retro

A three column page with header and footer where the centre column is fluid, the two side columns are fixed, and all three appear equal height.

Laying a page out in nested tables because the renderer has no box model worth trusting, which is how mail is still built and how the web was built before CSS.

A 2020s rave revival style of chrome and liquid 3D objects, warped and stretched lettering, clashing saturated colour on near black, smileys, globes, and wireframe motifs.

A style that pictures technology through the African diaspora, combining cosmic imagery, textile and mask pattern, gold and indigo, and geometric ornament used structurally.

Apple's early Mac OS X look of glossy blue gel buttons, pinstripes, gumdrop window controls, and a pulsing default button.

A 1920s luxury style of strict symmetry, stepped and fanned geometry, strong vertical emphasis, metallic gold on deep colour, and high contrast display capitals.

A turn of the century style of whiplash curves, botanical line ornament, muted jewel tones, and lettering drawn to fit the frame rather than set on a grid.

A style reduced to primary red, yellow, and blue on off-white, elementary circles, triangles, and squares, and undecorated sans serif type.

A raw style that leaves the document showing: system or monospace type, default link blue, hard borders, and no decoration beyond structure.

The analog future of late 1970s science fiction: beige and putty plastic, chunky toggles and rocker switches, amber or green CRT readouts, and monochrome bitmap type.

A 1920s poster language of diagonal bars and blocks, red and black on off-white, photomontage, and heavy sans capitals set on a strong angle.

A dystopian sci-fi interface style: near-black surfaces, one or two toxic neon accents, monospace all-caps labels, clipped corners, and scanline or glitch noise laid over the top.

A style built only from black rules, rectangular fields, and the three primaries on white, arranged asymmetrically with no curves and no diagonals.

Columns of glyphs falling and trailing away, green on black, the Matrix screen quoted so often that it now reads as shorthand for a computer thinking.

The mid 2000s look of glossy gradients, bubbles, water, bright skies, and clean humanist type, named after the typeface and Windows Aero.

The flat vector cousin of Frutiger Aero: gradient color blocks, bloom and glow, silhouetted figures, swooshes and abstract flourishes, without the glossy water and grass.

A look that fakes signal failure with colour channel offset, torn scan bands, and jitter, used for emphasis or as a whole visual identity.

A 1990s style of torn and photocopied texture, overlapped and cut type, off-grid layout, and dirty muted colour, where legibility is traded for emotional pitch.

The 1980s Memphis Group look of clashing pastels, squiggles, confetti dots, and terrazzo shapes scattered across a layout.

Microsoft's typography led design language of flat coloured tiles, large light headings, and motion used in place of chrome, shadow, and texture.

A 1950s and 60s style of muted mustard, teal, and burnt orange, tapered organic shapes, textured paper grounds, and friendly geometric sans type.

A loud style built from thick black outlines, saturated flat color, square corners, and hard offset shadows with zero blur.

The postmodern break from Swiss order: stair-stepped rules, diagonal and letter-spaced type, weights mixed inside a word, and text reversed out of bars.

An interface drawn on a visible pixel grid, with bitmap type, hard aliased edges, and icons kept at their original low resolution.

A comic and advertising style of flat primary color, heavy black outlines, printed dot shading, speech balloons, and bold condensed capitals.

A 1960s poster style of vibrating complementary color, warped and interlocking lettering that fills its own shape, kaleidoscopic symmetry, and liquid distortion.

A treatment that makes digital imagery look shot on film, adding grain, halation, light leaks, faded contrast, dust, and sometimes a corner date stamp.

A style that rebuilds the early desktop web on purpose: beveled window chrome, pixel and system type, garish color, and animated banners.

A style that pictures the future the way an earlier decade pictured it, so the technology shown is advanced but the type, color, and hardware belong to the past.

A print-inspired look of two or three flat spot colors that misregister slightly and show grain, imitating a riso duplicator.

A Victorian industrial style of brass, riveted plate, wood, and leather, with gauges, cogs, and valve controls standing in for ordinary interface widgets.

The Swiss modernist system of a strict grid, flush left sans serif type, asymmetric layout, and objective photography, still the base of clean UI layout.

A neon 1980s look built on sunset gradients, glowing perspective grids, and chrome type, close to vaporwave but sincere rather than ironic.

A look borrowed from the command line: monospace type on a fixed character grid, a block cursor, and green or amber text on black.

A retro internet look of magenta and cyan gradients, grid horizons, Japanese type, statuary, and 90s desktop chrome used ironically.

The amateur homepage look of the GeoCities era: tiled backgrounds, sparkle GIFs, under construction signs, midi music, and hit counters.

A look that imitates a worn videotape: tracking bands, smeared color bleeding past edges, interlace comb artifacts, and burned-in timecode or REC overlays.

The Windows Vista and 7 look built on translucent glass window frames, soft outer glows, reflections, and animated window transitions.

The turn of the millennium look of chrome type, bubble shapes, translucent plastic, and lens flares, revived as a web and app style.

A self-playing loop an idle screen falls into to demonstrate itself, inherited from arcade cabinets and reused by kiosks and product demos.

Text or logos that scroll continuously across a strip, either as a decorative ticker or because a label is too long for its box.

A digit or letter changing by flipping through every character between the old value and the new one, imitating the mechanical boards of airports and flip clocks.

Light and dark edges drawn along a shape's border so it reads as raised or carved, the depth trick behind classic desktop buttons.

A wet plastic finish made from a light gradient across the top half of a control, a highlight arc, and a darker lower half.

Rendering tone as a grid of dots that vary in size, borrowed from print and used to give flat interface art a comic or newsprint feel.

A text effect that fakes stamping into the surface, using a one pixel light shadow below the glyphs and a slightly darker fill above it.

A flat era decoration where an icon casts a single hard shadow at 45 degrees that runs far past the shape before fading out.

A saturated colour surrounded by layered soft shadows of the same hue, so type or a border reads as a lit tube against a dark surface.

Thin repeating dark lines laid over an interface to imitate the raster of a cathode ray tube screen, often with a slight curve and flicker.

A background pattern of small irregular chips scattered on a plain field, copied from poured stone flooring and used flat and multicolored behind interface content.