I know someone high up in package design in a company that handles a lot of big name clients. Basically, the companies are coming to these designers asking to make their brand look less busy and appeal to older audiences for some reason. That and most people who go to school gor art are honestly the progressive types who want the sleak modern look. Not a lot of people with soul in the art world these days.
Ah the 90's. People have seen the 80's come back several times now, but the 90's was actually doing a "groovy" 70's revival. I know I was a teenager in the mid 90's! That's why we had Austin Powers, The Brady Bunch, Scooby Doo etc. in Theaters. Stores started selling Lava Lamps again (for some reason), and Brit Pop was blastin' on the radio. Heck, even Fleetwood Mac, and Aerosmith had their biggest hits. So as an artist, I was heavily influenced by this retro future thing the 90's had going on. Everything was either super trippy, or EXTREME!!! Gone were the angular 80's and 90's, and in came the bean bag shaped everthing!
Great vid! I worked in advertising in the late 90s. That to me was the best decade for fun and creativity. Advertisers told the clients what was best to stand out from the rest. It was a large collective effort to a lot of companies to out do each other to stand out. It was a lot of fun.
You didn’t finish your sentence. “Taking a trip through the past exploring designs that were GOOD” that word hood makes a giant difference. Considering graphic design now is boring.
That were …. Extreme?… everything in the 90s was about extreme, like xgames, everything was edgy and needed shock value to grab the consumer, with bright vivid colors. A lot of gen x influence with grudge helped a lot.
@@Blanco_MeowThat's what makes it good, even 2000s were like that(little less cheesy and extreme), now it would be probably same but censorship ruined everything as time goes on.
You are absolutely KILLING IT with this aesthetic review content, bless you. I've talked to people about what is now called "Y2K aesthetics" for over a decade, and this whole series really reinforces my thoughts on it and reminds of several subgenres I'd forgotten about.
I don't understand why people think online shopping is more convenient. You can't try out perfume or clothing online. And there is just a special feeling of walking around a mall.
They were a perfect “third place”. You picked “your” mall, and that impacted your social circle as well as activities. It was like the town square of the era
bro, things you're talking about, have been imprinted into me subconsciously without ever thinking about it, and now you're providing an explanation of all the designs, this just sounds surreal. Please don't stop. I think time stamp deserves a video of their own. Also, will you do a video on today's modern designs?
Since schools often don’t replace old material (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it), I got to grow up seeing some Utopian Scholastic, even as a late 00s kid growing up in the 2010s. I mean, even to this day I still have to watch old CGI science videos from the 90s lol. I also remember playing old edutainment PC games back in Elementary as well. And you is right, those books were always smackin’.
As someone who grew up in the prime demographic in the 90's, I want to clarify a bit for people who maybe didn't live through it, because I see a lot of misunderstandings in these types of retrospective videos. Pokemon in 90's America was not at all mainstream. Same with Star Wars, Harry Potter, comic books, video games and "nerdy" things in general. People bought those things and definitely enjoyed them, but it was something you hid from anybody but your closest friends. I myself was a huge fan of all these, but you have to understand that acceptance of nerd culture is a relatively new concept.
I was born in '90 and I gotta disagree with this. Pokemon started out kinda nerdy, but was totally mainstream by '99. My preppy-leaning suburban school had a large group of kids hanging out trading cards and playing Gameboy at recess. Harry Potter was always one of the most popular books, albeit with a tiny group of people who took issue with it due to religion. And even 'normies' went to see Star Wars Episode One, which was everywhere as far as merchandising.
I agree. The whole nerd thing being trendy these days has always baffled me. Pokemon was probably the most mainstream and widely accepted of things you mentioned but only just. Harry Potter, comic books, Star wars... Those were definitely things you didn't go around advertising because people would react like Ogre from revenge of the nerds. "NERDS!!"
I have been searching for Utopian Scholastic forever! I have always noticed and loved the aesthetic but didn't know it had a name. Thank you, ExtraMint. Also props for Mind Maze
The early 90's and late 90's were almost like two different decades. In the span of a few years I went from listening to my music on cassette tapes, CD's and then MP3s. Kids born in the 2000's will have no clue how cutting edge it felt to download a song on your computer. Tech and video games were evolving at a stunning pace. A new computer would be obsolete in a year or two if you wanted to run and enjoy the latest software or gadgets. As a teen in the late 90's, most of us had a GeoCities webpage, dedicated to whatever your interest was at the time. So much fun to visit your friend's page and sign their guestbook. By far the biggest life changer was AOL instant messenger (AIM). Overnight we went from calling our friends over a landline to chatting on the computer. It spread like wildfire. Everyone was on it. It felt too good to be true. I could go on & on, but this is why I loved the 90's, there was always something new and exiting around every corner.
My dad was a Metallica-head growing weed in the 90s. So when I see those PS2 ads I think of him. (Mom was a pediatrician who hated drugs! They also met online in the 90s, so there's that.) I miss that style that has often been described as "Gen-X Soft Club". Like 'The Matrix' with an ethereal overtone.
Utopian Scholastic is such an underrated aesthetic. Makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside. Takes me right back to my days in primary school borrowing books from the library and silent reading sessions.
My sister was born in the 90s: 1991 and I was born ten years later in 2001. I only got the scraps of the 90s, but I used to listen to 90s songs all the time and the recent songs from the 2000s. The 90s was all about being in your face, color, personality, wackiness, and innovation. The games of this era were the very best as well as the 2000s.
I spent 5 yrs of my life trolling the entire world on aol some of the shit I did is arrest hate crime and prison in todays woke nwo soy ciety.... I was a demon on that thing and had rooms full of people laughing there hearts out... gay chat tranz chat bi chat pretend to be a twink looking for older men into elvo deep fisting and poop play eating get chatting to old pervs then give oiut my familys and my friends pay as you go mobile numbers then sit back and wait .
3D DInosaur was one of my early memories from when I was like 6 that I thought I dreamed or it wasn't real until a good few years ago when I found videos of it online. What a fever-dream of a game.
DAMN you really blew up! I remember watching your first video when you had like around 100 subs and commenting that you would blow up eventually and look at you now! 500k+ views in 2 of your videos is crazy, congrats! I love your videos
I freaking love those books, I have a few of those that I found at a Goodwill. DK is still publishing amazing visual books, you should check them out, their collection is amazing.
Fantastic analysis here. Love every style/example mentioned in this video. Surprisingly, Corporate Grunge really spoke to me in 2024. I love the rough feel, rough textures in an organized manner. Also, I need a hi-res copy to make a print of "Playstation: It's More Powerful Than God".
People tend to say that about whatever decade they grew up in. Plenty of boomers will tell you how cool and unique everything was in the '60s and how nothing will ever compare to seeing the greatest bands that ever existed at Woodstock, its unmatched cultural significance, vibe that could never be reproduced, etc.
@@heinrichagrippa5681 Nobody will say that about 2010s. Like what did 2010s have? Video games are turned into casinos by AAA studios. Creative bankruptcy killed off most of the franchises. Compared to 2000s when we had multiple new legendary franchises starting every year of the decade. Technological advancement hasn't really jumped all that much since Crysis 2007. Only by late 2010s the market has caught up and similar graphics became common place. Economy? After 2010s it lays in shambles as we had both the pandemic and multiple crypto bubbles left most people with no spare cash. Computer hardware became insanely expensive since companies can no longer keep the pace of innovation. Cars? Early 2010s saw a lot of companies close down due to the 2008 economic crash. This downward trend in new models continued as in 2010s most of remaining companies significantly reduced the number of car models. Many completely stopped making cars altogether, instead opting out for making nothing ut SUVs and trucks. Music is terrible, now most of stuff being played on radio is autotuned. The "performers" don't even bother to write song lyrics that rhyme. Housing bubbles all over the planet. The list can go on forever. 2010s has nothing, but complete degradation of society due to social media. It's only fitting that the culmination of the decade was a world-wide pandemic.
@@heinrichagrippa5681I could give you legitimate reasons why the 90s were better. The economy was booming, technology was advancing rapidly, we had peace (the Cold war ended), no wars until 2001, we had the perfect balance of technology and personal interaction, cell phones and the internet were becoming common but social media didn't exist yet, music was great as were the movies and TV. It truly was the best decade.
