How do you create glitch text and typography?

Glitch typography applies digital corruption aesthetics to letterforms, creating text that appears broken, distorted, or digitally degraded. The technique works for logos, posters, titles, and expressive type design.

Digital techniques: In Photoshop or Illustrator, start with your text, then apply displacement through horizontal slice shifts -select rectangular sections and nudge them left or right. Add RGB splitting by duplicating the text layer in different colors with slight offsets. Layer scan lines and noise textures over the type.

Animated approaches: For video, keyframe displacement values to make text glitch dynamically. Apply random position jitter, opacity flickers, and color channel separation that varies over time. Plugins like Data Glitch automate these effects.

Hand-drawn methods: Sketch letters normally, then add glitch elements: duplicate portions of characters offset horizontally, draw through-lines suggesting scan line interference, add “ghost” versions of letters in different positions.

Generative approaches: Tools like Processing can algorithmically corrupt text -displacing pixel rows, adding noise to vector paths, or fragmenting letterforms procedurally.

The most effective glitch typography balances readability with distortion. Too subtle and the effect disappears; too aggressive and text becomes illegible. Our glitch typography guide includes templates and tutorials.