Glossier is a multi-million dollar beauty company built on modern beauty and up-to-the-second trends. But when the millennial makeup brand went to launch their holiday collection online, they used swirly fonts and Tupperware-party colors like fuchsia and maroon that looked more like Brady Bunch graphics than cutting-edge style imagery. Of course, that was the point.
It's also an example of how brands are channeling retrofuturism, a web design trend that’s gaining fast popularity thanks to its exciting-yet-familiar format. Because it’s both accessible and creative, retrofuturism is a fun way to make your Wix Studio website stand out.
What is retrofuturism?
Retrofuturism is a design technique that borrows aesthetic styles of the past to craft a giddy version of the future. The genre’s aesthetic looks—in the best, coolest way—like a dated vision of the future. As a solution to design challenges like online engagement and user retention, retrofuturism can help build a digital brand, and even a greater web community, by helping make overly slick websites feel more personal, and elevating functional pages into witty spaces that make visitors linger longer.
“Retrofuturism is not a new trend,” says Nika Simovich Fisher, a program director and professor of communication design at the New School in New York City. “But because what we view as ‘old’ keeps changing, retrofuturism keeps expanding. That’s what makes it so fun.”
But to make the design feel cohesive—and ensure your web community is in on the joke—you’ve got to commit to a specific era of retrofuturist design. (More advice in a bit.)
So, why is retrofuturism so popular now?
“It’s an optimistic form of nostalgia,” says Simovich Fisher, and it makes those involved feel smarter—we know the future doesn’t include The Jetsons’ flying car or Back to the Future’s hoverboard, but we still love referencing it as a childhood dream. (Read more about the design nostalgia trend.)
A brief history of retrofuturism
The term “retrofuturism” was first coined by the writer T.H. Hinchcliffe in the 1960s, but its true founding father may be Jules Verne, the French science fiction author whose early 20th century stories about robotic submarines and globe-zooming hot air balloons inspired artists like Man Ray and Salvador Dali to create lush visual identities for worlds that didn’t yet exist.
Those worlds included hand-scrawled letters painted in mechanical chrome colors, with images of astounding robots wearing the everyday suits and ties common in the 1920s. Viewed today, those images look both vintage and techy, the standard recipe for retrofuturism in design.
Other famous examples of retrofuturism include Bohn’s famous flying car ads from 1945, Judy Jetson’s flying saucer miniskirts on The Jetsons, the self-lacing sneakers from 1989’s Back to the Future sequel, and the TWA Hotel at LaGuardia Airport, which combines mid-century modern design from the late 1950s with kooky robot bartenders meant to evoke space-age advancement… even though they look like something out of a 1980s science museum. If you’ve ever been to Disney’s Spaceship Earth, the geodesic Epcot Center dome that spans more than 2 million cubic feet, then congratulations—you’ve even taken a full retrofuturism-inspired vacation.
“What we think of as ‘retrofuturist’ is often that mid-century modern, early 1960s aesthetic,” says Andrew Shea, who teaches integrated design at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. “It was a way for people to confront their own anxieties about technology through art and design. Retrofuturism still makes the unknown less scary and more easy to imagine.” The utopian visions of supersonic air travel and gleaming modern appliances seen on Mad Men continue to captivate, to be sure. But Shea says another version of retrofuturism has taken hold in the last five years: the Y2K aesthetic.
“Retrofuturism has come for the 1990s and early 2000s,” he says. Low-fi digital fonts like Futura (as seen on the original Nintendo Gameboy), 16-bit graphics, and “grunge” textures like torn paper and glitter have become web design staples, especially with Gen Z brands like Pacsun and Futurewise.
Shea says this isn’t surprising. “The '90s reference a real cultural and societal ennui we’re seeing again. People want a way to contextualize that and they don’t have the words for this angst yet. Just vibes.” Retrofuturistic design centering '90s nostalgia is one of those ways.
Where to see retrofuturism today
If you binge-watched a hit show this year, you likely saw some classic retrofuturism flash across the screen. The breakout comedy thriller Fallout, starring Ella Purnell with art direction by Ann Bartek, fused classic '60s Hollywood glamour with clunky robot suits and laser stun guns. (Even its title sequence font featured a chunky throwback lightning bolt across the “o.”) The hit Apple TV+ show For All Mankind harnessed the 1970s brutalist architecture of Russia’s Star City, even as it imagined an alternate timeline of world history where astronauts from all countries could live on Mars.