@@Styxswimmer I love how you say “we” like you’re part of some special millennial in-group which I couldn’t possibly truly understand. Obviously, anyone who actually experienced the ‘90s would have 100% agreed with you, right? Well… No. I was born in 1989. My autobiographical long-term memory begins around late 1992 or very early 1993. I’m a white, hetero male who grew up in suburbia. I _am_ the definitive “‘90s kid”. So allow me to relate my perspective from even a fraction of my own authentic, first-hand experience of that decade. Rapidly advancing technology was cool in its own right, but also meant that your PC - or rather, the singular PC your entire family shared - would go from new to woefully obsolete within 2 years or even less than that. Even the most basic, non-fancy PCs were also way more expensive than currently, so unless your family was rich, good luck getting your parents to buy another. And while I still love the MS-DOS, NES and SNES games I played (subsisting on my cousin’s hand-me-downs I was consistently 1-2 generations behind on the console front and thus never made it to N64 or PSX), I would have killed for the tiniest fraction of what we currently have at our fingertips. That and only having at best maybe 4-9 computer games and a small handful of console games. People complain when it takes too much time and effort to finish a game now, whereas back then "beating" a game wasn't even something you realistically expected to do - just some vague, abstract conceptual fantasy; so presumably out of reach that for console games they rarely even bothered to _have_ any kind of special ending beyond white text on a black screen saying "conglaturation! You win! Thank for playing!". That at least improved in the latter half of the ‘90s with the PSX/N64(/Saturn lmao), but was still generally a far cry from today. I don't miss having a dial-up modem scream at me for 1-2 minutes every time I wanted to go online. Or "being online" being an infrequent, 15-60 minute event that had to be severely limited and basically treated like a long-distance phone call. Because not only did your internet plan only cover a set number of _minutes_ per month (and charge through the nose for every single minute in excess of that amount) it used your phone line, which during the dial-up era was most likely your entire family’s _only_ means of communication - and also meant your use of a phone to just talk to people was limited as well. I don't miss having to watch web-pages agonizingly load individual .jpg images line-by-line, or waiting 2 hours at 0.5-2 kB/s to download an 8.7 MB, 144p, 9-second video of a primitive CGI dancing baby. I don’t miss such crude, limited means of online entertainment, where even Flash animation wasn’t a thing yet. Meanwhile, while I despise practically all current social media, I at least have a choice. Nobody’s forcing me to use it and I can generally just ignore it. Oh, and on a tangentially related note, compared to what I could get ahold of at the emergence of my incurably horny, pubescent youth, today is an infinite, all-you-can-eat buffet with every possible dish in existence, as opposed to my meager table-scraps: a small handful of random, blurry, low res topless pics nervously stashed on the family computer - down a maze of directories with conspicuously generic-sounding names in hope that my mom would never find them. Good god, having to surgically remove specific internet history and/or “recently opened files” was such a precarious nightmare. That or being upfront about frequently purging all internet history and temp files to “clean the computer and make it less slow”. (And yes, when it came to family computers, it made more sense to say “less slow” rather than “faster”). Anyway, getting back to telephone-related stuff, am I nostalgic for hanging out with friends at the mall? Sure. But everyone forgets how much of a pain in the ass it was to coordinate anything when no one had cell phones. The moment you step outside your front door, you have no means of communication whatsoever. Nothing incoming, and anything outgoing being limited to whether or not there was a payphone nearby and you had enough spare change (and the phone number), and the prerequisite that whomever you were trying to call was still at home, or at the very least get some intel on their whereabouts from their parents. You meet up and one or two of your friends aren’t there: Was their bus late and they’re still on their way? Did they decide to just do something else? Who knows! But if you go now and they show up, they’ll be screwed and have no option but to wander around aimlessly, hoping to randomly encounter you. Same deal if someone slightly misinterpreted the meet-up location: they’re now lost to you, despite probably being only a few dozen feet away. I also don’t miss having to commit numerous phone numbers to memory, or else carry around a literal pen-and-paper notebook of them. Back to media: I don't miss that any TV-series you were into could only be seen on a specific day at a specific time (which could also arbitrarily change without warning). And if you missed an episode for any reason: tough shit. Maybe they’ll air it as an off-season rerun next year, but otherwise that was your one chance to watch it exactly _one_ time unless you knew someone committed to recording episodes on VHS. Or how getting into anything after it had already started airing meant having to just jump in somewhere at random, like half-way into season 3, and hopefully figure out everything you missed through context or a friend's jumbled synopsis. (Though incidentally there was usually surprisingly little to catch up on, but I’ll get into that later). Or having no choice but to start an episode half-way in because the first 20 minutes were overwritten by _an mf'ing football game in overtime._ And I don't miss not even being able to watch most of those shows at home _at all_ unless you had a cable plan. Also, I don’t miss how because of that, nearly _all_ shows aside from brain-dead soap operas were intentionally just a bunch of episodic stand-alones, which barely ever changed the status quo. Such that they were interchangeable to the point where you could start from any episode and watch the other episdes in any order with barely any noticeable inter-episode continuity issues. Nor do I miss 36% of all air-time being ads - with ad breaks strategically getting progressively longer and more frequent the further you were into whatever you were watching - and the pacing of shows being intentionally written to accommodate that.
@@Styxswimmer [continued because apparently there's an actual limit to how long comments can be] Still on the topic of visual media and social convenience, I don’t miss buying and carrying around film rolls - 24-36 pictures each - and having no idea how your pictures actually looked until weeks later - a process which involved going somewhere and paying for it (and accepting the inevitability that any and all of your more “personal” pictures would be seen by whoever developed the film). I don’t miss not even having the option to take pictures 99% of the time unless you were one of those unusual enthusiasts who carried around a camera everywhere, even in their regular day-to-day life. Nor do I miss that if you really, _really_ wanted to take a picture of something but didn’t know beforehand - aside from buying an entire new camera - your only resort was to find somewhere that sold disposable cameras, buy one, then return to the location of whatever you wanted to take a picture of and just pray that among whatever photos you took with the cheap-ass throwaway camera (with absolutely no adjustable anything) there’d be at least one or two that didn’t _entirely_ suck. I don’t miss pictures being just one or at best two physical objects which cannot be replicated and could easily be lost forever. And not even being able to show any of them to anyone outside your home unless you were literally carrying them on your person. My seven-years-younger brother has pictures dating back to his childhood that can be easily seen anywhere at any time. Meanwhile, good luck finding anything of me before I was around 12. Those _presumably_ exist - buried somewhere in my parents’ basement, assuming they weren’t at some point lost or inadvertently thrown away alongside various other junk. Sure, the former risks a breach in privacy, but I’ll risk it if it means access to pictures I can actually _show_ people. When I hang out with people in their 20s, and for whatever reason they start showing each other childhood photos, I’d take the possibility of Google or Facebook or whoever potentially having an unnoticeably infinitesimal, indistinguishable few pictures of me among literally billions of pictures of random nameless kids, over the reality of me just not having access to any of those pictures at all. That’s just a fraction of the stuff that was worse off the top of my head, and only communication/media related. I didn’t even get into how - even as a hetero white guy - I nevertheless do not miss the casual racism and _extreme_ default level of homophobia. Homophobia to the extent that, even if mainstream media had started trying to normalize it (in the backhanded approach of making gay people walking punchlines to laugh at rather than despise), it was still a given that anyone openly gay not only had to deal with over half the population considering them vile and repulsive, but to the point where depending on where they were they’d have to be legitimately concerned about the very real possibility of being outright _murdered._ Oh, and a common attitude towards the AIDS epidemic being “Eh, whatever. They deserve it.” while simultaneously regarding _all_ gay people as essentially lepers who might infect you with their incurable “gay” virus if you got too close. Obviously these issues still exist, but are at least for the most part not as bad as they used to be. For instance, at least trans people are acknowledged as a thing that exists rather than being exclusively categorized as either effeminate sissies, butch women, or deranged, cross-dressing perverts. Anyway, like any decade, the ‘90s had its ups and downs, much like my childhood therein. And I’m not so blinded by my own “‘90s kid” nostalgia that I’ll just declare the decade I conveniently happened to grow up in “objectively the best decade ever”. Like, seriously, come one, how egotistical can you be to think the time _you_ grew up in was inherently more special than anyone else's? Rotate that ‘9’ 180 degrees and realize you sound no different from boomers going on about how nothing will ever top the irreplicable magic of the ‘60s - its music, culture, atmosphere, Woodstock, etc. Meanwhile, Gen-X’ers _who were still youngish adults and fully able to objectively appreciate everything the ‘90s had to offer_ are still likely to say it wasn’t as cool and nostalgic as the ‘80s. I could give more examples, but I think I’ve made my point. Holy crap, I didn’t intend this to turn into an entire essay… whoops.
