ＷｅｂＡｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ

Vaporwave

Ｉｔ＇ｓａｌｌｉｎｙｏｕｒｈｅａｄ.

// ＷｈａｔＴｈｉｓＩｓ

Philosophy

Vaporwave is the internet's fever dream about a past that never happened. It takes the visual language of early-90s corporate design — marble busts, Windows dialog boxes, Japanese text, shopping mall muzak — and distorts it until it becomes beautiful and sad at the same time.

As a web aesthetic, it trades in gradient washes, glitch artifacts, and retro system UI. Nothing loads fast. Nothing is optimized for conversion. The page exists to feel like a place you half-remember, rendered in pink and teal and the low hum of a CRT monitor.

// ＤｅｓｉｇｎＴｏｋｅｎｓ

Characteristics

Gradient Washes.exe

Gradient Washes

Linear gradients from pink through cyan to purple blanket entire sections. Color doesn't serve hierarchy — it serves mood.

Glitch Text.exe

Glitch Text

Multiple text-shadows in offset neon colors create a chromatic aberration effect. Headings look like they're being received through a bad signal.

Scanline Overlay.exe

Scanline Overlay

A repeating-linear-gradient of thin semi-transparent lines laid over content simulates a CRT monitor. Everything feels screened.

Retro System UI.exe

Retro System UI

Inset borders, beveled edges, and system-font labels evoke Windows 95 dialog boxes and toolbar buttons.

Fullwidth Characters.exe

Fullwidth Characters

Unicode fullwidth Latin letters (ＡＢＣ) stretch display text into something monumental and slightly alien.

Neon on Dark.exe

Neon on Dark

Key accents glow in mint green, hot pink, and cyan against dark or gradient backgrounds. The palette is warm nostalgia meeting cold digital light.

// Ｃｏｐｙ＆Ｐａｓｔｅ

Style Reference

C:\AESTHETIC\PROMPT.TXT

Pastel pink-to-cyan-to-purple gradient backgrounds. Glitch text effects via CSS text-shadow with multiple colored offsets (pink, cyan). Retro Windows 95 UI elements — inset borders, beveled buttons, system font labels. Fonts: a heavy display sans-serif for headings, a monospace pixel font for accents, and a clean sans-serif for body text. Fullwidth Unicode characters for decorative display text. Repeating scanline overlays using repeating-linear-gradient. Color palette: #FF71CE pink, #01CDFE cyan, #B967FF purple, #05FFA1 mint, #FFFB96 pale yellow. The mood is nostalgic, ironic, and dreamy — the internet remembering a commercial utopia that never existed.

// ＷｈｅｎｔｏＵｓｅ

Use Cases

Good for

Music and audio project sites
Art portfolios and experimental galleries
Personal sites with a retro or ironic tone
Event pages for creative communities
Zine-style editorial content

Not for

Enterprise SaaS or B2B marketing
Healthcare, finance, or accessibility-critical apps
E-commerce with real conversion goals
Long-form documentation or knowledge bases

// Ｏｒｉｇｉｎｓ

History

Vaporwave began as a micro-genre of electronic music around 2010-2011, built on slowed-down samples of 80s and 90s smooth jazz, elevator music, and corporate hold music. Artists like Macintosh Plus and SAINT PEPSI turned forgotten consumer culture into something hauntingly beautiful.

The visual aesthetic followed the music. Album covers pulled from early internet clip art, Greek statuary, Japanese kanji, pastel sunsets, and the chrome-and-marble fantasy of a shopping mall that exists outside of time. By 2014, it had become one of the most recognizable internet aesthetics — a strange loop where the internet mourned its own lost innocence.

On the web, vaporwave translates to gradient-drenched layouts, glitch typography, and deliberate anachronism. It's one of the few aesthetics that is explicitly about nostalgia as a design principle. Its children include synthwave (which took the neon and made it cooler) and Y2K (which shares the retro-digital palette but aims for optimism over melancholy).