Style combination · Pairs well

Sovietwave × Vaporwave

Its Western counterpart: share the degraded found footage and wistfulness, but replace the mall and pastel irony with Soviet space imagery.

From the research on Sovietwave

Mix them and make something Sovietwave Vaporwave

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Sovietwave, their arrangement from Vaporwave, the finish from Sovietwave. 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.

Sovietwave Vaporwave

Type from Vaporwave: Wide letterspacing
Eclectic mixing
Colour from Sovietwave: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Sovietwave: Stylised figuration
Rectilinear
Composition from Vaporwave: Collage & layering
Central symmetry

Sovietwave avoids central symmetry: this is where the two pull against each other.
Surface from Sovietwave: Grain & noise
Glitch

The type

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

Display · Vaporwave

Souvenir

Syncopate, standing in for Full-width Latin text (ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ)

Text · Sovietwave

A post-Soviet internet aesthetic pairing synthwave's music and VHS glow with Space Age Soviet imagery and Cyrillic captions: nostalgia for the past future (Natalija Majsova), a lost technological optimism. Visually it diverges from synthwave, with muted print colours and little neon. It is not endorsement of the Soviet state; critics call it a romanticised myth (Shevchenko) or one that ignores harsh realities (Molchat Doma), and Ukrainian artists may reject the label. Use state symbols with care.

VT323; Sovietwave used Plain Soviet-era sans lettering, such as the period Zhurnalnaya rublenaya (Polygraphmash, 1947), which the look draws on; no source ties it to specific sovietwave works and Hand-drawn Soviet poster and film-title lettering in Cyrillic

The colours

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

Sovietwave Vaporwave

#1c1f2e ground · 36%
#e8dcc0 ink · 14%
#43d5e0 accent · 18%
#01cdfe accent · 14%
#d9a441 accent · 10%
#05ffa1 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #1c1f2e;
  --ink: #e8dcc0;
  --accent-1: #43d5e0;
  --accent-2: #01cdfe;
  --accent-3: #d9a441;
  --accent-4: #05ffa1;
  --font-display: "Syncopate", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "VT323", monospace;
}

The two styles

A helmeted cosmonaut in a red spacesuit looks upward beneath a diagonal red banner reading “ВЫШЕ.” A rocket rises beside a large teal celestial body against a dark, star-speckled sky, with distressed print texture throughout.

2012–present · Eastern Europe, Global / networked Sovietwave A post-Soviet internet aesthetic pairing synthwave's music and VHS glow with Space Age Soviet imagery and Cyrillic captions: nostalgia for the past future (Natalija Majsova), a lost technological optimism. Visually it diverges from synthwave, with muted print colours and little neon. It is not endorsement of the Soviet state; critics call it a romanticised myth (Shevchenko) or one that ignores harsh realities (Molchat Doma), and Ukrainian artists may reject the label. Use state symbols with care.

A large classical sculpted head rises from a turquoise swimming pool beneath a striped yellow-pink sun, surrounded by palm trees, waterfalls, city buildings and tropical foliage. Floating computer windows, a dolphin, cherry blossoms, a compact disc and a wireframe globe fill the pink-and-purple sky beneath the title “DREAM POOL.”

2011–2017 · Global / networked, North America Vaporwave An internet-born microgenre and visual aesthetic that remixes the debris of late-20th-century consumer culture (Windows 95 dialogs, classical busts, palm trees, mall interiors, Japanese text, early 3D renders) in pastel pinks and cyans. Emerging around 2011 from records by James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin and Vektroid, it is at once nostalgic homage and deadpan critique of corporate optimism.

Sovietwave × Vaporwave

What each style brings

The type

The colours

As CSS

The two styles

More combinations

With Sovietwave

With Vaporwave