I 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.
Yep! 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 (left nav buttons, for example)
Homepage is offline because it has code expecting PHP5 (and Flash); deeper pages mostly work though!
Microsoft 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
I 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.
> more optimistic view people had of tech at the time vs today.
Probably because there was yet not that much weaponized targeted advertising, brain rot content, and social media designed to make you consume content all day that gives you non-stop dopamine, then makes you feel depressed about yourself.
Tech was more of an extra tool to aid life IRL, and hadn't yet completely absorbed and replaced IRL entertainment and interactions. It was easier to separate and limit your on-line activity from your daily life than today without the feeling that you're missing out.
The online presence was all about niche online communities, games, forums, bulleting boards, and chat groups, instead of all being absorbed into Subreddits that gamify your engagement for upvotes to sell it to investors and advertisers.
Consumer PC hardware at that time was mature and reliable enough to not require a PhD or make you hate using it, but still progressing quite fast to make you excited about the next OS, video games, CPUs and GPUs(back when people could actually afford them).
It was a wild transitional period for tech, from 32bit CPUs to 64bit, DirectX 8 to 9 to 10, single core CPUs to multi-core, some of the best movies, videogames and franchises launching in that period, instead of all being sequels, rehashes, reboots and remakes of old franchises like today. It was a great time to be alive and whatness all that, hence the optimism you mentioned.
Oh, and all videogames (and SW in general) shipped as "Gold" on discs, fully finished, tested and patched, no bullshit broken preorder cash-grabs needing the famous zero-day patches to work as advertised, treating their customers as beta-testers, plus half the game being sold to you as an extra DLC six months later.
It was such an amazing time. Everyone always points to tech differences and tries to do stuff like Gemini, but the tech stack isn't the main problem.
The big problem is the Internet was a reflection of real life, now it's largely just a reflection of more internet. Scroll all day, post, sleep, repeat... Doesn't leave much time to create anything worth scrolling, and the stuff that is gets lost in the sea of low effort shit posts.
The software doesn't help, but mostly because of the UX. The actual tech is fine. Stuff is fast and batteries last 12 hours. We don't need simple lightweight versions of what we have, we need pagination, proboards-style UIs with large signatures and avatars, and to go do more stuff aside from endless fussing with tech stacks.
Meh, PCs weren't so mainstream in consumers' homes back then, it was still more a thing for businesses and nerds, as the tech was quite limited for entertainment and HW still quite expensive for the casual user.
Yes hardware progress was fast, but it was also quite expensive and difficult to set up and use, a lot of the times buggy and with compatibility issues, and it would get outdated far too quickly[1] to the point you'd spend a fortune on a new GPU which would be obsolete in a year and the company would go bankrupt in 2 years, leaving you with no games that would support it anymore, turning you expensive GPU in a worthless paperweight.
It was rough being a a consumer back then unless you were loaded to afford keeping up with the upgrades and stomaching the teething issues and quick obsolescence.
OTOH, you could browse the web with Lynx just fine in 2004, post into Slashdot, read most of tech sites seamlessly and even by 2011 you could download full albums from Jamendo/Magnatune and the like.
Nowadays you need a Core Duo as a bare minimum for JS ridden sites in order to read something if Lynx/Linsk doesn't work with a fake UA like the PSP one in order to enforce the basic article mode for some overused CMS.
True, but as PC and Internet adoption increased, more people were exposed and have nostalgia and memories of the period.
The mid-to-late 90's also had a high level of techo-optimism, but I feel there was still a lot more mainstream skepticism that this all this technology would actually be useful which had mostly gone away by mid 2000. I just saw a bit with Bill Gates on Letterman about early Internet audio streaming where the reaction was "have you heard of radio?"
You can see this in the HN age poll. The most recent one shows the age group clustered around late millennial to young GenX. If you're 40 today, you would have been 17 in 2000, so yeah.
I 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
Yep, 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.
At 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.
That was when technology was solving real needs, therefore it was getting genuinely better all the time. Now almost all solvable real needs are solved, therefore technological progress is aimed at manufactured needs and the needs of companies, not users.
If 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.
I'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!
I'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!
I 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.
Adrian 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.)
"Aero" itself was already a well used term, the "frutiger" part adds nothing and is just an attempt to reinvent something seeking fake nostalgia. What's next "Forstall Aqua"?
It 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.
I 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?
I'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.
I 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.
If 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.
Yeah, 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.
This looks like what GNOME could be if it were fully perfected. Modern GNOME is already amazing, I'm a big fan now that it seems to be slightly less MacOSlike, but this prototype was something else!
Fandom 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?
In 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]
While 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.
No 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.
That 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.
> 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.
I 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...
No 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
I'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.
Aero 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.)
Much like in music, I find this hyper-specific genre-mania is ultimately just tiring. Regressive retromania that leads to pastiche and revivalism at best.
Similarly, 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.
I 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.
For 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.
