Vaporwave
Nostalgia for a 1990s internet that never existed: pink and cyan gradients, marble busts, wireframe grids, and stray katakana.
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What it is
Vaporwave started around 2010 as a music microgenre and dragged a whole visual language along with it. The album art for Macintosh Plus 'Floral Shoppe' is the canonical image: a plaster Roman bust on hot pink, with Japanese text. The raw material is dead consumer technology and dead commerce: Windows 95 dialog boxes, mall food courts, VHS tracking errors, corporate stock imagery, museum-gift-shop statuary.
Reach for it when you want nostalgia with irony attached, usually for music, merch, or a hero section that is allowed to be a joke. The moves are specific: magenta-to-cyan gradients on deep purple, a wireframe grid receding to a horizon, a sun cut by horizontal slits, checkerboard floors, palms, and type set in a chrome serif or half-width katakana used as texture rather than language.
Gotcha: everyone mixes it up with synthwave. Synthwave is sincere 1980s action-movie nostalgia (neon sunset, chrome, driving at night). Vaporwave is 1990s mall-and-office decay played straight-faced. Second gotcha: hot pink text on cyan fails contrast badly, so keep body copy off the gradient and let the palette live in the art.
Ask AI for it
Design this in a vaporwave aesthetic: magenta-to-cyan gradient over a deep purple background, a cyan wireframe grid receding to a low horizon with a large sun cut by horizontal slits, a white plaster Greek bust floating off-center, and palm silhouettes. Set the headline in a chrome or glossy serif with a soft outer glow, add small half-width katakana as decorative text, and overlay light VHS scanlines and chromatic aberration. Keep body text on solid dark panels so it stays readable.