Brent David Freaney, founder of the design studio Special Offer and the architect of Charli XCX’s “Brat” album art, was never a fan of the uniformity of the mid-2010s. Brands took visual cues from tech platforms, resulting in a look that was streamlined but bloodless.
“I always use the term ‘the Sweetgreenificiation of Manhattan,’” he said. “Everything was designed to look like an app.”
In response, companies — especially those courting Gen Z — have spent the past several years trying to make themselves appear louder and more irreverent, said Elizabeth Goodspeed, a graphic designer and adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.
They have clustered around a handful of similar tropes. The squishy typography, Goodspeed says, calls back to the candy and drink packaging of the 1970s. “Some feel like typical modernist sans-serifs inflated with a bit too much air, while others are more like a traditional script that’s been sitting out too long on a hot day,” she wrote in 2022 in an early reflection on the trend.
She pointed to the logo of Skims, Kim Kardashian’s shapewear company, and the packaging of Kyoot chocolate bars. “You don’t want to do the sans-serif anymore, but you also can’t do a script, because that just does not hold up well when it has to be shrunk down to an icon on Instagram,” she said.
Today’s Gen Z designs may be partly a product of the modern web, but they also gaze back wistfully at the internet of the 1990s and early 2000s, which young people barely glimpsed before it disappeared.
Their nostalgia has taken the form of spinning GIFs, novelty cursors and Windows XP graphics — a hodgepodge of anachronistic elements that Goodspeed describes as “Geocities Neue,” after the early web-hosting service. (See also: the cover of “My First Book” by Honor Levy; promotional artwork for the singer-songwriter Audrey Hobert; websites for clothing brands like Praying and Online Ceramics.)
“This is how you remember the internet looking before everything was polished, and 3-D and incredibly smooth,” Aitor, 23, said.
The palette is searingly anti-pastel, made up of shades like sour lemon-lime, hyperlink blue and pinks that might have tempted the Pop artist Peter Max. All that saturation is no coincidence, said Freaney, who said he sifted through 500 shades to find “Brat” green.
