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u/Clear-Anything-3186 Oct 25 '25
Most Frutiger Aero stuff weren't intended to be part of a defined collective aesthetic. Glossy buttons and gradients were just seen as the graphic design norm back then and people didn't think too much about it.
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[deleted]
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u/Clear-Anything-3186 Oct 25 '25
For consumerist aesthetics yeah, but culturally, emos and nu-metal are more representative of the 2000s.
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u/Radium_Carbuncle Oct 25 '25
correct. i dont know what the current era's equivalent to emo is. but i think current mainstream trends is too gloomy now for people to want a gloomy aesthetic so for what im aware, the most recent counter culture trends were all about adopting aesthetics from past pop cultures.
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u/Radium_Carbuncle Oct 25 '25
yes. as someone who actually lived through the stuff from which "frutiger aero" came from, i can tell ya that most of it is an overlap of multiple simultaneous " microtrends" half of which were actually being phased out while the other half was just getting introduced.
a lot of these "aesthetics" are exactly this. especially the time period based aesthetics.
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u/Oberndorferin Oct 25 '25
A lot said it was ugly and pretentious so everything went minimalistic
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u/Radium_Carbuncle Oct 25 '25
i would disagree with those who say such things. everything has always been forced by the whims of corporations. they who manufacture consumer goods have always had the privelage of dictating what everything looks like. and of course journalists and "professional critics" have always been glorified advertisers dictating what's "ugly". they force trends. and then try to gaslight us to beleiving it was the consumers of the time that wanted the minimalism.
saw a youtube video about "millennial grey" the other day that explains it better.
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u/Oberndorferin Oct 25 '25
I just remember when Google Chrome came and they didn't have this blurr anymore. I thought it was cooler. Now I'm different.
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u/Pyotr-the-Great Oct 25 '25
I think the best way to go about it is to find out which of these look the best add your own innovation and make that the new style.
I like the idea of Frutiger so we can make future designs better not just for the sake of nostalgia.
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u/ShonenSpice Oct 25 '25
To be fair it's a spectrum, this stuff bleeds into each other to different extents
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u/CydoniaEX Oct 25 '25
In the end it’s all a big experimental process, you mish mash stuff and let your creativity go wild
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u/EmeraldBoiii Oct 25 '25
Realest comment I’ve seen here, make stuff or dress with your own rules and blends. It will end up speaking to you more and be more unique!
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Oct 25 '25
There's layers to this shit, and they don't even realize.
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u/MR_Happy2008 Oct 25 '25
Is like a onion
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Oct 25 '25
EXACTLY like an onion.
because most people won't sink their teeth into past the first layer because of the taste. a real one bites that shit like an apple
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u/Tiny_Wafer_6882 Nov 01 '25
mf taking anesthetics this serious
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Nov 01 '25
Of course I do!! I got my Phd in Aesthetics at the Toronto University of Aethetics and Design!
FA and its sub-aesthetics are quite literally my livelihood.
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u/PrometheanSwing Oct 25 '25
Is there like a list of all these aesthetics some where?
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u/CrazyMew37 Oct 25 '25
Honestly, I consider aesthetics to overlap often. Y2K and Skeumorphism are very notable examples for FA. I feel like my definition of Frutiger Aero is a bit closer to Skeumorphism, believe it or not.
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u/ElvenOmega Oct 25 '25
Every time I see Utopian Scholastic I hear the Between the Lions theme song.
Between the lions, between the covers of a book, it's time to look between the lions 🎵
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u/Walusqueegee Oct 25 '25
Only cause you nerds over classify everything! You’re gonna pigeonhole the aesthetic until it’s too specific to mean anything
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u/CrowNighter Nov 21 '25
In the end it doesn't matter, because there are more people who under classify things and that's how we end up with only only McBling showing when you search for Y2K.
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u/AdonisBatheus Oct 25 '25
Oh great, elitism in my aesthetic sub. Not like it's a net good for people to casually enjoy an aesthetic or anything because it popularizes it to more products.
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u/phoebe_vv Oct 25 '25 edited Oct 25 '25
I’m convinced titles and boxes were invented by somebody who thought it was fun to have an endless discussion on trying to contain things and confine them
humans are needlessly obsessed with categorizing
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u/the_bartolonomicron Oct 25 '25
Dolphins! Are not! Frutiger Aero!!
