Yep, the new style is far more obviously inspired by 1990s design. Right down to the use of yellow. There was no such thing as “clashing” or “too high contrast”

Yep, the new style is far more obviously inspired by 1990s design. Right down to the use of yellow. There was no such thing as “clashing” or “too high contrast” in the 1990s. Another poster references Memphis design - that was a huge influence but there’s more going on. In the 1990s we also had desktop publishing tools in the hands of non-credentialed designers, but the resolution and color gamut of screen and page was low. So you had indie artists producing bold, simple shapes, indie cartoons, deconstructed typography. The internet revolution created a market to synthesize these trends. The shock of the new was important. It got boiled down into a style which tried to be both as industrially loud as possible - high contrast, highly saturated colors - but also quirky, with little elements of cartoons or typography that seemed to be falling apart. Differences: Web3 seems to stick with the bold sans-serifs that everything has been converging on. Possibly due to the need to look good on mobile. Also, the 90s loved acid green, perhaps because it almost transcended print. Web3 seems to like a saturated yellow, but not the brightest possible yellow - one that’s reminiscent of print! I see a lot of the 90s in the web3 aesthetic. It might be nostalgia (a 30something designer has childhood memories of that time) but also they have the same goal: to shock people into paying attention, to appeal to youth, to create FOMO in the old in the middle of a gold rush.