Grunge / distressed
Design made to look damaged on purpose: photocopy noise, torn edges, ink splatter, scratches, and type that survived a rough night.
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What it is
Grunge is design that has been put through something: a photocopier, a wall, a wash cycle. Ink bleed, dust and scratch speckle, blown-out halftone, torn paper edges, misregistered layers, stencil and condensed type. The lineage runs from cut-and-photocopy punk zines through David Carson's Ray Gun, Neville Brody, and Art Chantry's gig posters, then into 1990s record sleeves and skate graphics.
Use it when polish would be a liability: music, streetwear, events, zines, anything that wants to read as loud and made by a person at 2am. The practical build is a high-contrast threshold pass on the imagery, a scanned paper or concrete texture multiplied over the whole thing, slight rotation on blocks so nothing sits square, and one or two channels knocked out of register.
Gotcha: a distress overlay at a uniform 20% opacity across the entire page reads as a filter, not a process. Vary the density, let some areas stay clean, and let the damage concentrate along edges and folds where real wear happens. Also, texture is subtractive: the layout underneath still needs a real grid and hierarchy, and small body text will lose legibility fast, so keep the grime off it.
Ask AI for it
Give this a 1990s grunge / distressed treatment: run photos through a high-contrast photocopy threshold with coarse halftone breakup, overlay a scanned paper-and-dust texture with visible scratches and toner speckle, and add torn-paper masks on the image edges. Offset one color channel slightly for misregistration, rotate a few blocks 1 to 3 degrees off square, and set headlines in condensed or stencil type with rough eroded edges. Palette: dirty off-white, black, and one bleached spot color. Vary the grime density (heavy at edges, clean behind body text) so it reads as wear rather than a flat filter.