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STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS

2x01 "The Broken Circle"

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.

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.

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.

I never thought the Fruitopia bottle and the distressed type font would evoke such fondness in me.

This is seriously fascinating and took me through decades of flipping-through-magazines nostalgia.

#ray bradbury #the ageism these days is insane #not all old people are bad peeps

🫧 underwater secret garden🐡

“Sex Change Just ‘Legal Correction’”, March 31. 1956.

mom Una has been back for 30 seconds and she’s already sending the kids everyone back to work

fav pic from the photo shoot

In Japan, you can be indefinitely detained by the police and “interrogated” til you sign a confession, and have this coercive measure hold up in court as evidence. There is a reason that Japan has something close to 100% conviction rate for crimes.

In South Korea, the military and the police both have been used, since 1945, to put down those protesting their government’s actions, mostly targeted towards leftists and those who wanted USAmerican-installed/backed regimes to be more democratic. Even as recently as 2015, the police fired water cannons with enough force to kill a pro-democracy activist.

In India, the police happily abuses the indigenous people of Kashmir. This has been an issue for forever, but the recent events in Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act of 2019) has magnified the brutality greatly.

In Canada, the police is brutal against the indigenous folks, as well as other people of color. Starlight Tour is just the tip of the iceberg for how the indigenous folks are treated by the police.

In Australia, the indigenous folks are treated much in the same way as Canada, with the police as a state tool for brutalizing and even displacing indigenous folks.

In Chile, during the recent riots over austerity, the police did much of the same things as the USAmerican police: meting out state violence gleefully, faking violence (such as setting their own patrol cars on fire and damaging private properties) and blaming the people for their own violence. This is just the tip of the iceberg also: the violence towards the Chilean people by the police goes very, very deep.

In Sweden, the mounted police trample protestors (much like in Houston, Texas the weekend of May 30th, 2020), not to mention the standard barbarism you see in European nations.

In France, the protests against pushing back retirement ages for a ton of people (including those whose bodies literally cannot take the work past the current age of retirement, like ballet dancers) saw the Police brutalizing the public, intensifying the already massive riots.

This isn’t even getting into the weeds with the Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and other European countries’ police forces’ barbaric treatment towards those who come from its former imperial/colonial holdings.

Police is never your friend, anywhere in the world.

Sproing

Link to the gay porn library of Alexandria.

Happy pride.

Two sword-shaped (“sipa”) amulets engraved with the Hebrew names of angels, names of G-d, and initials of verses, sewn into clothing for the protection of children whose siblings had passed away 

Iraqi Kurdistan or Iran, late 19th - early 20th century

via Kedem Auctions

Philomena Cunk lore drop

phoebe singing letter to an old poet tonight.