Far and away the 90s and it’s not even close. We had the internet but it wasn’t stalking us. We had cell phones but your parents couldn’t drop a tracker app on it to see if you were actually at Doug’s house. Gas was cheap. Airports were better, flying was better, fewer people, god I miss the 90s.
It’s an interesting idea, though, that one’s preference for a particular design or aesthetic, especially when that design or aesthetic is emblematic of a particular historical or cultural moment, is never wholly isolated to its visual or material components, but also innately tied to our memory and understanding of that moment. I personally don’t think you can extricate a particular aesthetic from the psychic background noise surrounding it. Our minds don’t work that way. It’s always forming these subconscious or unconscious connections, binding events and memory to abstract signifiers.
We don’t like the 90s aesthetic because it’s “better” or even attractive. I mean, nobody has wallpaper in their home with those pastel and neon triangles. Many of us like it because it reminds us of childhood, of not having responsibilities other than waking up early enough on Saturday to catch all your cartoons and of not complaining too much when you have to go visit your grandparents who can never remember your birthday and who always ask you how old you are this year, of finishing Super Mario on the SNES before your friend does so you can brag about being better at video games than him. It’s of a simpler time and place, because we were simpler. And it was, in retrospect, of an America briefly sandwiched between the end of the original “Forever War” that was the Cold War, and the beginning of the 20th Century’s new “Forever War,” that is the War on Terror.
Give me the 90s with today’s safety standards (for things like car/aircraft/etc)
Don’t forget about the banning of indoor smoking in public places. God the 90’s were a horrible time for that although it was winding down.
It wasn’t so great if you were gay, either. Racism was mostly passe, but everyone thought Columbus was a cool guy and the natives disappeared on their own, which is not ideal.
Not being poor and the blissful delusion that history is over sound lit, but there are some hard edges to the era I hear about occasionally, as a Zoomer. And WTF is up with that song about rubbing your boner on people?
That, and internet in the late 90s started to get really fast. Some blokes sat in their rooms for days on end, downloading music or movies, as there were no laws against it yet. Or at least they were not enforced. In other words, those were the days when average Joe could still be one step ahead of The Man. You know, before he turned against us with a vengeance, everywhere, 24/7.
2030s design:
Me, in my ivory tower: Man, bandages as an art style really seems to be trendy amongst the wastelanders. I wonder why?
This comment actually made that choice click in my head, I’d never asked why that was before and kinda assumed it was to help protect the internals of a machine you couldn’t fix from the environment but really it’s more likely to be so you always have some bandages on hand (however sanitary)
Now I’m no apocalypse expert, but I feel like a knife taped to some rebar doesn’t make for a very viable arrow, or at least not one that the pictured bow could fire
Edit: is that a curtain tassle they’ve used for fletching?
I’m also unsure about the purpose of the blood-stained bandages that keep you from holding the sub-machinegun’s foregrip.
Or whether the sharp, jagged edges on the frame of the goggles might be an issue.
And what the fuck is the skull used for?
Memphis design for the colors and patterns, Y2K for the colorful translucent electronics, and Frutiger Aero for the GUIs.
I’m biased towards Y2K from the nostalgia, since those were the prime years of my childhood right before my teenage years kicked in.
But, I love the design of that time because of how obsessed with futurism everything was. It took the future chic look of the mid-late '60s and revamped it, taking that hype for the future- with the Space Race- bringing it back, and updating it for the Information Age.
It felt like we, as a society, had so much optimism for the world that was to come. So, if anything, I think that’s what I’m mostly nostalgic for. I was so excited to grow up in that world. Damn.
It felt like we, as a society, had so much optimism for the world that was to come. So, if anything, I think that’s what I’m mostly nostalgic for. I was so excited to grow up in that world. Damn.
As with anything regarding the past, there’s a lot of rose-tinted glasses going on. Be careful what you wish for
I would also argue we lived in a pre-9/11 world.
It us shocking how much the world changed in response for the sake of security and safety, and I know it’s a controversial take but the terrorists succeed in changing the world to their image.
Before: wow, this new thing is literally 4 times faster with a fuckload of features.
After : wow, this new thing allows 800 companies, fifty countries and 2 superpowers to spy on me at the same time and has 4 times the bloatware!
And all the alternatives do the same thing!
It felt like we, as a society, had so much optimism for the world that was to come. So, if anything, I think that’s what I’m mostly nostalgic for. I was so excited to grow up in that world. Damn.
We lived through the dawn of internet for the masses. It’s like seeing the start of the Iron Age. Historians in the future will wonder about proper like us and what went through our minds, seeing this huge inflection point in human history, and it’s not finished yet. The effects are still rippling.
You can make a telephone call now, with video, for free, to anywhere in the world. Even chatting to random strangers. The world has shrunk and we’re all getting to know each other and looking around and seeing what’s bullshit and what’s not. It’s slow progress but it’s happening.
US/Israel’s genocide live streamed is going to change the world order for example. The optimism was well placed.
I really thought that the internet would bring the 1st world and 3rd world together: e.g. I’d be able to videocall a farmer in India.
Instead our attention has been focused “upwards” towards a small minority of people, very few who interact with their followers meaningfully.
Apps that have been powering the gig economy (ridesharing, workrabbit, renting apps) have largely helped employers and landlords coordinate their efforts, and not helped the working class negotiate better conditions.
I’m not sure if optimism is warranted tbh
Flat design is clinical depression in graphical form, a reflection of the contemporary existential/mental health crisis. It’s a societal cry for help, basically.
Or smartphones and high pixel density displays became the norm, and raster graphics don’t look good or scale well on them. Simple vector graphics are crisper on your screen, can be rendered via things like CSS, and can more easily scale to different resolutions and dimensions.
Apple’s skeuomorphic phase overlapped the Retina display era, though, so I don’t buy that explanation. Also, it’s nothing to do with raster vs. vector. The photos that we take with phone cameras are raster graphics, for example. They look great, and it’s because they’re high-resolution. High-res raster UI elements would look great, except then the versatile manipulation by CSS would not be possible. Vector graphics are very good at that.
But here’s the thing: Complex vector graphics exist, too. There were some pretty fancy PostScript graphics even back in the early 1990’s. With all the pixels that we have now, we could have good design instead of flat, if the developers bothered. But it seems we’ve internalized the feeling that we’re not worth the effort, aesthetics and color aren’t interesting, and life is a joyless slog. Which sounds and awful lot like clinical depression…
(Incidentally, odd that emoji aren’t flat design.)
(Incidentally, odd that emoji aren’t flat design.)
That actually depends on browser, app or OS that’s doing the render. Apple and Whatsapp use the same design, Android uses a slightly different one, Discord and Microsoft both use flat designs, but for Win11 it’s a different set
I’d be so happy for a desktop window manager that didn’t make all of the window borders grey-on-grey, and distinguish the active window by making the title text slightly-darker grey.
The irony is that you could go nuts with those color customizations on Windows 95-98-2000. Not to the point of active windows having different colors, but the title bar of the active window could be blue with red text, while inactives could be yellow with purple text, if you so wanted.
