Frutiger Aero: When the Future Looked Optimistic
The 2000s design aesthetic that you forgot about
Nostalgia for the 2000s has been in full swing for a while now, and it should come as no surprise. After all, most of us who experienced the period are getting on in life. Millennials are now closing in on their 40s, and the kids from Gen-Z are also years into adulthood. At the same time, it’s never been easier to reach into the past, and paradoxically, the past has never seemed so far removed from the digital present.
People have long surmised that as we grow older, we crave simpler times. Nostalgia is a complex thing, though. Sometimes it’s not so much what we had before that we miss, but the things we never had. Likewise, sometimes it’s not so much that past we crave, but the futures that never came to be.
On other occasions, nostalgia catches us off guard as we realize that something once so omnipresent in our lives has vanished like an old friend you lost touch with years ago.
In a roundabout way, this brings me to Frutiger Aero, an aesthetic that emerged in the early-to-mid 2000s and, for nearly a decade, encapsulated so many of the design choices of the era before silently disappearing.
