Peak Apple design.

[imacop]

I never owned one of the lampshade iMacs, but I remember seeing them and thinking that this was really awesome. And also that I was a kid and would never afford one, lol.

What's your favorite Apple tech from way back?

 

[PraxHeadroom]

Not a big Apple guy, but I absolutely love the Apple IIGS. It really pisses me off that Apple sidelined it in favor of Macintosh, the objectively inferior product.

 

[eve]

the imac g3 lookz soooo nice with all the colorz, and the powerbook g4 hazz suchhh a good finish and u can actually fix it urself unless most modern apple productz ROFL

 

[Cobalt]

I miss this lil guy more than y'all know. It was perfect for the gym or when you wanted to listen to music in bed without getting distracted like on a Iphone. Plus it was $50 USD max. If it got lost or broken you could just buy a new one without it being much of a hit to your wallet.

 

[Boxerdog]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMLTp7DHbOE

 

[Pangolin]

Wow those old school macs really had a nice style to them that the modern ones seem to lack with their boxy-oblong shape. I would argue its the sterilization of creativity since the passing of Apple's leadership and visionary.

 

[GENOSAD]

the imac g3 lookz soooo nice with all the colorz, and the powerbook g4 hazz suchhh a good finish and u can actually fix it urself unless most modern apple productz ROFL
View attachment 76847

View attachment 76848

Come on, you can't show us the G3 without this sexy angle:

 

[Vaporweeb]

I am becoming increasingly nostalgic for the era of the of the G3, and mid aughts app.e in general.
I wouldn't mind a comeback.

View: https://youtu.be/Q4bG6wewZdM?si=0E9iuG7R5bLsgFVQ

 

[GENOSAD]

I am becoming increasingly nostalgic for the era of the of the G3, and mid aughts app.e in general.
I wouldn't mind a comeback.

View: https://youtu.be/Q4bG6wewZdM?si=0E9iuG7R5bLsgFVQ

Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. Frutiger Aero is having a sort of comeback in terms of appeal (although, I haven't seen anyone actually making that kind of art recently), and I remember hearing a while back that Tim Cook was getting tired of minimalism in design. I don't think that Frutiger Aero specifically will make a full-on comeback, but I do think that the design styles after this current wave of minimalism will have some sort of renaissance.
One thing's for sure, though: Product/graphic design was much more appealing back when it was digital artists who were doing it all, and not when it was "graphic designers."

 

[georgemoody]

the imac g3 lookz soooo nice with all the colorz, and the powerbook g4 hazz suchhh a good finish and u can actually fix it urself unless most modern apple productz ROFL

I prefer the eOne

 

[Remember_Summer_Days]

I hate how minimalistic modern apple looks. It feels so soulless and disingenuous. Like you're trying to cover the quasi lovecrafting dread that comes when you look at the skeleton of a computer with an innocent white tombstone

 

[imacop]

One thing's for sure, though: Product/graphic design was much more appealing back when it was digital artists who were doing it all, and not when it was "graphic designers."

I am a graphic designer and I'll say that a lot of the lack of creativity is client-driven. I've had several cases where I made something interesting and the client asked to go a more conservative direction because they want something that is "clean" and "professional." Usually this means copying their competitor's site, which have never been very creative in my experience.

At the end of the day, they're paying for it so I give them what they want and reserve creativity for home projects (when I can be arsed to work on them). Truly creative corporate sites are almost always media marketing agencies who have a videography department. Sometimes it comes from a company's internal team in the name of rebranding (see Oracle's current design patterns).

Painfullly related: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

 

[GENOSAD]

I am a graphic designer and I'll say that a lot of the lack of creativity is client-driven. I've had several cases where I made something interesting and the client asked to go a more conservative direction because they want something that is "clean" and "professional." Usually this means copying their competitor's site, which have never been very creative in my experience.

