Tag Archives: retro

It’s hard to invent a new aesthetic. That’s probably why it happens so infrequently. However, that did not stop a young Milanese (Ettore Sottsass) and a small group of other European designers from giving it a real shot. In 1981, their Memphis aesthetic debuted at the Salone del Mobile furniture...

Designers in the Premium/Luxury categories have always striven to differentiate their work from the great unwashed teaming masses of regular consumer products. In trying to communicate “I am better than you”, products in these categories have relied on such design levers as length (stretched limousines), height (top hats and rooftop...

In Fashion, style is mostly cyclical (with repeating themes currently on a 25-year cycle). In other design categories, however, the wavelength has been a bit longer. Roughly 150 years ago, some clever folk called the Victorians set about changing the world with their Industrial Revolution and, among other things, their...

As colors go, orange (specifically Pantone O21c) has had a good run in the design world. Despite taking a back seat through antiquity to various golds, blues, reds, and whites, it would seem the visual merits of the color were finally recognized in the mid 20th century. As the legend...

Some aesthetic themes arise purely as a counterpoint to an established visual mode. For decades, we’ve surrounded ourselves with increasingly polished, seamless, perfect objects; from smartphones to automobiles, the stylistic vector has been ever towards shiny, sleek, rational, and technological. Made by machines, with all hints of an artisanal human...

We’ve posted several trends about the interplay between the digital and physical worlds. One aspect of the digital aesthetic that has emerged, coinciding with a broader revisiting of 1980’s design cues, is the Vector Line. Originally, this element was introduced via early 1980’s (even late 1970’s) arcade graphics: Asteroids, Tempest,...

In keeping with the Translation category’s definition of bringing a visual language from another world into our own, Pixelmania celebrates the union of digital and physical. The most fundamental unit of the digital world is the pixel: the atom from which all digital experiences are built. Constructing shapes from that...

In keeping with this category’s theme of mashing disparate concepts together, here we see stylistic motifs from two distinctly different visual eras juxtaposed together. This method first appeared at the Milan furniture fair in the mid 2000’s. The most common combination so far has been more Baroque/Victorian themes with modern...

  We are surrounded by a rich terrain of icons, visual metaphors that are immediately recognizable to everyone. Depending on your age, cultural background, or region, we each possesses a unique catalog of icons onto which we load meaning and past experience. Some icons are incredibly powerful, due to their...