Distress / grunge overlay
Scratches, dust, and eaten-away edges layered over artwork so it looks worn, photocopied, and printed on a bad day.
See it
What it is
A layer of scratches, dust, speckle, and eaten-away ink dropped onto clean artwork to age it. Unlike noise texture, which is evenly spread, distress is irregular and clustered: heavy at edges and folds, clear in the middle, with directional scrapes that imply something physically dragged across it. Ray Gun-era editorial, band merch, skate graphics, and photocopied zines are the canonical anchors.
Two ways to apply it, and the difference is everything. Laid on top at low opacity, the grime sits in front of your art and reads as a dirty screen. Used as a knockout mask, the texture removes ink from the letterforms and shapes themselves, which is what real worn print does and what actually convinces. Use the mask route for logos and headlines, the overlay route for backgrounds and photos.
Gotcha: distress does not scale. A logo eroded to look great at 400px turns into mush at 32px, and thin strokes disappear entirely. Always keep a clean master and swap it in for favicons, small UI, and embroidery, and keep the texture off body copy: it destroys legibility faster than any other overlay in this field.
Ask AI for it
Distress this logo and headline: use a high-contrast grunge texture (scratches, ink speckle, dry-brush erosion) as a knockout mask so the texture removes ink from the letterforms rather than sitting on top of them, biting hardest at the edges and leaving the centers mostly intact. Add scattered dust specks and a few long directional scrapes across the background at low opacity. Keep a clean unmasked version for small sizes.