~ a e s t h e t i c s ~

[Sport]

Thank you for sharing. It's good to have terms for these things I've felt, but couldn't quite put a button on. 

 

Like Corporate Memphis is the name of the style I've hated this whole time. Or like being a kid in the 90's and never really vibing with whimsicraft 

 

Also fun to know now that the way my friend's weird mom decorated their house in the 90's was called whimsigothic. Everything in his house was pointy, dark, and uncomfortable.

[The_Admiral]

Whimsicraft looks like another subset of Global Village Coffeehouse, just a little less ethnic. Sorta like calling a burrito a steak wrap.

 

Whimsigothic is very much its own terrible thing and I cannot imagine living in a house that looked anything like that.

[Sport]

 

Their kitchen chairs were like this and the mirror and table in the front hallway were very similar too. Brushed nickel metal everything. It was a very cold, unwelcoming, not homey environment. 

 

It was a little more industrial than the set on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but it felt a lot like this. 

 

 

His parents were older and his dad did something in the coffee business, had a pilot's license, and owned a small airplane that he would use for business. My dad would always put "Coffee" in air quotes whenever he talked about him. No idea what happened to that kid or his parents. 

[The_Admiral]

It's frustrating when people try to do a platonic ideal of "'90s graphics" and it's just the opening credits to Saved by the Bell. This Tim Burton/Smashing Pumpkins stuff was like third on the depth chart at best, but it was very much there, and somehow it aged ten times worse than doing too much stuff with Macs and pretending to be an Indian.

[CS85]

1 hour ago, The_Admiral said:

It's frustrating when people try to do a platonic ideal of "'90sto graphics" and it's just the opening credits to Saved by the Bell. This Tim Burton/Smashing Pumpkins stuff was like third on the depth chart at best, but it was very much there, and somehow it aged ten times worse than doing too much stuff with Macs and pretending to be an Indian.

 

I'm sure generations who grew up during the 80s have a similar feeling to Retrowave/Laser Grid/Neon Everything that trends every now and then.  I admittedly follow more "remember the 90s" instagram accounts than I'm proud of, but I do appreciate how many of them actually tend to toe the line between blinding nostalgia and just how things kinda were, at least as far as being a kid from 1990-1997 or so.  

 

Sure, Jazz cups were a thing and kids commercials were loud and wacky, but the beauty of good nostalgia is in the minutiae and restraint.  Not every coffee shop was caked in the GVC stuff:

 

And a lot of malls still looked the same as they did when they were built in the late 70s/early 80s.  Like everything else, everyday life was a collage of visual input and patterns that didn't feel "vintage" or "retro" so much as "this is just how it is, yo."

[The_Admiral]

8 minutes ago, CS85 said:

I'm sure to generations who grew up during the 80s have a similar feeling to Retrowave/Laser Grid/Neon Everything that trends every now and then.  I admittedly follow more "remember the 90s" instagram accounts than I'm proud of, but I do appreciate how many of them actually tend to toe the line between blinding nostalgia and just how things kinda were, at least as far as being a kid from 1990-1997 or so.  

 

 

And a lot of malls still looked the same as they did when they were built in the late 70s/early 80s.  Like everything else, everyday life was a collage of visual input and patterns that didn't feel "vintage" or "retro" so much as "this is just how it is, yo."

 

The family room in my childhood home, up until September '95, had dark wood paneling and green shag carpeting. Far cry from living inside a Sarah McLachlan album cover like that "coffee" baron up there, but that was still my '90s. The 3-5 wing of my elementary school had Taco Bell Padres stripes running across the cinderblocks for some reason. 

 

But after we moved, hoo boy, stenciling and sponge work all over the walls. I wish I had pictures to contribute to the site. It was 1996 interior design at its worst.

[SFGiants58]

Whimsigothic looks very “Alex Proyas making a kids show,” which is basically Tim Burton’s goth aesthetic.

[CS85]

19 minutes ago, The_Admiral said:

 

The family room in my childhood home, up until September '95, had dark wood paneling and green shag carpeting. Far cry from living inside a Sarah McLachlan album cover like that "coffee" baron up there, but that was still my '90s. The 3-5 wing of my elementary school had Taco Bell Padres stripes running across the cinderblocks for some reason. 

 

But after we moved, hoo boy, stenciling and sponge work all over the walls. I wish I had pictures to contribute to the site. It was 1996 interior design at its worst.

 

Any popcorn ceiling action?

 

[Sport]

1 hour ago, The_Admiral said:

It's frustrating when people try to do a platonic ideal of "'90s graphics" and it's just the opening credits to Saved by the Bell. This Tim Burton/Smashing Pumpkins stuff was like third on the depth chart at best, but it was very much there, and somehow it aged ten times worse than doing too much stuff with Macs and pretending to be an Indian.

 

And the opening credits to Saved by the Bell were way more 80's-coded anyways. Drives me nuts when a minor league baseball team does 90's night and they go with something like Memphis Milano or Contempo Eclectic. I guess it was still around, but that's not the defining aesthetic of the times. 

