# Cyberpunk

> Dark city, neon signs, corporate dystopia — angular cuts, acid-yellow and cyan on near-black, glitching type, and a world where the future arrived and it was not great.

- Category: Expressive & trend
- Era: 2010s – present
- Origin: Cyberpunk fiction, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Neuromancer
- Lesson: https://design.dawit.dev/styles/cyberpunk
- Try it: https://design.dawit.dev/styles/cyberpunk?style=cyberpunk

## Where it came from

William Gibson's Neuromancer and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner defined the cyberpunk visual vocabulary in the 1980s. The aesthetic moved into games, anime, and UI design, peaking with CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 marketing in 2020. It combines noir darkness with hypersaturated neon, diagonal cuts, and the visual language of megacorp signage projected onto rain-slicked streets.

## How to spot it

- Near-black base with neon yellow and cyan accents
- Diagonal cuts, angled borders, and clip-path shapes
- Glitching type, scanlines, and digital corruption
- Aggressive condensed or wide display type

## Strengths

- Extremely atmospheric and memorable
- Strong contrast makes hierarchy clear
- Natural fit for games, sci-fi, and tech brands

## Weaknesses

- Very high visual noise — hard to keep readable
- Strong genre associations narrow its audience
- Glitch and neon effects tire quickly at scale

## In the wild

- Cyberpunk 2077 game UI and marketing
- Ghost in the Shell anime HUD overlays
- Deus Ex game interface design

## Use it when

Games, events, or tech products where dark-city dystopian energy is the brand.

## Related styles
[Synthwave](https://design.dawit.dev/styles/synthwave.md), [Glitch](https://design.dawit.dev/styles/glitch.md), [Tactical HUD](https://design.dawit.dev/styles/tactical-hud.md)