I've noticed that many of the websites at Neocities (which tend to be people's personal sites) are retro in style. You'll see things like pixel graphics, bright saturated colors, hand drawn art, and a very informal look and feel. These sites are so different from corporate and ecommerce sites elsewhere on the internet.
It's nice because although the look is retro, the info on the sites and the energy there gives a very young look. It's nice. Probably, if I hadn't wandered over to Neocities I wouldn't have seen this particular style. A lot of the personal sites have 88x31 buttons somewhere on it. Not on the main home page usually, but on the "about me" page. People are using these to promote causes/software/things they care about. Some people are making collections of these buttons to have as many as possible, even if they don't necessarily identify with the button's point of view.
Seeing retro style with a ton of energy is kind of an interesting mix. I'm wondering if this is a style that will ever make its way into mainstream corporate sites. Obviously not as its main design, but I'm wondering if we'll see accents that add a young energetic vibe to a corporate site instead of a lot of the "millenial-style" design trends of gold accents, marble, etc that beset so many of the e-commerce sites and make them look the same.
I'm also wondering if Neocities is the main place where retro design rules right now. Or if there are other spaces on the internet I'm not aware of which have that too. It's nice in the sense that it feels untouched by AI and by "big tech", which again can make everything look too same-ish.
This brings me to another point to ponder: is big tech trying very hard with their design to avoid looking "big tech"-ish? If so, they probably pay their designers a ton to do that (or they use AI and destroy the environment etc etc to do it). Either way, they probably sink a lot of resources into trying to look unique and different - and fail. Whereas individual people on Neocities are managing with relative ease to create something wonderful and unique that really sets them apart.
Loading...