Man this was such a blast to the past. Granted I was a child during the 90s so it's mostly the stuff aimed at children that I remember like the ISpy and EyeWitness books, the colorful ads of junk food, Crash Bandicoot & Spyro commercials, and just the overall "wacky" vibe. Pokemania was wild as well, I still remember seeing Pokemon fliers and Pikachu plastered in a lot of places and when the first movie got it's theatrical release, the hype was insane lol. I'm surprised that you didn't give a mention to the "Jumpstart" Adventure games, I remember being hooked on the 4th grade one but then again, I'm not entirely sure if those games were that popular lol. And oh my god the Encarta series, I had forgotten about those until watching this vid and as soon as you showed the 1995 version, I got a punch in the memories of it lol. And of course the corporate grunge logos and aesthetic, I honestly miss it. I have to agree with the others, I do miss these times and I wish that there would be a revival of some of the architect because it feels so much blander now compared to the 90s and even the early 2000s.
dont normally comment but stumbled across this video today and couldn't believe how insightful and fascinating this video was but also how entertaining it was. Also nice to hear an Aussie accent. Subbed.
This video was refreshing to my 90s kid soul. Utopian scholastic and wacky pomo are such fun aesthetics for a kid. I’m from Katy so it was a blast from the past seeing Katy Mills to its former full glory! I used to love going as a little kid and when I learned to drive in the 2010s I would go by myself and enjoy the architecture. I went this winter with my baby and while it’s still a thriving mall, it looks pretty different.
I loved the Wacky Pomo aesthetic. It was creative and I used to get excited into going into places with that architecture because it looked like it was going to be a fun time.
watching this made me happy and gave me an existential crisis at the same time. I guess I'll get an even bigger existential crisis when I'm watching your 2000s video next, as I'm born in 92 and thus remember the early 2000s even more:P
1:55 this style of photographing people for ads / stock images was really popular at the time: person making a weird facial expression, overhead view with a sort of fisheye effect so the head and shoulders are huge and the feet are tiny
Great video! Aw man, that Encarta maze game was fun, probably the best educational game I played (that's right, you heard me, Mario's Time Machine, lol). I also miss the video game magazine ads, even if many were very edgy or raunchy. If the 80s were Totally Rad, the 90s were XTREME! It also really did feel like we were moving into the future, closing in on the year 2000 (Those colourful Apple Macs are a perfect "Y2K aesthetic") but looking back, it really does look like an older time now.
i love most of the design of the 90s. all thats in this video was great. granted, some as are really strange but interestingly to look at for sure, i miss those times. part of it felt like "do what you want, experiment and lets see what sticks, rather then what the establishment wants you to try"
As we live in the 2020s I do hope you could make a video about the 2010s aesthetic as this is where things went massively downhill and became flat or minimalistic before recovering somewhat in this decade.
I REALLY enjoyed watching this! So fascinating to learn about what was trendy in the 90s. I grew up in this era too.. do you intend on doing one of these videos for the 80s too?
I’m sorry man the joke about the sunlight directly into your testicles over the clip of that Hulk took me out. I was laughing so hard I didn’t hear what you were talking about for a full minute. Great video, I love how you broken down aesthetics from several different industries.
You really hit a nerve for something that I didn't know had a name. L I M I N A L Spaces. Pure Nightmare fuel. Cannot tell you how many late night experiences I've had watching Dead Mall walk throughs with Dan Bell... not understanding the comfort and appeal. Subconscious nostalgia. Great video. Thanks for putting in the time, energy, and effort.
12:46 I grew up around Katy Mills Mall in the early 2000s. The design felt normal to me to the point where other malls felt boring. It was THE place to be at that time
This was the style I grew up with, as I was a teenager throughout the '90s. It really molded how I thought of the world, especially those weird-ass gaming magazine ads like I saw in GamePro. Remember GamePro? Remember when kids used to bring gaming mags to school and look through them at lunch? I do.
I was a bit distracted while watching, but as soon as I heard "TAB X-tra" my mind shot awake and I got this huge nostalgia trip !! I had totally forgot all about that drink, but used to buy that more than normal Coke or Pepsi XD
The overall presentation and interface design of most media has become so sterilized and homogenized. The 90s were colorful and varied. Glad I was a kid/teenager during that time.
@@ExtraMintyy DUDE LOLMike is just such an honest guy, the punches took the fake out of him. I still love the guy! Much love Brethren! Trump 2024! From Canada!
Toyota Supras are so sick. I just love how they look. One time I was driving fast af and safely passed everyone in my 07 Impreza on this mountain pass in Colorado. Out of nowhere this person driving a black 90's Supra just dusts me and passes me. It came from nowhere. I saw that vehicle in town a few more times. It was mint. I really liked that car after seeing it pass me and up close in town. After seeing it a few times, I really started to like Supras. The 90's Supra is one of my favorite cars. I like 90's Toyota style. I had a 92 Toyota 4runner and i will admit one of the reasons I bought it was because I thought it was a pretty truck. I do like going off road, generally like 4x4s and was lookin for a 4x4, but went with a 90's toyota 4runner because of how it looked too. I looked at newer Ford Rangers and Chevy trucks.
Always love these retro/nostalgia based vids you do! Though I do hope you kinda ease up on the forcibly inserted memes What I always love about your vids is it's very chill 'documentary style' flow with old commercials and clips. Makes it more down to earth and more of a nice relaxing vid without being too trendy or force trying to be funny like a lot of other channels unfortunately fall into Still loved the vid though! Looking forward to what you have in store in the future! ♥
I’m subscribing for the nostalgia alone… Ah, the days of Netscape Navigator at school, and EverQuest at home…! You guys missed out on the 90’s! I just heard you say you went to school in the 2000’s… I’m sorry to hear that 😅
Seeing how things are now, I am very grateful I was born in 1989. It really was a great time to grow up. The world seemed to have many different creative outlets & things to do. Our environment felt engaging and alive. With places to go, things to do. Things embraced having unique style & creative design. I really miss the Vibe of that Era. Looking back with hindsight it also really felt like media & companies at least respected our intelligence, our time & what kind of experience we would have. It felt like stuff acknowledged us as a customer, a fan, a person. In a hyper capitalistic society, the least they can do is use basic decency to make us feel like they care if we have a good time because without that, without us they cannot succeed. The creativity from that era put lots of effort into ingenuity. It genuinely felt like everything took pride in who could find the most creative and unique ways to do things, design things. For things to go from this 90's-Y2K era, then shift to this bland, soulless, minimalistic approach feels very Dystopian. I really hope we find a way to reconnect with these core things that we clearly saw positive benefits from. The world really needs this right now. Look how soulless so much has become nowadays? Look at the horrible aesthetics, poor quality & poor creative design in our modern cities. Even our shows, movies, & video games need a revolution. Things have become so bland, bleek, and minimalistic to the point that it doesn't even make since. Most Old house's/building's/únique shop's are gone. Interesting oddities like drive in movie theaters, indoor fun zones, arcade's, magazines that included a demo disc so you can try out game's. You could go to blockbuster/Hollywood video, McDonald's had N64's & crazy fun zones & covered in wacky art all over. We could preview music before buying it, they had an amazing selection of well made kid's toy's, Roller Rink's, Garbage pale kid's card's. You get the point. Bring back Retro-Futurism. Bring back Y2K Vibes. ANYTHING compared to this current Dystopian toxic positivity. Our society feels more lost now then it ever has. Basic living has never been so unaffordable. Society is solely focused on unhealthy capitalistic agendas. Where anything that isn't constantly increasing profits or gaining investors, is a failure and has no value to society.. Our Quality of Life should be better than this. Basic living shouldn't be this unaffordable. People should be able to have fun, dork around, have things that engage them. The list goes on. Bring me back to the 90's.
