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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.
I think they're talking about the designs, not the whole decade.
Boy did I miss that by a mile.
Yeah but you're right.
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?
I was fortunate to have grown up in the pacific northwest where being gay was mostly fine, racism was mostly absent and we learned about smallpox blankets in school.
2030s design:
Disappointing lack of chrome spray colour
Me, in my ivory tower: Man, bandages as an art style really seems to be trendy amongst the wastelanders. I wonder why?
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?
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.
Honestly? Any of them except the last one. My preference would be 2005-2015, but any of them is better than what came after. Late 2010s was alright, but around 2020 you can really tell UI designers got their marching orders.
It's all so damn boring and lifeless. Rounded corners on literally everything for no reason other than trend chasing, wasted space and needless gaps between elements, white OR black - rarely anything else, lest it interfere with whatever systemwide adaptive coloring thing is running (even if there isn't one), boring and lifeless icons/logos, an obsession with "clean" and "streamlined" that effectively equates to the removal of usability for aesthetics, etc. All of it copy and pasted to every single piece of software or app or site.
Its ironic you put Corporate Memphis images next to it in the 2015-2024 section, because that is effectively what this trend in design aesthetic will be remembered as.
Bland, lifeless, safe, focus-grouped garbage, implemented by companies that have reached a point where the innovation is dead, corporate consolidation has effectively destroyed any room for something new and original to enter the space, and the only thing they do anymore is trend chase. Even the slightest bit of originality or doing something different from the market leader may risk the potential loss of a sliver of shareholder profit, and that simply must never be done.
And I swear to God, if I hear one more focus group generated argument about how rounded corners are more inviting or human, I am going to break into your home, and personally change every last single doorway into a hobbit hole, and every window into a port hole.
The needless gaps are there for touchscreen optimization, even on things you never use a touchscreen on, like a desktop OS.
I think it's to make desktop computing more approachable for people because smartphones are so ubiquitous nowadays and used by literally all age groups, so it makes a little bit of sense I guess.
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.)
Seems more a rejects of the flamboyance of the prior two generation which will certainly give it a different feel. It absolutely felt fresh at the time of inception.
Judging by the comments I think I must be alone in loathing the Frutiger Aero style of design, both now and at the time. So self-conscious, so fake-looking, so plasticky.
Much prefer the clean lines and flat colours of nowadays (although that's not to say there aren't issues - eg Google's stupid icon design policies in the last few years)
You know the worst part about flat design? Fucking "hamburger menu". Fuck that shit.
The second worst part? "Text? Lol get real, old man!" Menus that don't have text so I have to guess what the fucking icons mean on every different app/site.
I was born and raised throughout the whole Memphis Design era, reluctantly tolerated the Y2K era, gained a little hope for humanity during the Frutiger Aero era, then subsequently lost all hope once the Flat Design era hit.
Every era is defined by the tools we had at hand during that process. While Memphis is basically pixel art, Y2K was defined by the gradient and mask tools on Photoshop, and Aero was a victim of skewmorphic design trends pushed by the commodity of 3D tooling. Flat design took prevalence because raster-based products felt weird when seen on retina displays.
I wonder how design will be affected when AI tools become the norm.
Everything will have extra fingers.
Seriously tho I think there will be a flight to intricacy.
I don't share the hate for flat design.
It's cleaner than the others, simpler and less distracting. Easier on the eyes, too. It takes itself seriously and does so successfully imo (nice try, aero). It feels professional in a way all the previous eras don't - they seem almost child-like by comparison.
Modern design cultivates recognizable interactions by following conventions and common design language instead of goofy icons and high contrast colors. To me, modern software interfaces look like tools; the further you go back in time, the more they look like toys.
Old designs can be charming if executed well and in the right context. But I'm glad most things don't look like they did 30 years ago.
I'm guessing many people associate older designs with the era they belonged to and the internet culture at the time. Perhaps rosy memories of younger days. Contrasting that with the overbearing corporate atmosphere of today and a general sense of a lack of authenticity in digital spaces everywhere, it's not unreasonable to see flat design as sterile and soulless. But to me it just looks sleek and efficient.
I used to spend hours trying to customize UIs to my liking, nowadays pretty much everything just looks good out of the box.
The one major gripe I have is with the tendency of modern designs to hide interactions behind deeply nested menu hopping. That one feels like an over-correction from the excessively cluttered menus of the past.
