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Frutiger Aero
- theandrewbailey 3y agoI would love to see more of this. Flat design just doesn't cut it.
- carlos-menezes 3y agoAlthough this aesthetic brings me (not so fond) memories of MSN malware and peer-to-peer networks, I wholeheartedly agree.
- coldacid 3y agoToday I learned that CARI[0] exists. [0]: Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, https://cari.institute/ https://cari.institute/
- theandrewbailey 3y agoI've had a lot of fun going through their categories over the years. Now, I can put names on designs I dislike, like global village coffeehouse.
- JusticeJuice 3y agoIf you find that interesting, you also might find the existence of WGSN interesting, a product and fashion trend forecasting company[0]. If you're making a run of 10,000 items, would be nice to know if the design will still be in fashion after the 2 years it takes to get it to production right? Companies like WGSN try predict exactly that. The odd thing is they're so popular among production businesses that it's unclear if they're predicting trends, or setting them. [0]: https://www.wgsn.com/en https://www.wgsn.com/en
- simbolit 3y agoThat sounds Gibsonesque.
- codetrotter 3y agoTheir URL gives “ATM Machine” vibes.
- rchaud 3y agoThat middle era of computing between WinXP and Vista, mashing up Bryce3D-esque reflective renders of desktop icons with elements of videogame console palettes, mostly Wii and PS3.
- gtroja 3y agoMetacreations Bryce 4 changed my life as a kid. I loved the interface
- ckz 3y agoI've actually starting incorporating the Vista/Aero aesthetic again in some recent UI work. Not explicitly in anticipation of the 20y trend cycle returning to it and not nearly the same level of overall gloss (yet?), but I wouldn't be surprised if it feels fresh and new soon enough. :) Though from a hobbyist perspective I probably own more interesting designs falling under Y2K. Transparent PDAs, game systems, etc. have always been cool in my book!
- eternityforest 3y agoI've been getting back to that too, along with deep selectable theming and skinning based on more organic textures like old parchment. One thing I noticed when building my new CSS framework is that skeuomorphic design is less forgiving of deeper UI issues. You can just skim over badly organized form controls when everything looks like just a run of text with big spaces and the same 2 colors. When you do skeuomorphic design, that button nobody uses that really belongs in a separate tab really stands out. And if it's cluttered with 20 inputs and they're all equally important, it makes the need for deeper UI changes to the whole workflow really obvious. Some stuff can be automatic, some stuff can be done with more advanced controls, maybe some stuff should be a guided dialog rather than 10 scattered inputs you have to hunt for and know which ones to use in which cases... Modern UI practices in a lot of apps are really good. They're instantly usable, with most things automated and uncommon stuff in hamburger menus. We also have high res displays. It's easier than ever to do skeuomorphic stuff!
- aquova 3y agoWhile I do have fond memories of this aesthetic (although more for old Mac OS X than Windows), and do prefer it over the flat design, I'm curious what will come next. Looking at this site's other pages, it seems that it's about once a decade that these trends tend to change, and we're about due.
- thom 3y agoExcited for the Windows control panel to be rendered in _three_ different UI paradigms in five years time, I guess.
- jszymborski 3y agoIf I had to make a guess, it'll have Brutalist DNA.
- voldacar 3y agoMetalheart hopefully
- isoprophlex 3y agoNo discernable buttons at all. A flat, mid-grey pane. You click randomly on the empty window, and AI try to will detect the thing you wanted to do from the amount of anger, determination and hopelessness with which you click. ... which would be about as frustrating as trying to create a meeting in outlook or ms teams.
- earthboundkid 3y agoThis is not allowed to be retro. I forbid it.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoUnderstandable, have a nice day.
- theandrewbailey 3y agoYou're right. It's not retro. It's timeless.
- Apocryphon 3y agoIt would be nice if more modern tech branding / marketing used the nature aesthetic that Frutiger Aero had. There's something so warm and optimistic about it, even if it was greenwashing. The most solarpunk aesthetic.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoI feel the optimism people reminisce over around frutiger aero is coupled with the more optimistic view people had of tech at the time vs today.
- DrawTR 3y agoI think that's half the fun of it? There's this sort of squeaky clean optimism and hopefulness to it that's just absolutely gone in today's universal design language
- nvy 3y agoYep, back when we still believed the lie of "Don't be Evil", and before the tech darlings of yesteryear ruined society by turning all of technology into a surveillance panopticon just to sell us a few more ads. I hate the future we inhabit compared to what could have been.
