Style combination · Pairs well
Internet Ugly × Punk
Both make amateur, cheap reproduction a stance; combine ransom-note cut-ups with Impact captions and crude pasted photos for zine-style posters that still read as a joke.
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.
Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular Punk & DIY Zine
- Type from Internet Ugly
- Colour from Punk
- Form from Internet Ugly
- Composition from Punk
- Surface from Punk
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Internet Ugly
Noise
Anton, standing in for Impact (Geoffrey Lee, Stephenson Blake, 1965), set white with a black outline
Text · Punk
The graphic voice of punk rock in fanzines, record sleeves and gig flyers: images and words cut from newspapers, typed or scrawled, pasted down and run off on a photocopier. Deliberate crudeness, ransom-note lettering and hijacked mass-media imagery turned cheap reproduction into an anti-professional statement of autonomy and dissent.
Courier Prime; Punk used Ransom-note cut-out lettering and Typewriter faces
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Punk, with a counter-accent from Internet Ugly. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular Punk & DIY Zine
-
#f2efe6ground · 36% -
#0d0d0dink · 14% -
#ff2fa0accent · 18% -
#00a2e8accent · 14% -
#d7191caccent · 10% -
#ff7f27accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2efe6;
--ink: #0d0d0d;
--accent-1: #ff2fa0;
--accent-2: #00a2e8;
--accent-3: #d7191c;
--accent-4: #ff7f27;
--font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Courier Prime", monospace;
}Use it with care
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
05
More combinations
With Internet Ugly
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Drop one rage face or Impact caption into a strict Swiss grid to show how much of design's authority comes from polish.
- Brutalist Web Design Pairs well · Put MS Paint drawings and image macros on a raw-HTML page of default fonts and blue links; both treat software defaults as honesty rather than lack of taste.
- Acid Graphics / New Ugly Contrasts · Acid Graphics' 'New Ugly' is rendered by professionals in chrome and 3D; Internet Ugly is ugly because it is quick and amateur. Decide which kind of ugly a brief needs before borrowing either.
- Corporate Memphis Contrasts · Brand-safe flat illustration is what meme makers mock; a brand that borrows meme templates risks the backlash Douglas describes, as communities drop co-opted formats.
- Indie Sleaze Pairs well · Both live on casual web platforms and refuse polish; Indie Sleaze takes the music-scene snapshot where Internet Ugly takes meme vernacular.
- Instagram Slideshow Activism (Social-Justice Infographics) Contrasts · The meme vernacular is its ironic other and the language of its parodies: crude, found and knowing where the slideshow is polished and sincere.
- 'Good Morning' Greeting Images (WhatsApp Forward Vernacular) Contrasts · The same forwarding networks with the opposite intent: borrow the meme's speed and template logic, and even its jokes, but keep the greeting affectionate rather than ironic.
- Forum Signature Art (Sig & C4D Render Graphics) Contrasts · The crude, ironic meme dialect of the same forums; sig art aims at the opposite, a slick and earnest technical finish.
With Punk
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Borrow Constructivist diagonals and red-and-black bars to give punk collage the agitprop structure post-punk sleeves later adopted.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Run punk collages through a riso in fluoro pink and black to keep the DIY ethic while gaining richer, layered colour.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Deface a clean corporate identity with xerox collage to make the critique of polish and authority explicit.
- Frutiger Aero Contrasts · Glossy optimism is everything punk rejects; one torn xerox fragment on an aero gradient reads as instant sabotage.
- Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas) Contrasts · Both mix found type with appropriated pictures, but punk tears and photocopies while Fluxus keeps a clean offset black, justified blocks and a tight edge-to-edge grid; use the Fluxus version when cheap materials should still look ordered.
- Natural Wine Label Art Pairs well · Alice Feiring calls the earlier natural-wine scene punk rock: of Gut Oggau she says 'This is where things grow up and stop being so punk rock' (Punch, 2021). Take punk's refusal of professional polish but drop the collage and the anger: one felt-pen picture on a white label carries the same do-it-yourself stance in a friendlier voice.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective) Contrasts · Both scribble over photographs, but punk's photocopied blacks and ransom-note type are cheap and nihilist, while Grapus prints bright offset colour, mostly on white, in an optimistic, party-backed voice.
- Situationist Détournement Graphics Contrasts · Punk reprised the situationist prank in the late 1970s, but it packs torn photocopies and mixed type into crowded pages; détournement keeps a few recognisable fragments and lets each one say the opposite of what it said. Borrow the rewritten balloon when a punk layout needs a sharper argument.