That and the fact that there's way too many "settings" sections and you can never figure out which one has the thing you're looking for.
P S. The picture did flat design dirty by putting it on white background - we're living in the era of dark mode!
Needs a few earlier movements, including Art Deco/jazz moderne, Bauhaus and midcentury modern/googie
y2k the transparent plastics were when electronic manufacturing took pride in its products. (though I much prefer modern user interfaces)
Aero: I liked the 2010-ish design best even though I was at least 20 at the time. I just found Memphis and y2k a little goofy. Win XP or this fish glass Mac are the worst for me.
Maybe someone who is too young to have lived in the 90s finds this novel, I don't know.
Someone has written it here. There was at least some techno optimism left in 2012 or so and maybe that's the time I am nostalgic for.
Not so much the 90s "because we had no phones" - then turn your phone off.
Frutiger Aero was when design peaked
Flat design is just soulless crap
You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
Memphis design will always win my vote. The weird ass electronics, the ground breaking UI components, just absolutely nutty decisions and insane product concepts built on everyoneβs wild dreams of the future. I even think the same forward looking design concepts carried into the Y2K designsβ particularly with personal electronics like phones.
Frutiger Aero was best. Not only for beautiful design, but also there were standards people followed on making UI's. Now everything goes. Last time I wanted to register on some shitty website it didn't provide me any feedback that I wrote "weak" password (I copied it from KeePass), except literally green button that you could click like a madman and it didn't do anything but went gray when password was "strong enough".
I gravitate towards the ones I came up in, and that's probably not a coincidence. I will say that flat design becomes self-defeating sometimes. Every damn Google icon looks the same.
not sure, but I do know that "flat design" is absolutely the fucking worst.
This might as well ask, "When were you young and broke and wanted everything you saw in a commercial and then started collecting ridiculous amounts of nostalgia product as soon as you had even a crumb of disposable income."
Thankfully I didn't fall for that nonsense.
: reclines on throne made entirely of first gen Zunes and Sidekick phones:
Deleted my previous comment, felt like I should give this a bit more attention.
To be honest I feel like all designs are good in their own way. I like the general vibe of Memphis, but being that I was born in the mid 90s, it's probably just that general energy you get from things that happened before you did, where they are "cool" due to how just-old-enough-to-be-old-but-not-old-enough-to-be-an-antique they are, yanno?
Y2K design -- Well. I like the transluscent plastic on Gameboys and Macs. Really underrated aesthetic, wouldn't mind having it back. The DreamCast had some very sleek angles too.
Frutiger Aero will never not "look like the future" to me. It was the age of computer interfaces having all sorts of fun colours and transparencies and animations, and it just LOOKED futuristic and neat. Don't care for the product designs of the era though. That shiny finish would draw in filth and fingerprints from accross the room and after a very short time it'd lose its prettiness.
Flat design I have issues with, like the hamburger menus and the abandonment of descriptive text in favour of abstract icons -- It is also a bit too serious, but I understand and accept that, even if I miss the playfulness of Frutiger. -- But it DID finally bring us dark mode. And my eyes are forever grateful.
... Just wish solarized themes were the norm instead, no idea why they must have such high contrast. I'd even give light mode its time of day if it was a solarized light instead.
Best era was actually the 1920s(art nouveau)
Aero looks futuristic and sleek.
I like flat design.
I feel like everyone here just prefers the design they grew up with.
The next generation of design is already taking shape. It's a simplistic skewmorphic design, where it looks like the logo has been made out of clay. Look at the new Reddit and Android logo.
I don't think the underlying reason is what year I turned fifteen, but Flat can go fuck itself. Just awful usability all around. Even Windows 95 managed relief shading, and it could do that shit in sixteen colors. White on white with white dividers is the nonsense you put in movies.
90s because they used logic in designing things. Now they change for the sake of change.
Like how there was a damn good reason for the start menu button to be on the button right: you could fling your mouse the lower left and no matter if you did it too far or fast, it would always hit the corner, and be at the start button. You never had to "target" the start button, you simply went all the way down to the left. Didn't even have to look.
So obviously, they must of had an equally smart, thoughtful reason to put it in the middle, right? That's a decision born from utility, not aesthetics. Clearly not making a painfully obvious attempt at copying their main competitor.
Y2k and frutiger aero and transition between the two was the blast