Cyberpunk
Rain-slick night city where advanced tech sits on top of decay: neon signage, haze, cables, and 'high tech, low life' grime.
See it
What it is
Cyberpunk is 'high tech, low life': advanced technology stacked on top of a decaying, overcrowded, corporate-run city. Visually that means night, rain, and haze; stacked multilingual signage; wet asphalt reflecting magenta and cyan; sodium-orange streetlight fighting the neon; cables, ducts, and grime layered over everything. The canon is Blade Runner (1982, with Syd Mead's designs), William Gibson's Neuromancer, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Cyberpunk 2077.
Reach for it when you want tension and density: a game page, a security product with attitude, a music release. On screen, the effects that sell it are volumetric light through fog, chromatic aberration, scan lines, and glitch displacement on type.
Gotcha one: neon alone is not cyberpunk. Clean neon on a clean surface reads as synthwave. Cyberpunk needs decay and clutter behind the glow, and the glow must be a light source in the scene, not a sticker on top. Gotcha two: glowing cyan on black passes a contrast check and still hurts. Thin, heavily saturated, bloom-wrapped type halates on a real screen, the edges smear, and people stop reading after a paragraph. Keep the glow in the art and set body copy in something calmer: heavier weight, lower saturation, no text shadow.
Ask AI for it
Render this in a cyberpunk style, Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077 reference. Night, heavy rain, thick atmospheric haze with volumetric light shafts. Dense vertical city: stacked multilingual neon signage, exposed cables and ducts, steam vents, wet asphalt reflecting the signs. Palette: near-black base with magenta and cyan neon, sodium orange for practical streetlights, one sickly green accent. High contrast, crushed blacks, strong rim lighting on subjects. Add chromatic aberration, fine scan lines, and glitch displacement on the type. Keep surfaces worn, dirty, and cluttered, never clean or minimal.