Glitchy fashionable effects

Written in Mar 2009 by Anthony Stonehouse
Tags: , ,

An interesting observation came up a number of years ago in one of my typography tutorials at the National Institute of Design while I was presenting some work. The T-shirt I was wearing featured deteriorated type on the sleeve. The print was worn, faded and some of the letters were even beginning to fall off, yet the T-shirt was brand new and in fact quite expensive on a student budget. It was fashionable to wear clothing that was falling apart or with badly printed patterns and prints, and for some reason I thought I would be quite fashionable back then. While this was quite obvious, the observations made were that this trend had occurred at some point. Manufacturing had developed to the point where we were able to make perfect clothing relatively cost effectively and consistently that the trend of making imperfect clothing had emerged. 

While collecting assets for a motion graphic mood board I’ve discovered this pattern is beginning to exist in post production and special effects. Pixelation and glitches you used to see if you had the wrong video codec are now being purposely added to adopt this aesthetic. It made me wonder how many other areas this could become a fashion. Will we ever be driving cars with doors missing or parts hanging off? Anyway, some interesting examples below, click on the image to view the video.

Chairlift
Chairlift: Evident Utensil by Ray Tintori.

Kanye West
Kanye West: Welcome to Heartbreak by NABIL

1 Comment »

  1. Hope says:

    You forget the band Nine Inch Nails, they have been doing it for quite a while :)

RSS feed for comments on this post. / TrackBack URI

Leave a Reply

Jan 2012

Web design trend predictions for 2012

A year ago I posted web design trends for 2011, many of which evolved to different extends throughout the year and will continue this year. So here are my 2012 predictions for trends in visual design for the web.

Oct 2011

London Olympics logo lacks London?

Graphic communication that uses distinct styles and reveals the personality of it’s cultural environment is far more powerful and memorable — look at the rich, vibrant visual language used on the streets of India or Japan. Does the London Olympics logo have anything to do with the strong historic visual culture of London?

Oct 2011

Designing outside the rectangle

New UI design opportunities are becoming available as we adopt 3D technologies, augmented reality and gesture based control. Screens will evolve from rectangles that we look through, in to destinations we can move in to. While augmented reality enables the user interface to exist along side the real world.

Sep 2011

OnLive UK first impressions

The OnLive cloud based gaming service was fairly ground breaking announcement a few years ago and I have been anxious to see how it compares to my xbox 360 and PS3.

Jun 2011

Ampersand Conference 2011

Brighton, Friday June 17, 2011 — one of the first conferences devoted specifically to web typography. I still find it hard to believe we’ve finally reached this era. Designers can now use a wider variety of faces and apply typographic control to HTML using fonts that have been specially designed for screen use. It’s certainly […]

Apr 2011

Moodboard development

The design process always requires some sort of image based research. Ideally this takes place at the start of a project, with one of the primary outcomes being a mood board. Other outcomes will are often a visual audit of existing design, a competitor analysis and some exploration in to the key audiences. The mood […]