civicconsumerdesign

With any aesthetic, there is also the chance of someone missing it as soon as it goes away. As humans we are creatures that find comfort in the familiar while mourning what we have missed out on. For its users, its ten years of existence will be inextricable from the cultural memory of 2015 to 2025. The youth that is now growing up around Italian Brainrot and Labubu toys, surrounded by the subliminal dominance of green (of Dubai chocolate, of matcha, of Charlie XCX’s Brat), the deluge of newborn popular AI technology, will feel they have just escaped Windows 10. In parts of the world where Microsoft is most swift with its purging of the Windows 10 order, Windows 10 will become an ambient, embedded memory, a lost, elapsed moment. Its glimpses will emerge in malfunctioning public devices that have not been updated. Moreover, it will become a reminder of a bygone time where computers gave a semblance of communication with other humans rather than infinite scrolls, slop and chatbots. For all the griping about the soullessness of flat design, Windows 10—and Corporate Memphis and Hexatron and Internet Awesomesauce and whatever other as-yet uncategorised aesthetic it may be contextualised as—will be seen as the halcyon days before computers were given not a soul but an unwanted ‘intelligence’. What if we kept demanding something-ness and realized we preferred nothingness?

Letraset Instant Lettering

In the 1960s, putting together and printing a graphic product still required hugely expensive machines and the expertise of graphic designers and typographers. Transfers, meanwhile, only cost a few pence and did not require great technical skills to use. They were the first DIY graphic composition technology and, unsurprisingly, they were enormously successful... The ‘anarchic’, low-cost and unmediated nature of transfers made them very popular among the era’s counterculture movements. In some cases, employing a publisher or professional graphic designer would have increased the risk of whatever the creator had in mind being censored or not produced at all.

Artcore 

Compilation, React, UK, April  18, 1995

Cover Art by Phil Wolstenholme

Design by The Designers Republic