Right there with ya man, and not in just simply being nostalgic. Yeah, felt like we were moving forward somewhere for a bit in the early 2000's, then we just stagnated at a point and now just revive different eras that came before to give the illusion of "new" or "progressing". Yeah, our tech and phones have advanced (though since much is priced to where the wealthy have access to the newest and best, it doesn't feel like it) but the overall world feels like we missed a chance to be at a different point than we are now overall. The fact people are taking note of where we've come from and where we are now in terms of aesthetics and how the world around us has developed, feels like to me anyway, more people feel something is off with where we're at. And maybe trying to find what feels like we "lost" that we never got to see, I guess.
I think yeah like was mentioned in the cars portion, a lot of the look in media in general was advances in tech that happened very rapidly at the time allowed easier and more capable design and production, and like mentioned in the web portion, the falling cost and ubiquitous access to these things and a venue to share it allowed a lot of people to jump in to trying their hand at design. As for liminal spaces... I would say a lot of the architecture that makes those up tends to be farrrrr older. Some 90s, but a lot of malls and retail spaces and other spaces most associated with them are more from the 80s and prior back to the early 1900s, then had a pretty good boom in the 90s so everything was kept very clean and shiny and well put together, but have started to show age and decay and lack of maintenance and rushed jobs leaving weird looking spaces you're not supposed to see, but they're there. This might just be the local trend though where I live. A lot of stuff has been since renovated in the 2000s and in some cases early 2010s, but seemingly more to do quick upgrades or improvements to try to keep people interested, or the singular mall that's doing OK having the assets to do so. In most cases, moving to far blander, duller styles. Overall, I wonder if we'll see maximal design cycle back as maybe a means for companies to start trying to differentiate, or if we're just settled in to minimalism because it's been calculated and determined through focus groups and AI and whatever else that it's just the best way to maintain control over markets and move products and services and designers are just far less interested in and have less liberty to use the existing tech to push more engaging designs. At least in tech, I hope we see at least much more options and cultural interest in personal expression, though. Working and even finding entertainment in modern gray, blocky UIs is honestly pretty depressing, and more and more devices and platforms are constrained to things being certain ways and less ability for a user to tinker because of "security" (but will still collect all your data).
There is a specific artistic design I remember being used on cover art for computer software or just computers in general. 12:50 you can definitely see it here but it uses more warmer colors and honestly, gives this association with coffee. I’m not sure why coffee but if the 90’s barfed on a coffee shop, that’s what it would look like.
Wacky post modern is one of my favorite aesthetics but i didn't know it had a name till now! Its so garish and well, wacky 😂 but it's so nostalgic and nothing hits like it does
That Game Boy ad with the colored tongues was my favorite magazine ad as a kid and I would actually dream about getting all the different colored Game Boys someday which of course, i didn't (didn't even get one of them)
There were also a lot of iconic cartoons that came out in the 90's, Cartoon Network for instance had a huge influence on aesthetics from that time as it hosted the most popular cartoons.
Back during the Corona virus times in 2020 about 7 months into it in September I had went to a mall in a pretty busy area. Shit had 1/3 of the stores open. I wasn't sure if we were ever gonna recover from that shit seeing how empty the mall was. I moved away from there so I haven't been back but I'm sure it's gotten somewhat better being that it's in Vegas. Everyone loves to shop at malls and stores in public while in Vegas. Tons of tourists.
A family friend gave me their Time Blaster alarm clock shown at 12:40. It was by far one of the weirdest but also neatest non 'toy' things I had in the early 2000's
It's ironic that those anti piracy ads actually used piracted music. they didn't pay the original composer for continued use
Even the anti-piracy ad secretly didn’t care about piracy. Wonderful 😆👍
Pretty sure that's a myth. Been debunked since.
ua-cam.com/video/pnXsS4eP7Dw/v-deo.html
Lol classic corporate hypocrisy
Ha, I knew that music seemed too cool for an ad like that..
I was born in 86 so the 90’s was my childhood man. Good times for sure. My fondest memories loved the 90’s.
Same here, friend. It was the the best, it's hard to even state how awesome it was.
I was born in 83 and remember the late eighties and loved 🥰 the nineties
I turned 16 in 99
I think we can all agree this modern corporate internet look we're stuck on is trash and needs to change , no creativity
fr i love frutiger aero it NEEDS to come back
Yeah no charachter or personality whatsoever. It feels so dead.
I love the look of Windows 7. 10 looks fine. but Windows 11 looks so bad
@@user-vn4ue remember windows 8? That was the worst one
I know someone high up in package design in a company that handles a lot of big name clients. Basically, the companies are coming to these designers asking to make their brand look less busy and appeal to older audiences for some reason. That and most people who go to school gor art are honestly the progressive types who want the sleak modern look. Not a lot of people with soul in the art world these days.
Ah the 90's. People have seen the 80's come back several times now, but the 90's was actually doing a "groovy" 70's revival. I know I was a teenager in the mid 90's! That's why we had Austin Powers, The Brady Bunch, Scooby Doo etc. in Theaters. Stores started selling Lava Lamps again (for some reason), and Brit Pop was blastin' on the radio. Heck, even Fleetwood Mac, and Aerosmith had their biggest hits. So as an artist, I was heavily influenced by this retro future thing the 90's had going on. Everything was either super trippy, or EXTREME!!! Gone were the angular 80's and 90's, and in came the bean bag shaped everthing!
Yes and flared jeans came back and honestly lasted into the mid 00s, or close to it. I miss those lol
Great vid! I worked in advertising in the late 90s. That to me was the best decade for fun and creativity. Advertisers told the clients what was best to stand out from the rest. It was a large collective effort to a lot of companies to out do each other to stand out. It was a lot of fun.
As a professional graphic designer, it is absolutely fascinating taking a trip through the past exploring designs that were.
You didn’t finish your sentence. “Taking a trip through the past exploring designs that were GOOD” that word hood makes a giant difference. Considering graphic design now is boring.
frr bro elaborate what kind of asset packs did they have ? or.. did they hire artists
100th like
That were …. Extreme?… everything in the 90s was about extreme, like xgames, everything was edgy and needed shock value to grab the consumer, with bright vivid colors. A lot of gen x influence with grudge helped a lot.
@@Blanco_MeowThat's what makes it good, even 2000s were like that(little less cheesy and extreme), now it would be probably same but censorship ruined everything as time goes on.
Nothing looks better than the 90's sports cars. The Skyline, Supra, Viper, RX-7, 3000GT, NSX, etc. are just do damn cool.
Everything from the 90's is super cool not only the cars.. even the people
I was born in 2000, so I'm more familiar with Frutiger Aero, but I'm absolutely IN LOVE with the mid 90's-early 2000's Style.
You are absolutely KILLING IT with this aesthetic review content, bless you. I've talked to people about what is now called "Y2K aesthetics" for over a decade, and this whole series really reinforces my thoughts on it and reminds of several subgenres I'd forgotten about.
Thanks, that means a lot. I’m glad you’re enjoying them!
I miss shopping malls. They were nice places to just relax.
Back when security guards would not harass you for sitting around.
And they actually opened early and stayed open late and the stores actually had product lol
I was one of the original Katy mills mall loiterers 😎
I don't understand why people think online shopping is more convenient. You can't try out perfume or clothing online. And there is just a special feeling of walking around a mall.
They were a perfect “third place”. You picked “your” mall, and that impacted your social circle as well as activities.
It was like the town square of the era
bro, things you're talking about, have been imprinted into me subconsciously without ever thinking about it, and now you're providing an explanation of all the designs, this just sounds surreal. Please don't stop. I think time stamp deserves a video of their own. Also, will you do a video on today's modern designs?
