this ask has been here for a while, and i haven't really answered it because... i don't really know what to call the aesthetics i like??? i'm sure all the aesthetics and styles i borrow from have names, but i don't really know what they are!!

i mostly grew up with mid 2000s computers and web design; most of my background as an artist, in terms of both music and art, was just messing around with free software as a kid and creating things in them. i was much younger back then, so i wasn't working with any specific goals or styles in mind, i was just creating things. there's a certain form of boundlessness that i associate with the things i made as a kid, even if most of what i did sucked. maybe especially if it sucked. the only thing that really shaped those creations were my inability to fully grasp the software i was using, but also the limitations and functionality of the software itself.

the limitations of web 1.0 are a big factor in what made it look as garish and simplistic as it did. the same concept applies to music trackers, or midi files, or ms paint art, or compressed mp3 files, or gamemaker 7 doomclones, or chiptune and pixelart as a whole. i pretty much grew up making myself familiar with all of these formats. using my computer to make creative things was basically my main outlet at the time, and there are a lot of holdovers from that in my work even now. it's something that i want to express in my work, since it made me into who i am today.

because of its simplistic nature, this type of design also feels very utilitarian to me. i prefer using aliased lines in my artwork, because in a very machinal way it just speeds up the process of creating art. if i had an outline of a rectangle, and the outline is all black, all 1, and the background is all white, all 0; if i wanted to fill it, it's very easy to compute which 1s should be turned into 0s. throw some anti-aliased lines in the mix, that go from 1 to 0.754455 to 0.244239 to 0, and you start having to mess around with settings to get the right fill threshold and you start having to apply tricks with your fill selection to make sure it fills in everything without leaving any pixels unfilled.

aliased lines and other such computer graphics-derived aesthetics like pixelart, limited colour depth, dithering, all suggest a common ground between the artist/viewer and the computer. it's easy to understand for the artist/viewer, in a way that is also easy to understand for the computer. why should you use aliased lines? because it's easier to compute! it gives the art a sort of ease and accessibility, as though it says: hey, look, this is simple! you can do this too, it's easy! even you as a layperson can have a productive relationship with your computer as a tool to create art. you don't have to invest in a drawing tablet or expensive art software for that, nor do you need to invest lots of time into learning how to professionally use photo editing software to overcome hurdles like "how to fill in my art that has anti-aliased lines". i hope that putting out basic art made with basic tools and materials helps to inspire the democratization of digital art.

i always design things with the idea in mind that things should be clear to understand. i like using bold fonts and contrasting colours and very basic design to bring things across. and it's totally okay to play around with those things, as long as the primary message or feeling of the design still gets communicated. lately, i've been experimenting a lot with fonts; my personal website has fonts that are at an angle, the designs i've been making for CUTE CERVID recently have things like squished and squashed fonts, or even fonts that have been sheared or perspective shifted. idaidaida has bold y2k fonts with rainbow outlines and textures applied to them. but i'd never make the text unreadable. you can spice things up, you can rotate or shear fonts and make the viewer have to play around in order for them to understand the message. you can add lots of cool looking symbols and graphics that communicate a certain feeling or mood. but you should never make the message itself unable to be read. even when i do put things in front of the text, like on the Triple Team! coverart, i still keep the text outline there so you can still read what it says.

idaidaida was also heavily influenced by scenecore aesthetics, both visually and musically. i guess that's largely thanks to my peers such as 2a03fox and kaj strife who introduced me to aesthetics like those. scenecore aesthetics go so very hand in hand with old web aesthetics, because of how popular they were in the myspace era; there's tons of kitschy eyesore website themes and gifs to pull from here. it loops right back around to the computer graphics/web design aesthetics i previously discussed. it's easy to understand; maybe not in a readability sense, but it communicates a lot of emotion through being so visually heavy. this then ties back into hyperpop as a genre, which is defined by being extremely maximalist and post-ironic in how it takes music tropes and internet culture tropes and mashes them together into what could only be described as the ideal outcome of pop music: so ideal, mindless, and attention-demanding that it becomes a satire of itself.

and despite that, it's music that sticks! my attention span has been lowered quite a bit through growing up in such a traumatizing and mentally illness-inducing world that increasingly relies on screens and devices and likes and shares. at this point, i need heavily stimulating music and art to feel satisfied, because if it's not like that, it's much harder to really feel it. making heavy use of vibrant colours and logospam and futuristic fonts feels like the epitome of that. i don't view this all as a negative thing per se; i'm just here to document and describe the world around me through the emotions and feelings in my art and my music, and this is what that looks and sounds like.

i'd be remiss if i didn't point out how there's a lot of queerness in using so many computer/internet/tech related aesthetics in my works. i'm not really sure how to describe the connection between those topics, though!! but i'm sure you all get what i mean, right? i guess if you isolate someone from society and make it so that their computer is basically their only friend, they're very likely to put the windows 95 startup sound in their songs at some point. and they're very likely to become queer. i'm sure i'm also drawn to making things with extremely loud rainbow aesthetics as a form of self-expression, because there was a time where i wasn't allowed- or didn't allow myself to do anything like that, so now i'm doing all of that extra hard as a reaction to that. i'd try to define the connection between these topics a lot more thoroughly but i've been writing this post for an hour already and i have other stuff to do. maybe this is just a good topic for discussion in the comments/shares. :3