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.
You’re still right. You forgot just deciding to rent a place out downtown with your girlfriend on a whim. How life is supposed to be.
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.
Then the 80s show up and takes your lunch money, by blinding you with our awesome fluorescent clothing
Ha!
Amazing time for music as well.
and real original movies. and tv shows with writing. and music videos. and exciting new progress in video games. and cheap live music. and thongs under low rise jeans.
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:
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?
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)
oh, I figured it was just the ideal binding material for broken parts (e.g. limbs, rifle butts) whilst providing comfort and stretch/tightness control.
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?I can’t comment on the other things, but the skull is obvious - it’s for drinking, and the top half functions like a lid you can flap on and off, like a German beer stein.
Memphis design for the colors and patterns, Y2K for the colorful translucent electronics, and Frutiger Aero for the GUIs.
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.
… Can you turn my place into a Hobbit hole anyway?
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.
I’m ready for post-flat design.
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.
With Linux, you can customize your desktop until you pull your hair out.
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)
I actually really like Metro, live tiles are criminally underused and imo it gets a lot of hate becauae of how microsoft pushed it in windows 8, but for a touch interface it’s clean and really nice to use. Loved the sideways laid out apps too on windows phone and windows rt, wp itself was actually really nice to use and I actually kinda miss my lumia 1020
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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.
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!
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.
I started taking graphic design classes in the mid 2ks and the amount of my brain that has been squandered making everything look like shiny candy floating in a polished plastic void is disgusting.
Then I learned how to make everything look like it was badly spray stenciled and drug through a post industrial alley so I could really stick it to the man.
Woo, grunge!
Not so much the 90s “because we had no phones” - then turn your phone off. >
Whish it was that easy…
Frutiger Aero was when design peaked
y2k the transparent plastics were when electronic manufacturing took pride in its products. (though I much prefer modern user interfaces)
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”.
You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
Memphis design. 30-od years later those cup designs are still lit
Nowadays you’ll see some kids wearing sweat suits with that pattern.
Tbh I kinda want a hoodie with it.
“Kids…”
Shit, I’d wear the fuck out of that
It was discontinued only a couple of years ago, so you can still buy that design on Amazon, by the way. It’s the SOLO brand Jazz design.
I like flat design.
I feel like everyone here just prefers the design they grew up with.
Yeah, the 90s are in style right now. A few years ago, we were all cringing st the styles we wore/had in the 90s. Now it’s hip. In a few years, the early 2000s will be back in style, and everyone will think the 90s is tacky again.
I’m a big fan of flat design, too. To be fair, I basically loved every style in its time. Regardless, I like flat.
I remember being stoked when IOS 7 came out because it looked so much better when the design was overhauled to be flat.
I personally don’t like Aero too much. Win 7 looks decent but I prefer the look and simplicity in Windows 10.
Maybe that’s the point of the post. OP wants to know the average age of Lemmits