- trealira 3y agoAt my university library, there are a bunch of books from the early 2000s already with titles like "Web Content Mining with Java" (Tony Loton, 2002) and "Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques" (2001, Han Kamber (and 2006 and 2012)), as well as a whole lot of others. (Though most of these books are more about introductory statistics and using databases). The seeds of the current world were already being sown some 20 years ago.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoI remember when "data mining" had a negative connotation :(
- trealira 3y agoI think "data mining" must have had less of a negative connotation when they wrote those titles 20 years ago.
- ahartmetz 3y ago
- julianeon 3y agoFor me this style brings back memories of bad Windows-style interfaces, the wallpaper of the background I was looking at as I was trying to delete Bonzi Buddy.
- Lammy 3y agoSeeing Aqua described as "Aero" hurts my inner Mac fanperson something fierce. Aqua's aesthetic was Aqua lol I've been reliving it on my Wallstreet Powerbook https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/15s67e8/266_mhz_ought_to_be_enough_for_anybody/ https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/15s67e8/266_m...
- goldwolff 3y agoi agree. on tiktok its unbearable
- flashback2199 3y agoOS 9 was super fast in the 200s mhz, but OS X, not so much
- xattt 3y agoI am SCREAMING at the article since so Aqua was such a shift in UI! The lockable buttons, the quicksilver-like scroll bars. All these things came before Aero, and Vista was just Microsoft playing catch up.
- paradox460 3y agoPredated aero by half a decade, no less, and looked better doing it
- asow92 3y agoI guess I'm officially old now.
- ideasphere 3y agoMuch like in music, I find this hyper-specific genre-mania is ultimately just tiring. Regressive retromania that leads to pastiche and revivalism at best.
- confd 3y agoSimilarly, I don't mind the concept of "aesthetic" when applied to products, like Frutiger Aero. But once it crosses over to what amounts to short-term identities or "identities in flux" I am repulsed.
- ideasphere 3y agoI agree 100%. Style is important but it’s the personal identification with defining and policing its microscopic fluctuations that ultimately leads nowhere but back at the snakes head. The older I get and the most first-hand experience I have, the more I realise it’s an obsession of those not burdened with this. The broad strokes are there but it’s ultimately myth making – seeking to squish the square peg of history into the round hole of a neat narrative.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- desi_ninja 3y agoFun video explaining Frutiger Aero : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ostolucALTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ostolucALTA
- chromakode 3y agoFandom is completely unusable these days without an ad blocker. I'm surprised communities still put up with it. Why hasn't another free wiki host emerged?
- Lariscus 3y agoIn short, because of SEO. Google downranks your site if it has the same content as an already existing site. This means you have to rephrase every single article on your new wiki because wikia refuses to delete anything hosted with them. So your choice is either stay with wikia or try to battle against wikias SEO.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcfuA_UAz3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcfuA_UAz3I
- jfax 3y agoI couldn't find independent use of the term "Frutiger Aero" outside of this article when it first blew up, so I guess this coined it. Why "Fruitger" Aero. This basically smacks of being a forced meme by underageb& zoomers. But that's only half the reason this hits me as being frivolous and tiresome, I also echo the other comment here that's beginning to find "hyper-specific genre-mania" boring now.
- ideasphere 3y agoAdrian Frutiger was a well-known type designer whose fonts were popular in the era being talked about. It makes sense but I agree that to me, this hyper-specificity and flexing of knowledge on specifics shows that it’s really about the person coining it wanting to plant their flag in the ground. To be ‘the person who coined that phrase everyone uses online’ and their justification for taking that role is “I know who Adrian Frutiger is.” It promotes the idea of singular figures defining (and policing) the definition of these terms rather than encouraging others to contribute and engage in a collective mess (which is how I prefer culture to operate.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- simulo 3y agoDepends on perspective - graphic designers and typographers might find "Frutiger" to be the obvious part and wonder what "Aero" means.
- Apocryphon 3y agoIt dates back to at least CARI's work: https://www.are.na/consumer-aesthetics-research-institute/frutiger-aero-ptg8tgmzbig https://www.are.na/consumer-aesthetics-research-institute/fr...
- ideasphere 3y agoThey are specifically who I’m defining as flag-in-the-ground types.
- nxobject 3y agoI think the Longhorn UI prototypes were the best exponent of Fruitger Aero - information-dense, glossy, alive with ambient animations everywhere - the anti-Windows of today. Also, nowhere near close to ever having been implemented. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I7FnBHrJSao&t=2s&pp=ygUPbG9uZ2hvcm4gd2luaGVj https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I7FnBHrJSao&t=2s&pp=ygUPbG9uZ2...