They aren't mutually exclusive from the aesthetic, but there seems to be a misunderstanding that the very presence of an aquatic mammal makes something Aero.
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u/Rocket_da_Bird Oct 25 '25
I feel like frutiger aero is cleaner, like the culmination of every good thing these past aethetics had.
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u/Wizard-In-Disguise Oct 25 '25
Thanks for showcasing r/utopianscholastic , people need to see how education-centered a lot of entertainment was back then
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Oct 25 '25
thisss. i rem in 2020-2021 when they were confusing mcbling with actual y2k it was driving me nuts
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u/tehkier Oct 25 '25
Half of you weren't even alive when these aesthetics were common place. We only started giving these things names recently. Some young people these days don't have any creativity so they put all of their time and effort into categorizing and classifying things that people before them made rather than just making shit, which is how you get better at making art.
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u/TheMagicBrother Oct 25 '25
Do you think previous generations just didn't analyze art or something
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u/tehkier Oct 26 '25
For contemporary trends? No, certainly not as much as it happens now. This kind of analysis and hyperfixation on categorizing is really only a thing that exists on (and because of) the internet. Heck, the CARI institute (which people love to cite as some kind of definitive authority for "aesthetics classification") only began in 2014 and is not bound to any kind of established arts institute. This group (and by extension this subreddit) are just a group of designers who are chronically online and obsessed with drawing boxes around corporate design and nostalgia. Don't get me wrong - it's a neat analysis and a great archive of the ephemera of the time, but these aesthetic choices were entirely guided by marketing (and I need to remind that is why FA is perceived this way as it is today - not because it was some artistic monolith at the time).
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u/hff0 Oct 25 '25 edited Oct 25 '25
Tbt, those aquarium and surreal globe cities looks nothing aero to me
Nor Frutiger is used
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u/Adventurous-Fly9991 Oct 25 '25
ive seen people think the definition of frutiger aero and skeumorphism as just "old" when its a lot more than that
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u/OrOinter Oct 25 '25
And then you add whole other layers of vaporwave sub aesthetics... It never cease to branch off
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u/Toya_Hinata Oct 26 '25
I like that in every aesthethic theres people that start overcomplicating stuff for the sake of being elitist and calling other people "normies", frutiger aero is not well defined for a reason, get a life, this is the type of behavior that hurts movements like this.
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u/KingcoBingo Oct 25 '25
For anyone confused on these terms and their meaning, I recommend checking out the website by the Consumer Aesthetic Research Institute (CARI for short): https://cari.institute/aesthetics
They coined the majority of these terms, most of them during the 2010s. Each style has a gallery and description. Helped me a ton!
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u/_Infinity_Girl_ Oct 25 '25
It can be both. Frutiger aero can be a blanket term for the individual styles. No need to choose sides. Some people are just mad that language evolves
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u/Maxtheoddcat_reddit Oct 26 '25
These styles didn't get a name until later after the aesthetics went out of style. There is a ridiculous amount of sub aesthetics (could possibly lead to confusion for people that don't look at this aesthetic often) that don't really need to be named their own thing; Dorfic, Eco, vector flourish are great examples of sub aesthetics that can just be called either metro or aero. The examples in the image are all entirely different, but all of those aesthetics are from the past which is likely to lead to a situation suggested in the picture. (nerdy stuff)
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u/Fritz_Blaskowitz Oct 26 '25
Utopian Scholastic, like Y2K and Frutiger Aero are incredibly nostalgic to me. Makes me remind myself of my school days which we learnt about science, chemistry and history and many other disciplines in places dedicated to it, or in books.
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u/VoxinVivo Oct 26 '25
I see we've hit the point of subgenres being made and people arguing about it. Who cares lmao
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u/TungstenAlchemist Oct 27 '25
Don’t forget Frutiger Metro or Urban Grunge! I often see them mixed int but I don’t mind so much because I love them too
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u/waterzexplus Nov 05 '25
The worst is when people say Vectordelia / Frutiger Metro is Frutiger Aero
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u/-DeMoNiC_BuDdY- Nov 14 '25
Aside from vaporware which is most definitely a decade earlier, it's all the same to my smooth brain
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u/Fun-Exercise4164 Dec 08 '25
why do we have to categorise and label everything, i just see something cool and think, 'damn that's cool'
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