Design & Nostalgia.

Greek/Roman architecture surrounds us—the Greek Parthenon, the Roman Pantheon and all of their imitators like Napoleons’ La Madeleine. In fact, in the US most government buildings are based on the Romans from Capitol Hill to local libraries and universities. All of them are inaccurate—imperfect copies.

The Parthenon would have originally been incredibly colourful. It would have been adorned in reds, blues and golds. The white Elgin Marbles would have been painted to match skin tone. We have this idea of bare, white marble buildings and statues being beautiful because to us history has made it beautiful. Here’s the British Museum briefly explaining why.

This collective memory loss is true of our buildings and our sculpture. How often have you seen great men of the past depicted as heads in white marble staring out glassily through empty eyes filled with knowledge? Caesar, Darwin, Beethoven, all white marbles with empty, omniscient eyes staring back.

You won’t be surprised to learn this too is an imperfect copy. The Greek and Roman statues we imitated weren’t busts but often pieces from full-body statues, either broken or waiting to be inserted into an existing body. They were later discovered as fragments and mounted on plinths. We inadvertently created a new class of sculpture.

© Vinzenz Brinkmann

These are two busts of the Emperor Caligula. One as we would expect it in white marble and the second as how the ancients would have decorated it. The addition of paint pushes the statue towards uncanny valley. This colour scheme isn't even the gaudiest example. The statue’s eerie, all-knowing eyes suddenly look cheap and fake once painted.

We shouldn’t lament these copies for not being exact. This is instead a lesson in history. No matter how hard we try to recreate an aesthetic we inadvertently create something new—a new art movement, a new sculpture, even a new kind of website.

3.0 Nostalgia as Tool

Bloomberg Businessweek

If you’re into comics you may have heard of Alan Moore, and if not you’ve at least seen the Guy Fawkes mask he popularised. One of his most famous comics “Watchmen” is interspersed with fake notes typed by his future dystopian villain (slight spoilers). This antagonist runs a huge corporation that—among other things—sells perfume.

In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in the fantasies of the future or in the modified visions of a half-imagined past.

—Watchmen

This is taken from one of those notes by the villain. It’s a comment on the recent ad for their perfume “Nostalgia”. It alludes to Moore’s belief in nostalgia as a tool. It can be used to draw inspiration from the past, to calm the masses, to sell.

Almost everything we are sold is presented to us as new. A solution to all our ails if only we’ll buy it, read it, eat it. Nostalgia is the opposite of new. Instead of creating a longing for the future you create a longing for the past, a heartache. Nostalgia is powerful.

What once were technological restrictions became tools of nostalgia. The early web was restricted in size, in fonts, in colours, in layouts, but once a restriction is lifted it becomes a choice. GIFs were an early web animation method with many shortcomings—a limited colour palette, large file sizes and pixellation. Now a GIF is a deliberate stylistic decision—a tool of nostalgia. Now we pixelate images, videos and games not because of hardware or bandwidth but to be emotive of the past.

Bloomberg uses the tool of nostalgia well. Their site-wide redesign as well as their many special features delicately balance ‘90s computing reminiscences with usability. To an otherwise modern site they’ve added subtle references to the early web. They use deliberately primitive GIFs showing a ‘90s era desktop on the 404 page; text is cropped uncomfortably tight on headlines, harking back to the poor typesetting of early sites; and their signature blue is nearly rgb(0,0,255) or the default blue of the early web (and the blue used in this article). Their readers remember dial-up, they remember Netscape, they remember Windows 95. Small , stylistic decisions mount to form a connection with their readers.

More recently, The Outline has launched with a design full of references to the past. This is a trend-heavy approach that may date faster but it’s visually striking and emotive. Interestingly, The Outline rather than referencing ‘90s computing has opted to reminiscence about other elements of the era. The homepage background conjures images of tie-dye, they use the decade’s omnipresent wavy-line pattern; and their Killer Acid illustrations would look right at home in a ‘90s skate shop. Our nostalgia, our inspiration, our references should not just be restricted to the web but also to culture as a whole—music, art, film, fashion. The deeper and wider our sources of inspiration the more coherent a whole we can create.

Web design is in it’s infancy but we already have a collective past. It’s crude, it’s limited by the technology of it’s time but to those who grew up with it it has meaning. Some companies are already referencing it beautifully—Bloomberg, Acronym, The Intercept. I’m not arguing for us to dump all javascript libraries and build Brutalist sites entirely from HTML but we can do better. Ignore sample groups, ignore market research, take a risk, make something you’re passionate about with the tools you have. Inspire the next generation’s nostalgia.