- ikari_pl 3y agoi miss Longhorn. If not the .NET explorer frequent crashes, it would have been my most exciting OS experience to date
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoIf the internet historians are to be believed, Longhorn was pretty innovative for its time because Microsoft gave their devs free reign and let them go crazy with it to put all their ideas into the new OS. Which was cool for show but apparently turned Longhorn into "the car Homer Simpson designed"[1], being plagued by endless cost overruns, constantly changing requirements, deadlines missed, a release date with no end in sight, and a codebase nobody could prune to turn into a solid shippable product, forcing Microsoft to scrap it completely and start over from scratch to create Vista in a ungodly short amount of time just to have something to ship to replace the now ageing Windows XP. As what was supposed to be Longhorn was schedules to release just 1-2 years after XP but due to the Longhorn development fiasco, a half-baked Vista launched a whopping 6 years after XP, which was an eternity in tech back then. Yeah, Microsoft really blew it with Longhorn and Vista, they tried to kill too many birds with one stone and ended up loosing all the birds and the stone. One wonders what Longhorn could have been if they hadn't messed it up from the start. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoYeah, going all-in on WinFS, DWM, and .NET is a big risk budget. I remember people theorizing that Vista (and later, some Mono-heavy revision of GNOME) were slow because of using .NET to replace C++ apps, but I don't remember if it was proven or not.
- captainmuon 3y agoI remember fondly learning from tutorials how to make "glossy" buttons. The trick was to have gradients running against each other, with a sharp line in the middle. Now that I think about it, this aesthetic started already with MacOS X and Aqua. Everybody wanted to have the "liquid" style. MS only adopted it with Vista - XP's Luna was famously matte plastic "fisher price" style.
- goldwolff 3y agoyes i remember this so vividly, I was obsessed with the dark/orange windows theme on vista. The early psps themes had a similar feel as well.
- xattt 3y agoThat, and the glossy blue theme, didn’t come until later and had to be downloaded separately from Win XP MCE (RIP) installs.
- ckz 3y agoYep! An easy way is a color gradient background layer and then another layer like a white gradient intersecting it. The orientation/opacity of that top gradient lets you get anything from super-glossy to more of a frosted glass, especially when combined with some additional tweaks to give it more depth. I still have some websites live (and untouched) from the period if you want to see some...evocative but rather unrefined examples: http://www.biotechgaming.com/software.php http://www.biotechgaming.com/software.php (left nav buttons, for example) Homepage is offline because it has code expecting PHP5 (and Flash); deeper pages mostly work though!
- paradox460 3y agoMicrosoft adopted it far quicker, but in marginal products. Windows Media center edition was glossy by it's second release, windows media player 9 was glossy (and the aesthetic only progressed further with wmp10), and they released the royale theme which was also glossy
- CrimsonCape 3y agoI look at the examples and think "yup, that's Nvidia. That's Nvidia too. Nvidia. Nvidia. Yep all Nvidia." Not sure why, maybe I watched too many CES videos in the 2010s...
- tomcam 3y ago> The term "Frutiger Aero" was coined in 2017... and went viral in 2022 Well, maybe not viral. I never heard of it until now.
- ertian 3y ago> It is characterized by [...] glossy textures, cloudy skies, tropical fish, water, bubbles, glass, lens flare, sprawling patterns [...] bright, vibrant colors (usually greens and blues). Seems wrong to put the start of this in the early 2000s. The fish, bubbles, birds, and greens & blues brought me straight back to the demo images on every color CRT monitor throughout the 90s.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoWindows Vista doubled down on bubbles with that screensaver that composited them over the desktop
- keyle 3y agoI always wondered what happened to all the talented designers that used to make Skeuomorphic (gorgeous) 3D like icons of real items, aaaand completely got shafted by flat design. Can anyone account for them? They had real talent. But I think at some points the devs must have gotten tired of "designed UI" and the inter-relationship with web designers, and said the hell with this, we can do design too! Woo all I need is bootstrap right?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- klyrs 3y agoI've met quite a few graphic designers in my career. Though I haven't met any who were specifically doing 3d-style icons, they're all artists. Icons are just small art, and 3d-style icons were just a fad that fell out of fashion. I'd bet that nobody's career was staked on that niche.
- cubefox 3y agoI'm surprised this website doesn't count the colorful Windows XP design to Frutiger Aero, although it mentions the colors blue and green as being indicative of the design.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoAero is named for the glossy Aero Glass design of Vista, so XP was like the precursor, before they had the window compositor that allowed such effects. (As others in the thread pointed out, OS X did it first, it could well be called Aqua aesthetic. But I don't think they did blurring in the first OS X.)
- swah 3y agohttps://www.instagram.com/frutigeraeroco/ https://www.instagram.com/frutigeraeroco/ actual material here for the nostalgia. Pairs well with nuclear energy and ecco the dolphin
- paradox460 3y agoNo one called it fruitiger aero. That's a retronym made up by a YouTuber. The most common name I ever heard was "glossy" or sekuomorphic, although "aqua-like", in honor of macos x, was common too