2000s Aesthetics Were Weird...

Frutiger Aero, Y2K, and several more obscure yet nostalgic aesthetics shaped a lot of the technological design in the 2000s. Having a profound impact on fashion, media and even architecture, in today's video we have a look at some popular and little-known aesthetics you might recognise. Of course, a couple of these get pretty weird.

CONTENT
0:00 Intro
0:28 Frutiger Aero
2:38 Y2K
4:58 Dark Aero
5:30 McBling
6:02 Weirdcore
7:20 My thoughts
7:46 Conclusion

[ExtraMintyy]

I Tried Making Frutiger Aero!
⬇Discord

[makytondr]

“The future we were promised but never got” hits hard. Totally accurate.

[FindTheFun]

This is honestly the last time people were still optimistic about the future, and it shows through the art.

[Myself-yfdo]

Back in the 2000s, we all wondered what the future would hold.
Now that the future is here, we all wish we could go back to the 2000s.

[Taikina]

imagine being a fucking goldfish and every day you look at your master's back as he sits down to drop a log. and that's your life whole

[melley]

1:44 OMG i remember these soaps!
They had a physical plastic fish inside'em, it looked really cool with the background and the transparent graphics on the front of the bottle.

[firstreality]

I feel like a lot of these videos ignore what aesthetics were actually shared and created by the average person at the time. I remember the whole Frutiger Aero look was more seen as a generic corporate thing that you associate with electronics companies, kind of like the generic minimal look nowadays. There were a few interesting takes on the aesthetic like what you see in Mirror's Edge or LittleBigPlanet but it was almost strictly made by corporations like Apple or Microsoft.

Meanwhile, a lot of younger people were creating things that fell more in line with the Frutiger Metro look, or continuing the Y2K/Cybercore thing with hacker UIs and abstract 3D models. A lot of it had to do with it being simpler to create for forum signatures and wallpapers, so it was all over the place.

[mtsimlover]

"i wish it was 2006." that man gets it.

[celebrityrog]

I call it the Glass/Aqua/Aero era where everything had to be some sort of see through, clear, air like design that had some water like qualities to it, and everything was shiny with it too, like glass. It was just a weird time.

[candydream]

I remember in the 2010s everyone was obsessed with the 90s and now everyone moved onto the 2000s. I'm dreading 2040, where everyone will be obsessed with the 2020s... shudder.

[Chopperdragon]

a lot of the weird core images here especially with children's bedrooms or blacked out people fit more the traumacore genre. I think.

[haraldlindohf]

Feels almost a bit depressing how so much of our current culture is shaped in some form or another by nostalgia.

[saratimbre]

I'm an art historian. The concept of "aesthetics" as gen z uses the word is really interesting to me. It's like the sane thing as how we try to categorize different art movements but somehow claims to be different? The ones you listed even fall in like chronologically with the movements of the beginning of the 20th century. Everything was bright and dreamy about the future, art nouveau 1900-1910ish. Futurism. Look to the future but also want conservative return to a time before the first world War. Up through the end of ww1ish, the dark aero. And then finally the post ww1 absurdity of Dada="weirdcore". It would be really interesting to look at the rest of this trend but I don't know enough about "aesthetics". What's the latest "aesthetic", or the one after weird core chronologically? I wonder if it also lines up.

[xerilaun]

Makes me happy that frutiger aero is getting popular again

[Pabliski]

In 2000s there was shower core. Then in 2009, League of Legends... can't have both

[daviematcha]

As someone who was a design student when iOS 7 came out, things like Frutiger Aero, the skeuomorphism of older iOS, and raster asset heavy, splashy skincare ads just seemed increasingly tacky, fake, lazy, and overwhelming. All of those shiny buttons and UI textures were more work to put in a website and didn't scale as the screens we used became higher resolution. Worst of all it, became a dated norm that was done poorly more often than it was pulled off successfully with often stolen and clearly regurgitated assets. It got to the point Flat, minimal graphics were like a nice break from the noise before they became the noise itself. Aero didn't feel like Ecofuturism at the end, it felt like a smarmy corporate lie. Another weird irony this historical lens presents is that modernist fonts like Frutiger's (Frutiger, Univers, and to some extent, Avenir) were seen as a cure to the DaFont driven craziness of the time that was more often associated with these images.

I'm glad this stuff can be appreciated now for its best traits, and I'm terrified that nostalgia for 2010s the folksy Mumford and Sons skinny handwritten font tumblr core is only a few years away.

[jasperisdumb]

wow... great video... i did always want a toilet like that also... combine it with maybe racing cars or trucks maybe? definitely some money to be made....

[dragonsfire]

"shower-core" lmfao I love that description of frutiger aero, also I have some memories of playing flash games on (what used to be) my mom's dell inspiron that ran vista. Idk I like 2000s stuff, I still have my sillybandz

[SnipsOW]

Oh im happy to see a video on this! I adore how these aesthetics are coming back in popularity!

[alexthetiger]

I was born in '96, the perfect time to experience all of these aesthetics. I miss the very aquatic designs of the early 2000s. I was super into it then, I had one of those bubble column things with fish in them in my room when I was about 5 or 6. We always had the Softsoap in the bathroom. Very upsetting that they just changed the design of those bottles. I still love these water-y aesthetics and I want the 2020s to be the aquatic decade. I'm glad Frutiger Aero is making a comeback too. Also I played so much NFS Carbon back in '07. I loved that game. Dark Aero was a great theme too.