In the teen movie Moonshot, Lana Condor and Cole Sprouse have the ultimate long distance relationship—across the Milky Way—while wearing '80s-era astronaut pajamas around their spaceship dorm rooms. Star Trek: Below Decks even took the classic animated “vintage space kid” vibes made popular by Elroy Jetson and Wall-E and made them cool for adults, turning voice actors Jack Quaid and Noel Wells into Simpsons-esque '90s animations pictured against '60s-inspired drawings of outer space.
Retrofuturism becomes the subject of video journalism in the documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon, which follows two millennial filmmakers as they try to find the “self-made office manager” who taught them how to type via video games in the 1990s. (She turns out to be the model Renée L'Esperance.) The film relies heavily on '90s graphics and 16-bit fonts, even as it shows its characters using iPhones and laptops to complete their investigations.
If you didn’t want to watch retrofuturism this year, you could wear it. On the runways in Paris and Milan, the classic 1960s space-age designs of the mod era returned in new forms, with Prada channeling the metallic silver miniskirts of Mary Quant and Rabanne reviving their chrome-plated dresses, shoes and handbags. Nineties “high tech” fabric like Old Navy’s performance fleece also returned to the spotlight, thanks to the brand’s new designer Zac Posen. At the buzzy young designer Sandy Liang’s runway show in September, her models wore the metallic pink lipstick first seen on James Bond villainesses… and later on Austin Powers femmebots, the bikini-clad robots programmed to take down Mike Meyers in his '60s spy spoof.
“We also saw a lot of retrofuturist fonts coming out of architecture firms and design schools this year,” says Andrew Shea, the Parsons design professor. (Indeed it’s one of the top typography trends.) “When people see technology becoming all powerful, they try to psychologically take back some of that control, often through visual cues. With all the discussions of AI, it’s not surprising that the Pac-Man style fonts of the early internet are coming back around, especially in spaces that are design-forward.”
Want to play with retrofuturism? Tips for web designers.
“I love seeing sites that channel the Angelfire and MySpace designs of the early internet years,” says Simovich Fisher. “It feels rooted in one particular time period that’s interesting to people right now.”
Creative director Marta Mae Friedman, the founder of the marketing firm Air Milkshake, has harnessed the trend for her own website, using tiny 8-bit graphics of sparkles a la Sailor Moon to showcase buzzy Gen-Z brands like Starface and Dr. Martens.
“I think Chobani does it well, too,” says Simovich Fisher, referring to the yogurt brand’s ad campaign that blended swirly hand-drawn illustrations of valleys and rivers with architectural renderings of solar-powered skyscrapers and floating wind turbines. It was created by the content agency Scholar.
Some advice for web designers interested in channeling this trend today:
Choose one of these fonts
Classic (read: '60s-inspired) retrofuturistic fonts mix clean, geometric angles with curved lines, going as wide as possible while still remaining super-legible. If the letters look like they could be made with Las Vegas neon, you know you’re on the right track. Got access to a bank of existing fonts? Look for Eurostile, the Italian typeface first created by Aldo Novarese in 1962. (Can’t find it? Microgramma is a close dupe.) and Orbitron, the '70s-era lettering with hard, wide edges that looks like it belongs on the side of a NASA rocket. Want a font that’s closer to your '80s Atari console? Go with Blippo, first developed in Japan. As for the whirly, wispy '90s fonts seen at Glossier and Chobani, try modified versions of Milanesa Serif.
Embrace high-contrast colors
For old-school vibes, think of Bewitched kitchen colors like turquoise, salmon pink and pops of shiny, candy-apple red. Metallic chrome flashes can also help, especially if your main color theme runs darker, like navy. Cribbing Star Trek’s entire fleet uniform palette can yield unexpected but exciting retrofuturistic color combos like violet-and-tan or orange-and-hunted-green. (Software developer Matthew Leonawicz even made his own breakdown of Starfleet’s common color partners.) Going for an early 2000s MySpace vibe? “Everyone still knows their pure blue color,” says Simovich Fisher. “There’s a lot of fondness around it.” For every color story, try to include at least one high-contrast combination—a hallmark of retrofuturism.
Don't overlook the details
For sites that allow for more playfulness, consider programming your site with a motion tracker that appears as a visible clue—an old-school mouse arrow, perhaps, or a tiny 8-bit sparkle trail, which can immediately add interest onto your webpage and allow visitors to play along with your vision. (Learn more about website animations and custom cursors.)
Screen-on-screen elements like visible homepage navigation bars and chat windows that scream "AOL Instant Messenger" can heighten the nostalgic hits, too.
For more business-oriented pages that require straightforward elegance, skip the click games and stick to your design mission. Above all, retrofuturism is an oxymoron. You’re trying to create the past’s version of the perfect future. You can do it with a few quick font and color swaps—no spaceship required.
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