Weirdcore & Dreamcore
- Type from Hauntology
- Colour from Hauntology
- Form from Hauntology
- Composition from Weirdcore
- Surface from Weirdcore
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Hauntology avoids glitch: 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 · Hauntology
Souvenir
Archivo; Hauntology used Monotype Grotesque (MT Grotesque), the main face of the Ghost Box front covers, chosen over Helvetica and Clarendon (Bitstream's cut) on Ghost Box back covers and booklets
Text · Weirdcore
An internet aesthetic popularised on Reddit, TikTok and YouTube in the early 2020s, with dreamcore as its softer, pastel, cloud-filled sister. Found or low-quality snapshots of empty, half-familiar places (playgrounds, classrooms, malls, corridors) are crudely edited: disembodied eyes in clouds or darkness, faceless figures in doorways, and short captions such as 'nothing is real' in red or inside black voids. The aim is anemoia, a nostalgia for places one never knew, turned into unease and the feeling of being watched.
Instrument Sans; Weirdcore used Short captions in out-of-place red text ('are you lost?', 'nothing is real'), typed in whatever plain default face the editing app offers and dropped onto the photograph and White text inside black rectangular voids pasted over the picture, the void heightening the message
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Hauntology, with a counter-accent from Weirdcore. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design Weirdcore & Dreamcore
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#efe9d8ground · 36% -
#1e1b18ink · 14% -
#f9a61aaccent · 18% -
#ff0000accent · 14% -
#01b2deaccent · 10% -
#cfc07aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe9d8;
--ink: #1e1b18;
--accent-1: #f9a61a;
--accent-2: #ff0000;
--accent-3: #01b2de;
--accent-4: #cfc07a;
--font-display: "Archivo", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Instrument Sans", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design: The Ghost Box sleeves and logo, Littler's Scarfolk images and Frances Castle's Clay Pipe sleeves are in copyright, and much of what they imitate (Penguin covers, government public information posters, textbook illustrations, archive photographs) has its own rights holders: build a new fictional institution from public-domain or licensed material rather than copying a Ghost Box sleeve or Penguin's trade dress.
Weirdcore & Dreamcore: Weirdcore's found snapshots are other people's photographs, often of real homes, schools and playgrounds (the Backrooms photo was a real shop interior in Wisconsin, identified only in 2024): shoot or license your own places, and leave identifiable children and private interiors out. Its makers describe it as built to unsettle, from 'existentialism and derealization' (Nylon, 2021) to an 'aesthetic that can cause a panic attack' (a @unttochable video quoted by i-D, 2021), so take care before aiming it at children or using it near mental-health subjects, and keep video cuts to three or fewer flashes a second (WCAG 2.3.1).
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Hauntology
- Surrealist Graphics Pairs well · House named Max Ernst among his influences: add an Ernst-like collage juxtaposition to a textbook photograph to make an educational image turn eerie.
- London Transport Design Pairs well · Borrow the logic of a public-service programme (fixed elements, a roundel, varied pictures within one system) to give an invented hauntological institution a believable house style.
- Vaporwave Contrasts · Both build nostalgia from found media, but vaporwave mourns consumer electronics in neon pastels on screens while hauntology misremembers public, educational print in flat offset colour on paper; choose which lost future a design should haunt.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Contrasts · House names Peter Saville among his influences, but Saville's Factory sleeves quote one modernist or classical source per record, while Ghost Box invents a whole institution and dresses every release in its one template; choose a single quotation or a fictional series.
- Neo-Swiss Revival Contrasts · Swiss revival uses the modernist grid straight, crisp and current; hauntology keeps a grid but ages its pictures with grain and halftone and lets something uncanny into them.
- Hipster Artisanal Revival Contrasts · Both fake an old firm, but the hipster badge revives Victorian craft for warmth and trust, while hauntology revives a post-war public institution so that it feels slightly wrong.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print the template on a risograph to get real grain, two or three inks and genuine misregistration instead of simulated wear.
- Witch House Graphics (Symbol Names and Haunted Web Imagery) Contrasts · Choose between Ghost Box's fictitious institutional series and this scene's coded artist identity: trade the ruled paperback title band for a glyph-name and a distressed photographic field.
With Weirdcore
- Vaporwave Contrasts · Tanni's genealogy starts with vaporwave's spectral reuse of web imagery; vaporwave collages pastel consumer debris, busts and Japanese text with ironic luxury, while weirdcore empties the frame and drops the joke. Keep the found picture but swap the bust for a vacant playground to move from irony to unease.
- Early Web Vernacular Pairs well · Frame a weirdcore still in an old browser window, a default dialog box or a low-resolution GIF to make its debt to the amateur early web explicit; keep the window empty rather than crowding it with the early web's badges and counters.
- Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular Contrasts · Both caption a crude found picture, but white Impact capitals ask for a laugh and a crowd to copy them; one small red lowercase line asks whether you are lost. Decide which the caption is for before choosing the picture.
- Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic Contrasts · Both are nostalgic online moods set to lo-fi music, but lofi paints a lived-in, occupied room that comforts; weirdcore photographs an empty one that watches back. Choose lofi for focus and calm, weirdcore when the brief wants disquiet.
- Surrealist Graphics Pairs well · Magritte's single displaced object in a calm, ordinary space is the grammar weirdcore remakes with snapshots and phone edits; study it so the one wrong thing (an eye, a door, a figure) feels placed rather than random.
- Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics Pairs well · Borrow compression damage and an abrupt datamosh between two stills, but treat the damage as the decay of a memory rather than the subject of the work, and keep the rest of the snapshot readable.
- Analog Horror Graphics Contrasts · Both turn nostalgia into unease and share The Backrooms, but weirdcore is a still snapshot of an empty place with one small lowercase caption, while analog horror is a sequence of broadcast or tape fragments in an official voice and plain capitals. Choose the found image or the fake transmission.
- Yami-Kawaii (Sick-Cute) Contrasts · Uncanny low-resolution photography against polished, cute vector illustration.