Frutiger Aero The Mid-2000s Design Trend Taking Social Media By Storm
The Guardian|December 15, 2023
What do tropical fish, bubbles, green fields and dew drops have in common? They are all visual markers of a mid-2000s aesthetic that is taking the TikTok generation by storm, amid a wave of nostalgia for a time when technology was seen as a path to a brighter future.
Ellie Violet Bramley
Frutiger Aero The Mid-2000s Design Trend Taking Social Media By Storm

Labelled Frutiger Aero by design gurus, the trend is named after the Swiss typesetter Adrian Frutiger, whose lettering featured widely in early colour computers, and Windows Aero, a visual style embraced by Microsoft’s 2006 Vista software, with its screen savers depicting electric-green grass and impossibly blue skies.

On TikTok, the hashtag has had nearly 270m views and is populated with videos showing Motorola flip-phones, bottlenose dolphins jumping out of pools and the Apple logo filled with water and goldfish. On YouTube, viewers are tuning in to soothing videos with titles such as “ 30 Minutes of Frutiger Aero! for all your 2000s nostalgia needs ”.

Observers say the trend is a reaction to a present-day dominated by apocalyptic warnings about AI’s power to destroy humanity, where the unchecked power of Silicon Valley’s tech bros has made digital advances part of the problem rather than a solution.

Frutiger Aero harks back to a time of tech optimism, a time before i Phones when computers – such as Apple’s fruit “flavoured” iMac G3 – were seen as more in tune with nature.

This story is from the December 15, 2023 edition of The Guardian.

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This story is from the December 15, 2023 edition of The Guardian.

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