Since schools often don’t replace old material (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it), I got to grow up seeing some Utopian Scholastic, even as a late 00s kid growing up in the 2010s. I mean, even to this day I still have to watch old CGI science videos from the 90s lol. I also remember playing old edutainment PC games back in Elementary as well.
And you is right, those books were always smackin’.
Can you keep going back? Dig into “why did the 80s look like that,” “why did the 70s look like that,” and so forth.
The 1880s?
Especially thr 80s
Definitely do the 80s
@@dorkbrandon4422Nice name lol
"Why did the 1600s Look like that?"
As someone who grew up in the prime demographic in the 90's, I want to clarify a bit for people who maybe didn't live through it, because I see a lot of misunderstandings in these types of retrospective videos.
Pokemon in 90's America was not at all mainstream. Same with Star Wars, Harry Potter, comic books, video games and "nerdy" things in general. People bought those things and definitely enjoyed them, but it was something you hid from anybody but your closest friends. I myself was a huge fan of all these, but you have to understand that acceptance of nerd culture is a relatively new concept.
Probably an American thing.
I was born in '90 and I gotta disagree with this. Pokemon started out kinda nerdy, but was totally mainstream by '99. My preppy-leaning suburban school had a large group of kids hanging out trading cards and playing Gameboy at recess.
Harry Potter was always one of the most popular books, albeit with a tiny group of people who took issue with it due to religion. And even 'normies' went to see Star Wars Episode One, which was everywhere as far as merchandising.
I agree. The whole nerd thing being trendy these days has always baffled me. Pokemon was probably the most mainstream and widely accepted of things you mentioned but only just. Harry Potter, comic books, Star wars... Those were definitely things you didn't go around advertising because people would react like Ogre from revenge of the nerds. "NERDS!!"
I was still a small child for most of the '90's, but the early 2000's were absolutely rife with nerdy stuff on the playground.
Pokemon was so insanely mainstream at the end of the 90s.
It was only "nerdy" for older Teenager^^
I have been searching for Utopian Scholastic forever! I have always noticed and loved the aesthetic but didn't know it had a name. Thank you, ExtraMint. Also props for Mind Maze
I miss the 90s and the edgy advertisements. Also experimental entertainment.
Same I miss my childhood
anime is gay
@@C-Stanzthat’s yaoi.
The early 90's and late 90's were almost like two different decades. In the span of a few years I went from listening to my music on cassette tapes, CD's and then MP3s. Kids born in the 2000's will have no clue how cutting edge it felt to download a song on your computer. Tech and video games were evolving at a stunning pace. A new computer would be obsolete in a year or two if you wanted to run and enjoy the latest software or gadgets. As a teen in the late 90's, most of us had a GeoCities webpage, dedicated to whatever your interest was at the time. So much fun to visit your friend's page and sign their guestbook. By far the biggest life changer was AOL instant messenger (AIM). Overnight we went from calling our friends over a landline to chatting on the computer. It spread like wildfire. Everyone was on it. It felt too good to be true. I could go on & on, but this is why I loved the 90's, there was always something new and exiting around every corner.
AIM and those AOL CDs for free internet for 20 hours😂
I was a kid in the early nineties and a teenager in the late nineties. Age 6 on January 1, 1990
@@PraveenSrJ01 wow!
I had that exact CD of Encarta '95 for Mac. I used it mostly for school homework. It was like Wikipedia before Wikipedia with way more media samples.
My dad was a Metallica-head growing weed in the 90s. So when I see those PS2 ads I think of him. (Mom was a pediatrician who hated drugs! They also met online in the 90s, so there's that.)
I miss that style that has often been described as "Gen-X Soft Club". Like 'The Matrix' with an ethereal overtone.
That is quite the couple, lol
As a 90s person.. opposites do attract
Utopian Scholastic is such an underrated aesthetic. Makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside. Takes me right back to my days in primary school borrowing books from the library and silent reading sessions.
My sister was born in the 90s: 1991 and I was born ten years later in 2001. I only got the scraps of the 90s, but I used to listen to 90s songs all the time and the recent songs from the 2000s. The 90s was all about being in your face, color, personality, wackiness, and innovation. The games of this era were the very best as well as the 2000s.
I absolutely loved the breakdown of each piece of the 90's aesthetic. This is incredible.
One aesthetic I like is "global coffeehouse" such a comfy vibe
Agreed it looks chill as hell
One of my favorite parts of reading comics from the 90s is definitely the ads
I'm so glad I got to live through these times and experience it first hand. It was a great time to be alive and in your teens.
I spent 5 yrs of my life trolling the entire world on aol some of the shit I did is arrest hate crime and prison in todays woke nwo soy ciety.... I was a demon on that thing and had rooms full of people laughing there hearts out... gay chat tranz chat bi chat pretend to be a twink looking for older men into elvo deep fisting and poop play eating get chatting to old pervs then give oiut my familys and my friends pay as you go mobile numbers then sit back and wait .
That short clip of the 3D Dinosaur game took me straight back to childhood, I’ve never seen or heard it mentioned since the 90s
3D DInosaur was one of my early memories from when I was like 6 that I thought I dreamed or it wasn't real until a good few years ago when I found videos of it online. What a fever-dream of a game.
i had the 3d dinosaur game it was bundled up with my Packard bell
DAMN you really blew up! I remember watching your first video when you had like around 100 subs and commenting that you would blow up eventually and look at you now! 500k+ views in 2 of your videos is crazy, congrats! I love your videos
I remember that comment, you were legit one of the first 💯 thank you sm, ur a legend!
I ate those DK eyewitness books up as a kid
I loved the Star Wars visual encyclopedias
I freaking love those books, I have a few of those that I found at a Goodwill. DK is still publishing amazing visual books, you should check them out, their collection is amazing.
Same
Fantastic analysis here. Love every style/example mentioned in this video. Surprisingly, Corporate Grunge really spoke to me in 2024. I love the rough feel, rough textures in an organized manner.
Also, I need a hi-res copy to make a print of "Playstation: It's More Powerful Than God".
The 90s was the greatest decade ever. Nothing will ever be that awesome again.
People tend to say that about whatever decade they grew up in. Plenty of boomers will tell you how cool and unique everything was in the '60s and how nothing will ever compare to seeing the greatest bands that ever existed at Woodstock, its unmatched cultural significance, vibe that could never be reproduced, etc.
@@heinrichagrippa5681 Nobody will say that about 2010s. Like what did 2010s have?
Video games are turned into casinos by AAA studios. Creative bankruptcy killed off most of the franchises. Compared to 2000s when we had multiple new legendary franchises starting every year of the decade. Technological advancement hasn't really jumped all that much since Crysis 2007. Only by late 2010s the market has caught up and similar graphics became common place.
Economy? After 2010s it lays in shambles as we had both the pandemic and multiple crypto bubbles left most people with no spare cash.
Computer hardware became insanely expensive since companies can no longer keep the pace of innovation.
Cars? Early 2010s saw a lot of companies close down due to the 2008 economic crash. This downward trend in new models continued as in 2010s most of remaining companies significantly reduced the number of car models. Many completely stopped making cars altogether, instead opting out for making nothing ut SUVs and trucks.
Music is terrible, now most of stuff being played on radio is autotuned. The "performers" don't even bother to write song lyrics that rhyme.
Housing bubbles all over the planet.
The list can go on forever. 2010s has nothing, but complete degradation of society due to social media. It's only fitting that the culmination of the decade was a world-wide pandemic.
@@heinrichagrippa5681I could give you legitimate reasons why the 90s were better. The economy was booming, technology was advancing rapidly, we had peace (the Cold war ended), no wars until 2001, we had the perfect balance of technology and personal interaction, cell phones and the internet were becoming common but social media didn't exist yet, music was great as were the movies and TV. It truly was the best decade.
@@Styxswimmer I love how you say “we” like you’re part of some special millennial in-group which I couldn’t possibly truly understand. Obviously, anyone who actually experienced the ‘90s would have 100% agreed with you, right? Well… No. I was born in 1989. My autobiographical long-term memory begins around late 1992 or very early 1993. I’m a white, hetero male who grew up in suburbia. I _am_ the definitive “‘90s kid”. So allow me to relate my perspective from even a fraction of my own authentic, first-hand experience of that decade.
