Style combination · Contrasts

Weirdcore × Witch House Graphics

Both can estrange a low-quality photograph; use a coded artist name and geometric sign for witch-house identity, rather than weirdcore's anonymous place and short viewer-addressing caption. A haunted photograph alone is not enough.

From the research on Witch House Graphics (Symbol Names and Haunted Web Imagery)

Mix them and make something Weirdcore Witch House Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Witch House Graphics, their arrangement from Weirdcore, the finish from Weirdcore. 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.

Weirdcore & Dreamcore Witch House Graphics (Symbol Names and Haunted Web Imagery)

Type from Witch House Graphics: Experimental & distorted
All caps
Colour from Weirdcore: Dark ground
Pastel
Form from Witch House Graphics: Geometric primitives
Naturalistic depiction
Composition from Weirdcore: Full bleed
Isolated object
Surface from Weirdcore: Grain & noise
Glitch

The type

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

Display · Witch House Graphics

Square

Climate Crisis; Witch House Graphics used Typed symbol-name lettering and Widely tracked, plain sans-serif capitals, as on the inspected White Ring Black Earth That Made Me cover; this is a lettering treatment, not a verified typeface identification

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

The colours

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

Weirdcore & Dreamcore Witch House Graphics (Symbol Names and Haunted Web Imagery)

#000000 ground · 36%
#f3c6d6 ink · 14%
#ff0000 accent · 18%
#d7388a accent · 14%
#cfc07a accent · 10%
#9ed33b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #000000;
  --ink: #f3c6d6;
  --accent-1: #ff0000;
  --accent-2: #d7388a;
  --accent-3: #cfc07a;
  --accent-4: #9ed33b;
  --font-display: "Climate Crisis", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Instrument Sans", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

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).

Witch House Graphics (Symbol Names and Haunted Web Imagery): These are musicians' authored identities, not a reusable alphabet of anonymous occult decoration. Credit the artists and obtain permission for their marks, photographs and footage; online circulation does not make those works openly licensed. The folk-symbols trait records coded and sometimes religious-looking signs, not evidence of the makers' beliefs or a licence to copy a community's sacred designs. Research any specific sign before using it. Symbol-only names can obstruct search, pronunciation and assistive access: supply a readable equivalent rather than reproducing that obstruction in navigation or essential information. The available evidence is strongest for the early-2010s visual cluster; later witch-house releases must be judged visually, not admitted by genre alone.