The conversation
rest in piss you hateful old cunt
oh, shit for real????
LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOO!!!
There’s a longstanding rumor that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” hails Satan when played backwards. What could be more natural? A fall from heaven is the equal and opposite reaction to an ascent to heaven, as we see in this card from a magic deck that the eminent mentalist Kenton Knepper commissioned of us.
Source: oneletterwords.com
Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong so let’s fix it
If you weren’t here for part one, lemme sum it up real fast:
Okay, all up to speed? We’re being served 80s throwback stuff with the serial numbers scratched off, re-labeled as yo totally 90s. What we’ve got now isn’t completely wrong, but I’m telling you, there’s so much gold left unmined.
As we saw in part one with Memphis Milano, these things get messy. Trends don’t start and end neatly every ten years. The first wave of 90s throwback attempts focused on the early part of the decade, and nobody since really pushed to represent the other seven years. Well, if you really wanna do something, I guess you gotta do it yourself.
I have suggestions. Get your flannel ready, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
Analog Grunge
SURRRRRRRGE or uh, Grunge, is probably the look that defines the decade best. The big kickoff point here is Nirvana - after a shiny pop-dominated music scene in the 80s, Nevermind was like a breath of fresh smog.
Your design has to look like it survived a nuclear blast, then was run over by your parents’ Buick a couple of times.
- Rust. Dirt. Scuffs and scrapes. Signs of distress.
- Handwritten or scribbled illustrations.
- Low-rent aesthetics. Torn paper shapes, label maker or typewriter fonts.
If there’s a Comic Sans for the 90s, it’s “distressed typewriter font.” Seriously, it’s mandatory. When I pulled images for this post I could not escape typewriter fonts. I don’t think you couldn’t call yourself a respectable designer without it. Just look at how much mileage old-timey typewriters and label makers got:
Hell, it’s the giant X in The X Files!
I think another component to Grunge is sort of an anti-digital, pro-analog message. My pet theory is home computers went from being a semi-common novelty in 1990 to an essential gotta-have-it purchase in every American home by ‘99. Desktop publishing apps made it almost too easy to make pixel-perfect, clean, uniform designs. Digital photography and scanners meant you could now publish full color photographs with ease.
But digital perfection is the enemy of Grunge. Analog means authenticity.
So you had a whole gaggle of designers running in the other direction. Sure you could use a computer, but your work absolutely had to look like it didn’t come from one. As much as possible, incorporate hand-drawn artwork, scribbles, dust and splotches. Write text with chicken scratch if you have to. As much as you could make your multimillion dollar ad campaign look like it came from the margins of some high schoolers’ math homework, the better.
Factory Pomo
Not everyone was running away from digital, though. Many designers were embracing computer apps - and I think that’s where Factory Pomo first came into being. Coined by designer Froyo Tam (that’s their logo up above!) Factory Pomo is one of those things that once you see an example, you can’t stop seeing it.
- Strong, basic geometric primitives with inverted, contrasting colors
- Tall typography
- Art Deco style rivets and spikes
Want your logo to look futuristic and modern? Stick it in a circle and put some triangles around. Invert half the colors, then another half.
Max Krieger has a great writeup on the probable inflection point: Tomorrowland. As the story goes, Tomorrowland at Disney - the part of the park meant to look like it’s from the future - would very quickly look very outdated each time they tried to update it. Instead, in 1994 they decided to own being outdated. They came up with a ridiculously fun “timeless” futuristic look, mixing industrial design with Jules Verne. Factory Pomo’s signature was all over the blueprints.
The look quickly escaped the theme park and was especially prevalent in the booming mid 90s home computer market. It’s the Packard Bell cyborg, it’s the logo in Video Toaster. If you caught that The X Files logo earlier is both Factory Pomo with the tall type and X in a ring AND Grunge with the typewriter X in the background, you win 5 bonus Pogs.
And it’s a stretch, but one could draw a line between Factory Pomo’s inverted black and whites and the Ska movement’s two-tone checkerboards. Maybe. Possibly. I’d have to call Tony Hawk to double check.
Back to Froyo Tam for a second, but that bit about them coining the term? That was in 2017. “Factory Pomo” didn’t have a name for like… 25 years. How’s that possible, you may wonder? Weren’t designers following a defined style? Well, yes and no. I think people were designing stuff to look a certain way, but it’s less a game of “this is what the aesthetic looks like” and more like a game of telephone.
If you do an architecture tour in a major city, you’ll learn that every building and skyscraper is classified to a specific architectural movement. Every building that is but ones built in the last 20-30 years. Newer buildings have to wait a few decades for official classification. Historians need time and perspective to figure out what emerging trends in architecture are going on, whose work influenced who, that sort of thing.
Designing a logo for Slim Jims or Cherry Coke takes considerably less time than constructing a skyscraper, but I think the same principle holds true. It’s really difficult to tell what’s a trend and what’s a fad when you’re living in the moment. I couldn’t tell you what’s the defining aesthetic for the 2020s right now. It’ll be obvious in 2053, but right now, no clue.
Enough time has passed between the nineties and today that we can pick this stuff apart easily. Maybe if you’re lucky, you can be the first to classify these design movements, too.
Working on a part three! I’ll look into a few other trends and address the big question– Is the Y2K aesthetic actually a 90s thing? More to come.
*A ton of these examples above are from the CARI Institute, which you should totally check out, they’ve been cataloging this stuff for years.
It's extremely rare for me to not post something because it's too bad. But this was a 4 edible situation
Tumblr culture is not knowing if this is from 2008 or earlier this week.
The character designs in Disney Mirrorverse are absolutely insane.
I love it when an rpg has a huge potion making system and it’s just
- health potion
- better health potion
- best health potion
- bestest health potion
- fire resist potion (useful in one battle)
- jar of bees
I’ve had folk reply with Dragon Age, Divinity, Skyrim, Monster Hunter, Terraria, Minecraft, Neverwinter, Warcraft, Witcher, THE SIMS
two sick horses evaluating an orb
“it floats”
“don’t like that”
the ORIGINAL orb ponderers 😤 respect your history
“don’t like that” is in my everyday lexicon bc of this post.
I now understand the appeal of bird feeders
Devil's Tower, Black Hills, Wyoming.
Photo: Charles Ankrom
Comic I made about doing psychedelics as a depressed trans burnout and briefly visiting another, kinder dimension. Download for PWYC on itch.io! Also on Twitter and Instagram
Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart
“No I can’t come out tonight I’m sobbing about this entomologist’s heartfelt plea for someone to care about an endangered moth”
This is how I learn there's a moth whose tiny caterpillars live exclusively off the old shells of dead tortoises.
[Image description: text from a section titled On Being Endangered: An Afterthought that says:
Realizing that a species is imperiled has broad connotations, given that it tells us something about the plight of nature itself. It reminds us of the need to implement conservation measures and to protect the region of which the species is a part. But aside form the broader picture, species have intrinsic worth and are deserving of preservation. Surely an oddity such as C. vicinella cannot simply be allowed to vanish.
We should speak up on behalf of this little moth, not only because by so doing we would bolster conservation efforts now underway in Florida, [highlighting begins] but because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing. [end highlighting]
But is quaintness all that can be said on behalf of this moth? Does this insect not have hidden value beyond its overt appeal? Does not its silk and glue add, potentially, to its worth? Could these products not be unique in ways that could ultimately prove applicable?
End image description]
because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing
I was so inspired by this I made it into a piece of art for a final in one of my courses for storytelling in conservation
