Indie Sleaze and Internet Ugly: a style combination

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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.

Indie Sleaze Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

Type from Internet Ugly: All caps
Condensed display
Colour from Indie Sleaze: Dark ground
Form from Internet Ugly: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Indie Sleaze: Dynamic asymmetry
Full bleed
Surface from Internet Ugly: Glitch
Hard offset shadow

02

The type

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

Display · Internet Ugly

Okay

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

Text · Indie Sleaze

Mainly a fashion and music-scene label applied in retrospect to the late-2000s indie and blog-rock crowd (skinny jeans, band tees, smudged eyeliner). Its graphic expression is mostly photographic and platform-based, not a designed system: amateur direct-flash party snapshots posted as an unedited stream to MySpace and early Tumblr, overexposed, noisy and dark-roomed. Its distinctness lies in that pairing of flash snapshot and blog stream.

Space Grotesk; Indie Sleaze used Default blog and profile-page sans-serif captions and The MySpace and Tumblr interface type around the photographs

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Indie Sleaze, with a counter-accent from Internet Ugly. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Indie Sleaze Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular

#0d0b0e ground · 36%
#e6e1ea ink · 14%
#c8322d accent · 18%
#fff200 accent · 14%
#5a3a63 accent · 10%
#00a2e8 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0d0b0e;
  --ink: #e6e1ea;
  --accent-1: #c8322d;
  --accent-2: #fff200;
  --accent-3: #5a3a63;
  --accent-4: #00a2e8;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Space Grotesk", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Indie Sleaze: The look was built on photographing real people, often drunk or intoxicated, in nightlife, and posting the pictures publicly without their ongoing consent; the Cobrasnake archive and the Tumblr and MySpace posts are of identifiable individuals. Terry Richardson, whom Wikipedia lists among the mid-2000s photographers who embraced the style, has been accused by multiple models of sexual misconduct and exploitation (he says the allegations are false) and Condé Nast stopped commissioning him in 2017; he is deliberately left out of the exemplars and his work is not a model to follow. The revival raises the same consent and privacy questions: get consent from anyone identifiable, and do not reuse old nightlife photographs of real people as stock for a retro look.

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).

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