At the end of the day, they're paying for it so I give them what they want and reserve creativity for home projects (when I can be arsed to work on them). Truly creative corporate sites are almost always media marketing agencies who have a videography department. Sometimes it comes from a company's internal team in the name of rebranding (see Oracle's current design patterns).

Painfullly related: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

...so what the Hell happened that made graphic design so wild in theY2K period? I know I'm close to basically asking for a history lesson on graphic design as a whole, but I can't help but wonder why designs were more free before gradually succumbing to homogeny - or was it always homogenous, and we're just looking through Nostalgia Lens™?
Supposing things were as different as I'd like to believe, does this mean that the prevalence of the Internet led to the destruction of corporations having unique aesthetics?

 

[vulonkaaz]

...so what the Hell happened that made graphic design so wild in theY2K period? I know I'm close to basically asking for a history lesson on graphic design as a whole, but I can't help but wonder why designs were more free before gradually succumbing to homogeny - or was it always homogenous, and we're just looking through Nostalgia Lens™?
Supposing things were as different as I'd like to believe, does this mean that the prevalence of the Internet led to the destruction of corporations having unique aesthetics?

i'm no graphic designer but i've heard that a lot of jobs like ux designer things like that simply did not exist back then and people who did those kind of things didn't learn how to do it at school or anything

basically the whole industry was new and nobody had set the rules yet i guess

 

[imacop]

...so what the Hell happened that made graphic design so wild in theY2K period?

That is a great question, and one that I'm not entirely sure how to answer. I didn't start working in GD until about 2009 but even then we weren't as templated of a society as we are today.

Perhaps it was the proliferation of templates. Twitter's Bootstrap in the early 2010s homogenized the web with the 12-column grid system and a set of components that many developers were too lazy to customize. It could also be Apple's fault—the introduction of iOS 7 was a bit of a response to the over-glossy skeumorphic designs of the late 2000s, and corporate designers tend to follow the Apple aesthetic (or at least pay attention to it). Microsoft did the same for Windows 8. Everyone was trying to be "new" all the time, and that often involves a rejection of the "old." Swiss/international style ("flat design") is also much easier to render since it's easier to arrange some full-color blocks and thin typography than it is to create your own texture, apply it with intentionality, and "shape" the page as you can in print.

This is starting to roll back some. Web design now has access to the CSS grid and allows us to more closely approximate print design. We'll have to see where the zeitgeist leads now that society is tiring of flat design.

I think you could also partially blame the proliferation of the internet and smaller budgets. Having visual access to what everyone else is doing will inevitably cause incestuous design, especially when budgets get tighter as they did in the 2008 financial crisis. When you have to design things on your own and use books and theory, you're not as likely to produce something everyone else has seen before. Much easier to follow than it is to lead.

These are my off-the-cuff thoughts but its definitely worth a deeper dive. I'd be curious to hear what others think on this topic.

 

[Some_porcupine]

Come on, you can't show us the G3 without this sexy angle:
View attachment 76935View attachment 76936

strip-tease, you can see the internals
bender would be like uhuh

 

[punishedgnome]

My main machine was a PowerMac G4 MDD from around late 2005 to late 2006 or early 2007 and I absolutely adored it. It seemed so different from every machine I owned before than at the time, like a nerdy version of having an affair. It felt like I blew up the relationship I had with PCs since the early 1990s when I started using computers for an illicit relationship with an ethnic woman.

 

[Dark Agent]

I own several Apple products, my favorite is my iBook G3 Clamshell: It has a new battery and SSD + Airport, but i use it rarely. I weekly use my PowerBook G4 15" (with SSD too) and I use daily my iPhone 4 White running 4.3 for listening to music only (28GB+ of music!)

 

[Regal]

I've had several cases where I made something interesting and the client asked to go a more conservative direction because they want something that is "clean" and "professional."

Basically this:

 

[brentw]

It could be Nostalgia because it was the first computer I ever used.
But I am in love with the design of the Apple IIc.