What is the difference between vaporwave and synthwave?

Attitude, not imagery. Both use a neon grid and 1980s furniture. Synthwave is confident and cinematic. Vaporwave is degraded, ironic and sad, and it is nostalgic for shopping malls rather than for sports cars.

Which of these will make a poster stand out?

Designers Republic, glitch and pixel art all read as deliberate. Contemporary flat illustration will not, because it is what most posters already look like.

Can these styles carry a lot of text?

Pixel art and the NASA worm style can, because both come from systems designed to display information. Synthwave, vaporwave and glitch cannot, so keep the detail in a clean panel over the top.

Screen and digital

The looks that came from a screen, and the wording that gets each one.

These styles were born on a monitor rather than a press, so the defects are digital: a chrome bevel, a channel shift, a visible pixel, a polygon that did not get subdivided. Several are also nostalgic for a specific piece of software, which means the prompt has to name the era as well as the look. A clean modern render of a 1995 aesthetic is the wrong decade and it shows immediately.

Corporate looks, borrowed

Three styles that came out of real institutions and real agencies, and are now used by people who are not them.

NASA Worm Modernist

One continuous rounded logotype, a strict grid, and a red stripe holding it together.

Psychedelic Seventies Corporate

Rainbow stripe arcs, bulbous bubble type and an earth-tone palette from a brochure.

Designers Republic

Fake corporate marks, warning symbols, numbers and Japanese text, all with no meaning.

Nostalgia rebuilt

Three looks that recreate a decade rather than come from it, each nostalgic for a different piece of dead technology.

Y2K Chrome

Liquid chrome, lens flares and translucent blue, from a moment that thought the future was glass.

Vaporwave

A Greek bust, a pink and cyan grid, Japanese text and the melancholy of a dead shopping mall.

Synthwave

A neon grid running to a striped sunset, chrome type, and a purple sky full of haze.

Made of pixels and polygons

Four looks where the unit of construction is visible: a pixel, a polygon, a broken scan line, or a perfectly clean vector shape.

Glitch Art

An image breaking: channels shifted, scan lines displaced, blocks repeating where data was lost.

Pixel Art

Every pixel placed on purpose, on a small grid, with a palette of sixteen colours.

Low Poly

Everything made of flat triangles, each a single colour, with the facets clearly visible.

Contemporary Flat Illustration

Clean vector shapes, a soft modern palette, and figures simplified past anatomy.

Make one of them

Copy a prompt into an image model and pay for that one run. No subscription.

Open an image model

Other style groups

Graphic design movementsThe movements, and the wording that gets the look of each one.18 design movements Art movements as postersEach movement written as a poster the movement itself might have printed.21 art movements Print and reproduction looksThe printing processes, and the wording for what each does to ink.11 print processes Handmade and folkWays to make a poster that looks like a person made it, not a studio.9 handmade looks Place and eraNational and period styles, each with the rules that made it local.14 regional styles Propaganda and protestPolitical traditions, and the visual rules each used to move people.7 political traditions Music scenesThe scenes, and the graphic rules each used to say who a night was for.10 music scenes

Drawing and render stylesDrawing a character rather than printing a sheet? The same reference, for how a picture is made.

Because a model will render them with current technology unless told not to. A 1995 raytrace, a 2001 chrome bevel and a 2014 low poly scene are different objects, and naming the year is what stops the result looking modern.