- Sans Serif
381
- Calligraphy
49
- Display
534
- Bold
- Script
165
- Serif
286
- Retro
150
- Graffiti
66
- Y2K
67
- Elegant
- Western
- Gothic
74
- Futuristic
96
- Bubble
- Playful
161
- Art Deco
52
- Wedding
102
- Sports
60
- Brush
137
- Pixel
90
- Groovy
69
- Signature
88
- Cartoon
91
- Medieval
- Typewriter
54
- Blackletter
- Marker
- Grunge
- Monoline
51
- Handwriting
299
Scan Textures
Our scan textures come from real flatbeds and photocopiers: acid scans with banding in pink, teal, and violet; photocopy paper; dirty and bad-scan overlays; glitch and techno misreads; and a flat black-and-white set. Print-resolution JPGs, so the noise survives a full-bleed poster.
Scan textures: pulled off real glass, not generated
A scan-line filter gives you neat repeating bands, because that's the easiest thing for software to draw. A flatbed doesn't work like that. The sensor crawls across the page one thin strip at a time, so every bit of dust, every hair, every greasy thumbprint on the glass gets recorded into the image. And it gets recorded in exactly the same place every single time, because the dust isn't moving.
That's the detail worth holding onto. Real scanner noise has a direction and a memory. Filter noise is random and even, which is why it looks like nothing in particular.
A copier adds a second kind of damage on top. Toner clumps, streaks, and drops out where the drum is worn, and every pass through the machine loses a bit more. Photocopy a photocopy five times and you get edges no plugin will give you. Try it once if there's an old machine in the office, it takes ten minutes and you'll understand the whole category better.
Skip these when the artwork has to look clean and official, or when there's a lot of small type underneath. The heavier files eat body copy alive.
What's in the library
- Dirty and bad scanner: dust, streaks, uneven exposure. A machine that nobody has cleaned, doing its honest best.
- Photocopy and toner: clumped blacks, dropouts, dirty edges. The xeroxed flyer look.
- Acid scans: banding that runs through pink, teal, and violet, shifting tone from one edge of the sheet to the other. These carry a lot of color, so plan for that.
- Glitch and disrupt: shifted channels, torn bands, dropped data, from a file pushed past a clean read on purpose.
- Techno distortion: harder, more mechanical interference patterns.
- Black and white: flat grayscale noise and banding from a plain monochrome pass. The most documentary end of the range, and the easiest to use under type.
How the textures are made
Mostly by abusing hardware. Scans run through aging or dirty flatbeds, prints run back through a copier until the toner gives up, and files pushed until the read breaks instead of completing. The acid ones start from print material that's been chemically messed with before it ever hits the glass, which is where that pink and violet banding comes from.
Resolution is the part that matters to you. These get captured high, often 600 dpi, because scanner noise is fine detail and fine detail is what dies first when you scale up. A texture that looks great at screen size and falls apart on a poster is the usual disappointment with this category, so the files are built big on purpose.
Things to look at before you download
- Check the direction of the streaking: it should run one consistent way across the sheet, because that's how a sensor moves. If the marks in a pack point every which way, somebody built them in Photoshop.
- Color or neutral: acid and glitch files carry their own palette and will take over your layout. Black and white and photocopy files just add grit.
- Pixel size against your biggest format: the whole point of these is fine noise, and fine noise is the first casualty of scaling.
- How many are genuinely different: flipped and rotated copies of one scan are easy to pad a pack with and easy to spot once two of them are on the same spread.
- How much clean space is left: a texture with damage edge to edge gives you nowhere to put type. One with a quieter middle is far more useful.
Where these get used
Pick the texture to match the story the piece is telling. Black and white and photocopy scans read as official, archival, bureaucratic, like something that came out of a filing cabinet. Acid and glitch scans read as handled, bootlegged, deliberately wrong. Both are useful, and using the wrong one is how a zine ends up looking like a tax form.
- Zines and DIY print: photocopy and dirty scanner, matching how the format was actually reproduced for decades.
- Music and streetwear: acid and glitch, for a bootleg or corrupted feel.
- Album art and posters: the heavy files at full strength, where the damage is the whole visual.
- Editorial and archival layouts: black and white scanner texture doing the work of documentation.
- Packaging and labels: worn photocopy texture suggesting a product with a paper trail behind it.
- Social and title graphics: a scan over flat color or type for a degraded finish, kept light.
Dirty and bad-scanner files, the flat black-and-white set, and the acid scans with their pink-teal-violet banding all come off flatbed glass. Photocopy and toner passes come from a copier, where the damage is clumping and dropout rather than dust and streaking. Glitch, disrupt, and techno files start as either and get pushed until the read breaks.
A flatbed reads the page one thin strip at a time, so every speck of dust, hair, or smudge on the glass gets scanned into every pass. A photocopier adds its own layer: toner that clumps, streaks, or drops out where the drum is worn.
A bad scanner texture comes from a failing machine — streaks, dust, uneven exposure, misfeeds — but it's still one continuous image. A glitch texture comes from a scan or file corrupted on purpose, so it breaks into shifted channels, torn bands, and dropped data.
Black-and-white and photocopy scans read as documentation: forms, archives, anything meant to look official or bureaucratic. Acid and color-shifted scans carry attitude instead — zine, bootleg, corrupted-VHS territory, where the piece should look handled rather than filed.
Multiply for dark marks over light artwork, Screen for light streaks and dropouts over a dark layout. A mid-gray scan on Overlay or Soft Light adds the grit without moving your colors. Acid scans carry strong color of their own, so they work better as a base layer than as an overlay on top.
Respect the direction. A real sensor drags one way across the page, so streaks and misfeeds run consistently along one axis — placing a texture at a random angle breaks the thing it's imitating. One scan per piece is usually enough; stacking three reads as a filter stack.
Yes, if the file covers your final size — these are print-resolution, so a full-bleed poster is fine. The risk is legibility, not resolution: heavy glitch and dirty-scanner files eat small type and fine logo detail. Keep those on a background layer at reduced opacity, and save full-strength damage for pieces where the damage is the point.