Rapidly advancing technology was cool in its own right, but also meant that your PC - or rather, the singular PC your entire family shared - would go from new to woefully obsolete within 2 years or even less than that. Even the most basic, non-fancy PCs were also way more expensive than currently, so unless your family was rich, good luck getting your parents to buy another. And while I still love the MS-DOS, NES and SNES games I played (subsisting on my cousin’s hand-me-downs I was consistently 1-2 generations behind on the console front and thus never made it to N64 or PSX), I would have killed for the tiniest fraction of what we currently have at our fingertips. That and only having at best maybe 4-9 computer games and a small handful of console games. People complain when it takes too much time and effort to finish a game now, whereas back then "beating" a game wasn't even something you realistically expected to do - just some vague, abstract conceptual fantasy; so presumably out of reach that for console games they rarely even bothered to _have_ any kind of special ending beyond white text on a black screen saying "conglaturation! You win! Thank for playing!". That at least improved in the latter half of the ‘90s with the PSX/N64(/Saturn lmao), but was still generally a far cry from today.
I don't miss having a dial-up modem scream at me for 1-2 minutes every time I wanted to go online. Or "being online" being an infrequent, 15-60 minute event that had to be severely limited and basically treated like a long-distance phone call. Because not only did your internet plan only cover a set number of _minutes_ per month (and charge through the nose for every single minute in excess of that amount) it used your phone line, which during the dial-up era was most likely your entire family’s _only_ means of communication - and also meant your use of a phone to just talk to people was limited as well. I don't miss having to watch web-pages agonizingly load individual .jpg images line-by-line, or waiting 2 hours at 0.5-2 kB/s to download an 8.7 MB, 144p, 9-second video of a primitive CGI dancing baby. I don’t miss such crude, limited means of online entertainment, where even Flash animation wasn’t a thing yet. Meanwhile, while I despise practically all current social media, I at least have a choice. Nobody’s forcing me to use it and I can generally just ignore it.
Oh, and on a tangentially related note, compared to what I could get ahold of at the emergence of my incurably horny, pubescent youth, today is an infinite, all-you-can-eat buffet with every possible dish in existence, as opposed to my meager table-scraps: a small handful of random, blurry, low res topless pics nervously stashed on the family computer - down a maze of directories with conspicuously generic-sounding names in hope that my mom would never find them. Good god, having to surgically remove specific internet history and/or “recently opened files” was such a precarious nightmare. That or being upfront about frequently purging all internet history and temp files to “clean the computer and make it less slow”. (And yes, when it came to family computers, it made more sense to say “less slow” rather than “faster”).
Anyway, getting back to telephone-related stuff, am I nostalgic for hanging out with friends at the mall? Sure. But everyone forgets how much of a pain in the ass it was to coordinate anything when no one had cell phones. The moment you step outside your front door, you have no means of communication whatsoever. Nothing incoming, and anything outgoing being limited to whether or not there was a payphone nearby and you had enough spare change (and the phone number), and the prerequisite that whomever you were trying to call was still at home, or at the very least get some intel on their whereabouts from their parents. You meet up and one or two of your friends aren’t there: Was their bus late and they’re still on their way? Did they decide to just do something else? Who knows! But if you go now and they show up, they’ll be screwed and have no option but to wander around aimlessly, hoping to randomly encounter you. Same deal if someone slightly misinterpreted the meet-up location: they’re now lost to you, despite probably being only a few dozen feet away. I also don’t miss having to commit numerous phone numbers to memory, or else carry around a literal pen-and-paper notebook of them.
Back to media: I don't miss that any TV-series you were into could only be seen on a specific day at a specific time (which could also arbitrarily change without warning). And if you missed an episode for any reason: tough shit. Maybe they’ll air it as an off-season rerun next year, but otherwise that was your one chance to watch it exactly _one_ time unless you knew someone committed to recording episodes on VHS. Or how getting into anything after it had already started airing meant having to just jump in somewhere at random, like half-way into season 3, and hopefully figure out everything you missed through context or a friend's jumbled synopsis. (Though incidentally there was usually surprisingly little to catch up on, but I’ll get into that later). Or having no choice but to start an episode half-way in because the first 20 minutes were overwritten by _an mf'ing football game in overtime._ And I don't miss not even being able to watch most of those shows at home _at all_ unless you had a cable plan.
Also, I don’t miss how because of that, nearly _all_ shows aside from brain-dead soap operas were intentionally just a bunch of episodic stand-alones, which barely ever changed the status quo. Such that they were interchangeable to the point where you could start from any episode and watch the other episdes in any order with barely any noticeable inter-episode continuity issues. Nor do I miss 36% of all air-time being ads - with ad breaks strategically getting progressively longer and more frequent the further you were into whatever you were watching - and the pacing of shows being intentionally written to accommodate that.
@@Styxswimmer [continued because apparently there's an actual limit to how long comments can be]
Still on the topic of visual media and social convenience, I don’t miss buying and carrying around film rolls - 24-36 pictures each - and having no idea how your pictures actually looked until weeks later - a process which involved going somewhere and paying for it (and accepting the inevitability that any and all of your more “personal” pictures would be seen by whoever developed the film). I don’t miss not even having the option to take pictures 99% of the time unless you were one of those unusual enthusiasts who carried around a camera everywhere, even in their regular day-to-day life. Nor do I miss that if you really, _really_ wanted to take a picture of something but didn’t know beforehand - aside from buying an entire new camera - your only resort was to find somewhere that sold disposable cameras, buy one, then return to the location of whatever you wanted to take a picture of and just pray that among whatever photos you took with the cheap-ass throwaway camera (with absolutely no adjustable anything) there’d be at least one or two that didn’t _entirely_ suck.
I don’t miss pictures being just one or at best two physical objects which cannot be replicated and could easily be lost forever. And not even being able to show any of them to anyone outside your home unless you were literally carrying them on your person. My seven-years-younger brother has pictures dating back to his childhood that can be easily seen anywhere at any time. Meanwhile, good luck finding anything of me before I was around 12. Those _presumably_ exist - buried somewhere in my parents’ basement, assuming they weren’t at some point lost or inadvertently thrown away alongside various other junk. Sure, the former risks a breach in privacy, but I’ll risk it if it means access to pictures I can actually _show_ people. When I hang out with people in their 20s, and for whatever reason they start showing each other childhood photos, I’d take the possibility of Google or Facebook or whoever potentially having an unnoticeably infinitesimal, indistinguishable few pictures of me among literally billions of pictures of random nameless kids, over the reality of me just not having access to any of those pictures at all.
That’s just a fraction of the stuff that was worse off the top of my head, and only communication/media related. I didn’t even get into how - even as a hetero white guy - I nevertheless do not miss the casual racism and _extreme_ default level of homophobia. Homophobia to the extent that, even if mainstream media had started trying to normalize it (in the backhanded approach of making gay people walking punchlines to laugh at rather than despise), it was still a given that anyone openly gay not only had to deal with over half the population considering them vile and repulsive, but to the point where depending on where they were they’d have to be legitimately concerned about the very real possibility of being outright _murdered._ Oh, and a common attitude towards the AIDS epidemic being “Eh, whatever. They deserve it.” while simultaneously regarding _all_ gay people as essentially lepers who might infect you with their incurable “gay” virus if you got too close. Obviously these issues still exist, but are at least for the most part not as bad as they used to be. For instance, at least trans people are acknowledged as a thing that exists rather than being exclusively categorized as either effeminate sissies, butch women, or deranged, cross-dressing perverts.
Anyway, like any decade, the ‘90s had its ups and downs, much like my childhood therein. And I’m not so blinded by my own “‘90s kid” nostalgia that I’ll just declare the decade I conveniently happened to grow up in “objectively the best decade ever”. Like, seriously, come one, how egotistical can you be to think the time _you_ grew up in was inherently more special than anyone else's? Rotate that ‘9’ 180 degrees and realize you sound no different from boomers going on about how nothing will ever top the irreplicable magic of the ‘60s - its music, culture, atmosphere, Woodstock, etc. Meanwhile, Gen-X’ers _who were still youngish adults and fully able to objectively appreciate everything the ‘90s had to offer_ are still likely to say it wasn’t as cool and nostalgic as the ‘80s. I could give more examples, but I think I’ve made my point.
