✦ FRUTIGER AERO ✦

Remember when the internet looked bright, playful, and a little bit like magic?

Frutiger Aero is a visual aesthetic that became especially popular across technology, advertising, websites, operating systems, and product design during the 2000s and early 2010s.

It's characteristics included blue skies, fluffy clouds, tropical fish, green hills, water droplets, glossy buttons, glassy interfaces, bubbles, and clean sunny landscapes.

WHY SO BLUE?

I first encountered this aesthetic while exploring Pinterest. And it was if I stumbled head-first into a nostalgic flashback. I remembered the Windows XP interface that I used to watch my family boot up when they used the computer. I did not even know that I had that memory. And now that I had realized, I could not stop longing for that time.

There is something wonderfully whimsical about this design. Technology wasn't always as soulles, minimal, or corporate as today. Instead, people were excited to create a new future, hopes were high, and all was bright. I am aware that this is a rose-tinted view of the past, but I cannot help but feel that there was a certain optimism in the air.

"everything is going to be alright"

That's part of why the aesthetic has returned. Especially in Genz. To a generation growing up in an increasingly complicated and now, dying digital world, those bright skies and impossible green landscapes can represent hope

the future belongs to the dreamers