Chapter 7. Nostalgia as a style

Annie Atkins advises everyone who makes prop designs for historical settings to look for an inspiration offline, simply to visit a flea market or an antique shop to find your own historically accurate reference-gems. But what should people do, who design for the far future, if there are no references of it yet?

Design that we usually call futuristic is, of course, not a design directly from the future. It is an attempt of a designer, writer, or any other creative to predict how the future will look like. A fully accurate prediction is almost impossible: even if the idea of some technology had been imagined correctly, the shape of it was often pictured whimsical and ridiculous compared to the future we actually got. This phenomenon was named retro-futurism. It is not believable at all, but funny and apparently old-fashioned.

En L’An 2000 [In the Year 2000]. French retrofuturistic image series by artists including JeanMarc Côté.

И мы будем на Луне [And we will be on the Moon].

Moon base in USSR magazine Technology of youth, 1964.

The goal of every designer in design fiction is to create a relatable image of the future. But achieving a truly futuristic look is tricky due to narrow border between futuristic and retro-futuristic appearance. But what we call a futuristic design has nothing in common with actual future as well. Futuristic look is just an impression people expect from upcoming times. Everything sleek and flowy is considered to be “from the future,” but if we look around us we will not notice a lot of this stream-line smoothness. The shapes of objects that surround us are mostly still like they were a hundred years ago. We usually assume a futuristic typeface to be italic, maybe made of continuous line. It worked as futuristic 30 years ago, it works as futuristic now. But in real life we still use Helvetica as a universal typeface. Is it not futuristic as well then? I think futuristic typography works the same as ethnic typography which is often nothing like the culture of origin. It represents the stereotypes that other people have of this culture.

But there is a small trick that can help with designing for the near future. Everything in pop culture, as well as in design, follows a spiral. We always return to the good old days in our thoughts. And people from creative industries are not the exception. They are the reason why in the late 2010s we noticed a lot of influence coming from the 80s in visual and audio culture. It was brought to us by the people who were actually born in the 80s. Now they are adults in their 30s to 40s who take the leading roles in all the industries and actively experience nostalgia for their childhood.

Still from a-ha Take On Me music video, 1985.

Still from season three of Stranger Things, 2019.

© Netflix

Based on this knowledge, I assume that graphic design trends from 2020 will influence graphic design in 2050. I believe graphic props in the installation would look more expectable and, therefore, relatable if I used current trends as a style direction.