Holy crap, I didn’t intend this to turn into an entire essay… whoops.
Man this was such a blast to the past. Granted I was a child during the 90s so it's mostly the stuff aimed at children that I remember like the ISpy and EyeWitness books, the colorful ads of junk food, Crash Bandicoot & Spyro commercials, and just the overall "wacky" vibe. Pokemania was wild as well, I still remember seeing Pokemon fliers and Pikachu plastered in a lot of places and when the first movie got it's theatrical release, the hype was insane lol. I'm surprised that you didn't give a mention to the "Jumpstart" Adventure games, I remember being hooked on the 4th grade one but then again, I'm not entirely sure if those games were that popular lol. And oh my god the Encarta series, I had forgotten about those until watching this vid and as soon as you showed the 1995 version, I got a punch in the memories of it lol.
And of course the corporate grunge logos and aesthetic, I honestly miss it.
I have to agree with the others, I do miss these times and I wish that there would be a revival of some of the architect because it feels so much blander now compared to the 90s and even the early 2000s.
If I could go back to the 90’s I’d never return.
dont normally comment but stumbled across this video today and couldn't believe how insightful and fascinating this video was but also how entertaining it was. Also nice to hear an Aussie accent. Subbed.
This video was refreshing to my 90s kid soul. Utopian scholastic and wacky pomo are such fun aesthetics for a kid. I’m from Katy so it was a blast from the past seeing Katy Mills to its former full glory! I used to love going as a little kid and when I learned to drive in the 2010s I would go by myself and enjoy the architecture. I went this winter with my baby and while it’s still a thriving mall, it looks pretty different.
Never seen a video from this creator before but THIS video was epic! You took me back.
This is such a pet peeve of mine, the play station ad showed at 1:23 is a remake from a few years ago by Shy Smith, not from the 90s
Eyewitness and I-Spy were some of my favorite books as a kid! I still have the Eyewitness Tornados and Hurricanes book from my childhood
I loved the Wacky Pomo aesthetic. It was creative and I used to get excited into going into places with that architecture because it looked like it was going to be a fun time.
watching this made me happy and gave me an existential crisis at the same time. I guess I'll get an even bigger existential crisis when I'm watching your 2000s video next, as I'm born in 92 and thus remember the early 2000s even more:P
Speaking of gadgets, the Yak Bak voice recorder toy was peak "wacky pomo" style.
take me back 😭😭😭 so much nostalgia in this video makes me cry and gives me goosebumps.
1:55 this style of photographing people for ads / stock images was really popular at the time: person making a weird facial expression, overhead view with a sort of fisheye effect so the head and shoulders are huge and the feet are tiny
Man I’m loving that more aussies are making content. It’s just so nice hearing someone that sounds like me
Great video! Aw man, that Encarta maze game was fun, probably the best educational game I played (that's right, you heard me, Mario's Time Machine, lol).
I also miss the video game magazine ads, even if many were very edgy or raunchy. If the 80s were Totally Rad, the 90s were XTREME! It also really did feel like we were moving into the future, closing in on the year 2000 (Those colourful Apple Macs are a perfect "Y2K aesthetic") but looking back, it really does look like an older time now.
i love most of the design of the 90s. all thats in this video was great. granted, some as are really strange but interestingly to look at for sure, i miss those times. part of it felt like "do what you want, experiment and lets see what sticks, rather then what the establishment wants you to try"
I like the topics you talk about in your videos, subscribed.
I was born in 93 but definitely remember how it felt in the early 2000s 😌✊🏾
As we live in the 2020s I do hope you could make a video about the 2010s aesthetic as this is where things went massively downhill and became flat or minimalistic before recovering somewhat in this decade.
Sounds too boring though
I REALLY enjoyed watching this! So fascinating to learn about what was trendy in the 90s. I grew up in this era too.. do you intend on doing one of these videos for the 80s too?
You must've been super rich to afford the internet in the 90s
Or your dad was a software/hardware engineer nerd with his hands on some tech
Wacky Postmodern was such a great segue into the 2000s, so many childhood memories unlocked from happier times
You didnt answer much WHY they look like that.
Writing script is hard
It's an open question
I’m sorry man the joke about the sunlight directly into your testicles over the clip of that Hulk took me out. I was laughing so hard I didn’t hear what you were talking about for a full minute.
Great video, I love how you broken down aesthetics from several different industries.
😂 thank you
Love this. Hope to see more content like this. Thanks.
You really hit a nerve for something that I didn't know had a name. L I M I N A L Spaces. Pure Nightmare fuel. Cannot tell you how many late night experiences I've had watching Dead Mall walk throughs with Dan Bell... not understanding the comfort and appeal. Subconscious nostalgia. Great video. Thanks for putting in the time, energy, and effort.
Thanks so much! And yeah, it can be a very weird feeling. I found it so interesting when I first learnt about them.
Nostalgic and educational. Thank you for making this video!
Thanks for watching it!
The 1990's had wonderful and unique aesthetics. Also the 1999 Nissan GTR R34 Skyline is my favorite car of all time. Cool video. ^_^
Cheers, the R34 is sick.
@@ExtraMintyy I love when racing games put the R34 in the game. ^_^
Facts. I love being able to pull out my wrx on older car games and give it a spin hehe
@@ExtraMintyy Wonderful. ^_^
I always preferred the 32s personally
I love seeing these weird ass ads on gaming magazines back in the day :D
wake up hon extramint just dropped a vid
🙏
Great video!!! keep the nostalgia coming.
Nice to hear a Katy Tx shout out. I grew up in katy, about 2 exits away from katy Mills. It definitely got a crazy wacky vibe.
The fact that I wasn't around long enough or able to experience wacky postmodern is something I will never be able to get over personally
The thrilling pages of “Bird” 😂
Naw it was pretty thrilling though
I'm just happy I can name most of what I saw in styles and designs now.
12:46 I grew up around Katy Mills Mall in the early 2000s. The design felt normal to me to the point where other malls felt boring. It was THE place to be at that time
This was the style I grew up with, as I was a teenager throughout the '90s. It really molded how I thought of the world, especially those weird-ass gaming magazine ads like I saw in GamePro. Remember GamePro? Remember when kids used to bring gaming mags to school and look through them at lunch? I do.
I was a bit distracted while watching, but as soon as I heard "TAB X-tra" my mind shot awake and I got this huge nostalgia trip !! I had totally forgot all about that drink, but used to buy that more than normal Coke or Pepsi XD
I think I actually remember that "Lock on target" ad. Used to buy a lot of gaming mags back then.
The overall presentation and interface design of most media has become so sterilized and homogenized. The 90s were colorful and varied. Glad I was a kid/teenager during that time.
That Mike clip at the end had me rolling!! LOL how have I never seen that!
Glad someone caught that hahahahaha
@@ExtraMintyy DUDE LOLMike is just such an honest guy, the punches took the fake out of him. I still love the guy! Much love Brethren! Trump 2024! From Canada!
@@ExtraMintyy Dude I honestly laugh harder the more I hear it! I just can't believe it! Is this AI? hahaha
@@ExtraMintyy the fact he first says rejection but then corrects it to erection... LMFAO! Shoulda left it at rejection! hahaha
Shoutout for bringing up Katy Mills mall. would go there a lot in the 90s and early 2000s. I heart broke when Animagic closed there.
Toyota Supras are so sick. I just love how they look. One time I was driving fast af and safely passed everyone in my 07 Impreza on this mountain pass in Colorado. Out of nowhere this person driving a black 90's Supra just dusts me and passes me. It came from nowhere. I saw that vehicle in town a few more times. It was mint. I really liked that car after seeing it pass me and up close in town. After seeing it a few times, I really started to like Supras. The 90's Supra is one of my favorite cars. I like 90's Toyota style. I had a 92 Toyota 4runner and i will admit one of the reasons I bought it was because I thought it was a pretty truck. I do like going off road, generally like 4x4s and was lookin for a 4x4, but went with a 90's toyota 4runner because of how it looked too. I looked at newer Ford Rangers and Chevy trucks.
