The different universes visited in the film were designed to look like they were each drawn by a different artist. Having learned new animation tools after working on The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) following the first Spider-Verse film, Lord and Miller ambitiously employed them to develop six different animation styles. The intent was to amaze the audience whenever the characters cross into a new environment so the film can accurately reflect its plot and the styles can generate various emotional backdrops.
Earth-65, the home of Gwen Stacy, was designed to look like "impressionistic" watercolor paintings. The animation team created a simulator to generate this style and used a visual palette that reflects Gwen's emotions like a "three dimensional mood ring".[18] According to co-director Justin K. Thompson, the reflection of her emotions through colors is inspired by a scene in 1950's Cinderella where her dress gets torn, and the environment reacts to that trauma. This style was also intended by Miller to remind the audience about the covers of the Spider-Gwen comic books.
One of the two alternate Earths seen in the trailer was Earth-50101, which the crew nicknamed "Mumbattan" after Mumbai and Manhattan, due to that world being based on the one from Gotham Entertainment Group's Spider-Man: India comic book series.To give the character Pavitr Prabhakar unique motion and fighting style, the creative team researched the 2000-year-old Indian martial arts, Kalaripayattu,[citation needed] from the state of Kerala.
The other universe was Nueva York, the futuristic New York City from the Marvel 2099 world, was heavily influenced by Syd Mead's neo-futurist illustrations, which has an unfinished look.[86] Also the works of artists Ron Cobb, John Bell, John Berkey, John Harris and Ralph McQuarrie were inspirations for the city's design, in addition to the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. The city was created as a highly controlled environment reflecting Miguel's personality, and has an authoritarian, brutalist and minimalist style of design meant to represent a "clean, strong, unified, front-facing ideology". But when going underground one realizes that it's a world that can't really be controlled.
While the cast and crew were being interviewed for Empire in March 2023, codirector Joaquim Dos Santos revealed that another universe would be "the punky New London, inhabited by Daniel Kaluuya's Spider-Punk", with a final dimension "being kept tightly under wraps for now", later revealed to be Earth-42, the world the spider that bit Miles came from and where he has become that world's version of the Prowler.[85][89]
Spider-Punk's animation style took two to three years to develop and is inspired by collage imagery of 1970s punk-rock album covers, posters, and zines emulating the look of Xerox prints, colored papers and images appropriated from magazines and newsprints, and has a general grayed-out quality due to copy machines not having toner in them.[90] Also the animators experimented with different frame rates to reflect DIY punk visuals and Spider-Punk's anarchic personality and tendency of inconsistency. His body is animated on 3s or 2s (8 or 12 images), his guitar on 4s (6 images), and his outline on 2s or 1s (12 or 24 images); unlike rest of the characters that are predominantly animated on 2s.[91]
In May 2023, Jake Johnson revealed in an interview that a Lego universe would be featured in the film.[92] The Lego sequence was done by 14-year-old Canadian animator Preston Mutanga and was added late in the movie, after the filmmakers were so impressed by his fan-made Lego recreation of the film's first teaser that they tracked him down and recruited him.
Rick Leonardi, the co-creator of Spider-Man 2099, was brought on to adapt his own designs for the film, while comic book artist Brian Stelfreeze was chosen to shape the visual development of Jess Drew, inspired both by the white comic-book Spider-Woman Jessica Drew and the black live-action television Spider-Woman Valerie the Librarian (portrayed by Hattie Winston in Spidey Super Stories).