Bringing It Back

Why the old is new and design always comes full-cirlce.

People like to say that history always repeats itself, and in many cases, its true. Artists find their best inspiration in the past. Take the Neoclassical Movement for example where the painters, sculptors, and architects found a fashionable 'vintage' in the old Hellenic world. This is still practiced to an extent in the South; the antebellum period made extensive use of fluted, Grecian columns, and that period is now a past re-inspiring the present smooth-column, Roman/Greek composite architecture used around all sorts of important and perceptibly opulent buildings in government, academic, or private settings. Product design feels the same cyclical renaissance.
The most current trend (I personally don't think it's a trend) is flat design. Every digital company is embracing it to compete with the visual appeals of their rivals. Facebook looks flat, Twitter looks flat. Of course, the most notable and controversial implementation of the style is Apple's iOS 7. Regardless of opinion, this flat style is nothing new. Its roots are based in the Helvetica-fied Swiss style of the 50's. The look is focused completely around the elegance of the Helvetica typeface which lends itself to the use of simple color fields and a flat appearance.

The present era of the 2010's is starting to see more and more design influence from our parent's and grandparent's past. This also goes for the design of cars, cameras, clothes, sunglasses, coffee-makers, refrigerators, you name it. Maybe the reason us millennials embrace the throw-back so fervently is because of the simplicity it recalls. These decades had no laptops, smartphones, mobile connectivity, or anything of the sort. Yet everyone and everything looked great. Or maybe it is just because trends change with time and what is currently in vogue happens to look retro. I was greatly inspired to by an article from The Verge develop my thoughts on the concept in this post. It collected a wide variety of examples from the newest generation Mini Cooper to Nikon's vintage, metal-encased camera line. Much of the reason consumers want a retro-looking digital SLR is due to the trendy obsession with film photography, something which I am party to. With the renewed cultural affinity for the grain of the film, comes an attraction for the antique camera and therefore the cameras with the modern guts get renovated with a vintage body.

In addition to the neoclassical Mini, the Ford Mustang has also been re-engineered for 2015 with a flavor from the past. The old-look 'Stang first debuted in 2005 as the first of the retro pony car movement that resurrected the Camaro and the Challenger with boxy front and back ends. This newest generation also brings into the equation the oh-so-desirable fastback glass of '69 for an even more old-school style.

Of course these little nostalgic details are juxtaposed with the modern accouterments of LED lighting and rear-diffusers. It is this synthesis of today's high-technology and yesterday's smooth, classy lines that creates the current chic of the millenial era. A wonderful, recent pop-culture example is the phone/handset used by Joaquin Phoenix in Her. It is clamshell-flip-smartphone, similar to the way the Samsung Note II has an attached cover. Rather than design a highly-futuristic, glass-thin wafer of a phone, director Spike Jonez and designer K.K. Barrett opted to retrofit an old, slim cigarrette case. The finished product echos the form and colors of 1950 in a thin rectangle surrounding a high-end touchscreen interface.