Man I miss the nineties and early aughts. I want to have no responsibilities and the wonder that you have when a kid.
Would love to see how aesthetics evolved over time!
Great video
was NOT expecting to hear Katy Mills mentioned, i really do miss the way it used to look :((
bro same. did you grow up in Katy too?
Always love these retro/nostalgia based vids you do! Though I do hope you kinda ease up on the forcibly inserted memes
What I always love about your vids is it's very chill 'documentary style' flow with old commercials and clips. Makes it more down to earth and more of a nice relaxing vid without being too trendy or force trying to be funny like a lot of other channels unfortunately fall into
Still loved the vid though! Looking forward to what you have in store in the future! ♥
I’m subscribing for the nostalgia alone…
Ah, the days of Netscape Navigator at school, and EverQuest at home…!
You guys missed out on the 90’s! I just heard you say you went to school in the 2000’s… I’m sorry to hear that 😅
Seeing how things are now, I am very grateful I was born in 1989. It really was a great time to grow up. The world seemed to have many different creative outlets & things to do. Our environment felt engaging and alive. With places to go, things to do. Things embraced having unique style & creative design. I really miss the Vibe of that Era. Looking back with hindsight it also really felt like media & companies at least respected our intelligence, our time & what kind of experience we would have. It felt like stuff acknowledged us as a customer, a fan, a person. In a hyper capitalistic society, the least they can do is use basic decency to make us feel like they care if we have a good time because without that, without us they cannot succeed. The creativity from that era put lots of effort into ingenuity. It genuinely felt like everything took pride in who could find the most creative and unique ways to do things, design things.
For things to go from this 90's-Y2K era, then shift to this bland, soulless, minimalistic approach feels very Dystopian. I really hope we find a way to reconnect with these core things that we clearly saw positive benefits from. The world really needs this right now. Look how soulless so much has become nowadays? Look at the horrible aesthetics, poor quality & poor creative design in our modern cities. Even our shows, movies, & video games need a revolution. Things have become so bland, bleek, and minimalistic to the point that it doesn't even make since. Most Old house's/building's/únique shop's are gone. Interesting oddities like drive in movie theaters, indoor fun zones, arcade's, magazines that included a demo disc so you can try out game's. You could go to blockbuster/Hollywood video, McDonald's had N64's & crazy fun zones & covered in wacky art all over. We could preview music before buying it, they had an amazing selection of well made kid's toy's, Roller Rink's, Garbage pale kid's card's. You get the point. Bring back Retro-Futurism. Bring back Y2K Vibes. ANYTHING compared to this current Dystopian toxic positivity. Our society feels more lost now then it ever has. Basic living has never been so unaffordable. Society is solely focused on unhealthy capitalistic agendas. Where anything that isn't constantly increasing profits or gaining investors, is a failure and has no value to society..
Our Quality of Life should be better than this. Basic living shouldn't be this unaffordable. People should be able to have fun, dork around, have things that engage them. The list goes on. Bring me back to the 90's.
Right there with ya man, and not in just simply being nostalgic. Yeah, felt like we were moving forward somewhere for a bit in the early 2000's, then we just stagnated at a point and now just revive different eras that came before to give the illusion of "new" or "progressing". Yeah, our tech and phones have advanced (though since much is priced to where the wealthy have access to the newest and best, it doesn't feel like it) but the overall world feels like we missed a chance to be at a different point than we are now overall. The fact people are taking note of where we've come from and where we are now in terms of aesthetics and how the world around us has developed, feels like to me anyway, more people feel something is off with where we're at. And maybe trying to find what feels like we "lost" that we never got to see, I guess.
I think yeah like was mentioned in the cars portion, a lot of the look in media in general was advances in tech that happened very rapidly at the time allowed easier and more capable design and production, and like mentioned in the web portion, the falling cost and ubiquitous access to these things and a venue to share it allowed a lot of people to jump in to trying their hand at design.
As for liminal spaces... I would say a lot of the architecture that makes those up tends to be farrrrr older. Some 90s, but a lot of malls and retail spaces and other spaces most associated with them are more from the 80s and prior back to the early 1900s, then had a pretty good boom in the 90s so everything was kept very clean and shiny and well put together, but have started to show age and decay and lack of maintenance and rushed jobs leaving weird looking spaces you're not supposed to see, but they're there. This might just be the local trend though where I live. A lot of stuff has been since renovated in the 2000s and in some cases early 2010s, but seemingly more to do quick upgrades or improvements to try to keep people interested, or the singular mall that's doing OK having the assets to do so. In most cases, moving to far blander, duller styles.
Overall, I wonder if we'll see maximal design cycle back as maybe a means for companies to start trying to differentiate, or if we're just settled in to minimalism because it's been calculated and determined through focus groups and AI and whatever else that it's just the best way to maintain control over markets and move products and services and designers are just far less interested in and have less liberty to use the existing tech to push more engaging designs. At least in tech, I hope we see at least much more options and cultural interest in personal expression, though. Working and even finding entertainment in modern gray, blocky UIs is honestly pretty depressing, and more and more devices and platforms are constrained to things being certain ways and less ability for a user to tinker because of "security" (but will still collect all your data).
There is a specific artistic design I remember being used on cover art for computer software or just computers in general. 12:50 you can definitely see it here but it uses more warmer colors and honestly, gives this association with coffee. I’m not sure why coffee but if the 90’s barfed on a coffee shop, that’s what it would look like.
Wacky post modern is one of my favorite aesthetics but i didn't know it had a name till now! Its so garish and well, wacky 😂 but it's so nostalgic and nothing hits like it does
@4:36 "online retailers" DUNDER MIFFLIN
These videos answer questions I had as a kid that I didn't know how to ask
i love these styles, thx for your video :)
Love those 90s adds half of them I didn’t get back then as a kid but are definitely unforgettable the 80s and 90s are still the best eras
Another day another W... this video was cool, kind, great, awesome, nice
80’s, 90’s and very early 2000’s were absolutely golden.
Yes It is! Though late 90s and early 00s is the best time to be alive and i definitely wish to be live here. No hated comment please.
The best!
@@karinadelma 9/11, boy bands, reality shows? Early 2000s sucked
@@UltrafineDeluxeHell no. You only say that because you never born early 00s just because you people says 911 and you are gen z.
@@UltrafineDeluxe Hell no. You just say that because you are gen z and you arent around early 00s because you were younger in 2010s.
You really unlocked a memory with those Science books.
That Game Boy ad with the colored tongues was my favorite magazine ad as a kid and I would actually dream about getting all the different colored Game Boys someday which of course, i didn't (didn't even get one of them)
Probably could now if you really wanted to and have a few hundred bucks to spend.
I was worried you were going to say you wanted to collect tongues 😂
There were also a lot of iconic cartoons that came out in the 90's, Cartoon Network for instance had a huge influence on aesthetics from that time as it hosted the most popular cartoons.
Take me back! 😮
Dawg I love how you put in the Katy Mills mall, I’m pretty sure I went there in the 90’s once (I was like 5)
This unlocked a lot of memories for me
The 90s was my most favorite decade 😢. Yes I was doing graphic design stuff in this decade (97-99).
Back during the Corona virus times in 2020 about 7 months into it in September I had went to a mall in a pretty busy area. Shit had 1/3 of the stores open. I wasn't sure if we were ever gonna recover from that shit seeing how empty the mall was. I moved away from there so I haven't been back but I'm sure it's gotten somewhat better being that it's in Vegas. Everyone loves to shop at malls and stores in public while in Vegas. Tons of tourists.
I used to love going to Katy mills as a kid and getting lost in all the colors and the architecture!!!
5:25 GILLETTE SPOTTED 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻
As a car guy I appreciate you talking about this
"Unapologetic experimentation" That's 100% it.
A family friend gave me their Time Blaster alarm clock shown at 12:40. It was by far one of the weirdest but also neatest non 'toy' things I had in the early 2000's