 

There's a post going around social media that's like "When did the 90's actually begin and end?" and my answer is when T2 came out in 1991 and it ended with our response to 9/11. So when I picture the 90's I think of those years, which is a lot of early 90's Bugle Boy ass s***, but mostly it's grunge, coffee house, and Frasurbane. Browns, tans, mustards, muted greens, darker reds. Autumnal colors. To put it in sports uniform terms, the 90's were the Milwaukee Brewers Motre Bame unis and the Sonics green, gold, and red unis.

 

 

[The_Admiral]

The '90s ran from Desert Storm to Columbine. Columbine to 9/11 is its own period of time, the pretend-everything-is-okay time. Should have known right from the start America would go and break our heart.

 

  

3 hours ago, CS85 said:

Any popcorn ceiling action?

That's asbestos. That home was new construction, which in '96 meant building a house out of Chinese newsprint and prayers.

[chcarlson23]

This is wild to stumble upon as someone born at the end of the 90's but familiar with a lot of these designs throughout my childhood. Whimsicraft is the style of Crashbox, the kids TV show that I feel like I watched so much of as a kid. Crazy to have that style have a name. Or soft colonial wanderlust feeling like every book in the kids section at the library. 

 

A lot of the 90's designs just carried over into my childhood, and didn't get updated in places for a long time. I feel like there were a lot of grocery stores that had the festival marketplace long after the early 90's was over. Heck I even shopped at a Festival Foods quite often as a kid. (Which apparently, despite using the same logo and namesake, all of the Minnesota and Wisconsin stores have zero affiliation. Just found that out looking for a photo of their logo. )

 

Spoiler

Current logo

Photo of the White Bear location I went too from who knows when. But this is exactly the look I'm talking about 

There's also Cub foods, who despite a lot of modern redesign across their stores, still has a logo that gives off the festival marketplace vibes

Spoiler

 

[slapshot]

One of my favorite designers who sort of branched out from the Corporate Grunge / Ray Gun / David Carson scene is P.R. Brown, founder of Bau-Da Design: https://bauda.com/

 

He designed numerous metal/alternative album covers, books, and directed a number of music videos. Lots of blurs, layering, and cropped typography. Think "opening credits to Se7en" aesthetic. I think you can pick out his style looking at a stack of random CDs and books.

 

[CaliforniaGlowin]

After the Heat dropped their first vice uniform, I did a deep dive into what it referenced, and I discovered a whole world that I never knew existed: vaporwave art.   Art with pastel colors!

 

A darker version of it is called outrun art, more black and neon based with a lot of focus on driving.

 

In this process, I also discovered 80s and 90s interiors.

 

Memphis art is awesome too.

[The_Admiral]

Southwestern pastels were big in the early '90s. When my grandparents moved into a big new house in 1990, they furnished the whole basement in southwestern pastels. It looked very much like that picture. Were they from the Southwest? No. Were they in the Southwest? No, it was Barrington. Did they particularly like the Southwest? No! Why was it like that? I don't know! But I have  two of the chairs as hand-me-downs. My cat pukes on them. 

[MDGP]

On 5/18/2024 at 3:06 PM, DTConcepts said:

Anyone know what this style of design is called? Often seen in the NYT, Wapo and other corporate news outlets. CARI doesn't seem to have an answer.

 

Not an actual name for it, but I've always personally thought of it as Vox Dada. Lots of cutout and ripped images and shapes (especially things taken from newsprint) overlayed on each other giving the whole thing a surreal look. Obviously a bunch of news companies use the style, but I've always associated the look with Vox videos.

 

[CaliforniaGlowin]

8 hours ago, The_Admiral said:

Southwestern pastels were big in the early '90s. When my grandparents moved into a big new house in 1990, they furnished the whole basement in southwestern pastels. It looked very much like that picture. Were they from the Southwest? No. Were they in the Southwest? No, it was Barrington. Did they particularly like the Southwest? No! Why was it like that? I don't know! But I have  two of the chairs as hand-me-downs. My cat pukes on them. 

My mom was big on that, and I remember hotels and timeshares were in on it too.  I kinda like it myself.

[Dynasty]

Decoplex is a favorite of me largely because Plaza is a pretty common font tied to it, which I always enjoy seeing. I'll sometimes see late 90's aesthetics mixed with Synthwave/Vaporwave, which provides me with a whole new perspective on nostalgia from that time period.

 

Corporate Memphis feels overused nowadays. I think I see it on nearly every online article that gives advice relating to professional settings (what to do in a situation, brainstorming tips, etc.).

[The_Admiral]

I had to give a presentation using our company's Corporate Memphis branding. I made a joke about the clip art like "even this person with magenta skin, no face, and weird noodle limbs knows what steps to take" and got scolded for it. Oh well, they knew what they were getting.

[CaliforniaGlowin]

20 hours ago, The_Admiral said:

Southwestern pastels were big in the early '90s. When my grandparents moved into a big new house in 1990, they furnished the whole basement in southwestern pastels. It looked very much like that picture. Were they from the Southwest? No. Were they in the Southwest? No, it was Barrington. Did they particularly like the Southwest? No! Why was it like that? I don't know! But I have  two of the chairs as hand-me-downs. My cat pukes on them. 

I sure would love a team in those colors!

[Germanshepherd]

Just found this and it’s the Y2K video essay to end all Y2K video essays. Dude’s channel is great.