2. We are children of the eclectic ocean of the Internet.
Some of our aesthetical inputs are: gaming + glitch + punk / steampunk + tropic tech + Neobaroque and Byzantine styles.
Distorted Classic Piracy: there are pirate hats, sailor stripes, hooks… but mixed with elements of science fiction, punk, body horror, and dark humor.
Degen Pirate Bay sometimes looks like it’s taken from a digital comic. They resemble digital nightmare creatures or an unethical AI.
1. General Character of the Design
Each one of them has been created as a collage, using cut&patch with techniques such as 3D, handdrawed and AI generated elements, sometimes created with different lighting, textures, and even line styles. The goal is to generate visual friction, reinforcing the disobedient, broken, and patched-up aesthetic typical of pirates and punk lore
Exaggeration and caricature: all traits are pushed to the limit — big eyes, grotesque mouths, extreme hairstyles.
Expressive visual language: gestures and proportions reinforce each character’s individual identity and context. There are no “soulless NPCs” here.
Identity and contrast. We love contrasts! We juxtapose bold colors with the soft backgrounds: heavy use of white, black, red, purple. Contrasting palettes, with an aesthetic between fun gothic imaginery, neotoy, gaming and webcore. And we combine classic elements (crowns, patches, swords) with more absurd or unexpected ones (tentacles, wings, horns, bugs, mutations and erossions).
3. Aesthetic Influences in fashion
Degen Pirate Bay are also representatives of their own drip, referencing from Neobaroque, Byzantine, and tribal to meme / post-internet aesthetics.
Masks, piercings, strange eyes, colored hair, wings. All very DIY digital, merging classic elements with subcultures like digital punk, modern gothic, and irreverent high fashion, with reminiscences of 2000s gothic-tech fashion, referencing designers like Vivienne Westwoood, Alexander McQueen, Gareth Pugh, Craig Green or Comme Des Garçons.
A society is implied:
There are castes or roles: kings, captains, soldiers, mercenaries, sailors, explorers, artists, priests...
There is mutation and erossion as a simbol of transformation, as if they were a nomadic tribe, pirating through different existential planes.
IMPLICIT NARRATIVE
Degen Pirate Bay's full of references to the deep internet culture of the 2000s when the internet was a lawless ocean, and culture spread through torrents.
Some have masks as a symbol of early internet anonymity, to elements like the shovel and pickaxe (miners), the glowing eyes, ASCII tattoos, or the collection itself, which, when arranged in a specific order, recreates the logo of the legendary website The Pirate Bay.
UNIVERSE COHERENCE
It’s not "pirate realism." It’s a system of symbolic fiction:
Piracy here = freedoom defenders, pioneers, fortune and truth seekers, outsiders, rebelds, mutant identities, marginalized culture, cult.
There is no purity: everyone is broken, modified, corrupted and eroded in some way.They look like they’ve been eroded by the ocean currents. This visually unifies them.
