Retro-futurism

Two dates are present in every retro-futurist image. The one in the story is ahead of us, with rockets, colonies, thinking machines, and monorails. The one in the drawing is behind us, and it is given away by everything the artist could not help: the palette, the letterforms, the materials, and above all the interfaces, which are always made of whatever control hardware was impressive at the time. Dials, not touchscreens. Punched tape, not search. The pleasure of the style is that gap, and the melancholy of it is knowing which predictions landed and which did not.

Each decade left its own version, and the parts list changes completely between them while the move stays the same. The 1930s built the future out of streamline moderne: teardrop curves, chrome speed lines, and Art Deco lettering on a rocket. The 1950s built it out of the atom: starbursts, ringed planets, boomerang shapes, turquoise and coral, and the optimism of a World’s Fair. William Gibson gave that pulp strain a name in 1981, raygun gothic, in a story about being haunted by a future that never arrived, and the American version of the domestic side of it was sold at the time as Populuxe. The 1970s put it in beige plastic, and the 1980s put it in neon.

Those last two are the branches on this site. Cassette futurism is the late 1970s and early 1980s version, where tomorrow is made of putty coloured consoles, paddle switches, and small amber tubes, worn and repaired and industrial. Synthwave is the mid 1980s version, where tomorrow is a neon grid, a chrome title, and a sunset over a coastal road at speed. Steampunk runs the same operation on the nineteenth century, imagining a future of brass, gauges, and steam that the Victorians might have drawn. All of them share the one gesture: render the future through an older decade’s eyes, and let the anachronism do the work.

For interface work the register carries an argument, not just a texture. A product dressed this way is claiming to be tactile, optimistic, or lived in, and readers will take the claim literally, so it fits games, events, music, and hardware tools far better than anything a person has to use under pressure. Keep the costume where it is looked at, in the hero, the empty state, and the illustration, and set the working parts in ordinary type on an ordinary surface. Period type is the usual failure: display faces from the 1930s and bitmap faces from the 1970s were drawn for signs and small screens respectively, and neither will carry a paragraph. And the honest version of the style acknowledges its own date, because a future imagined in 1957 is a historical document, not a plan.