one bite is biting. two bites is eating

Cari and its eight team members are quietly some of the most influential archivists online. One of Sofi Xian’s coinages is Frutiger Aero, a branch of Futurist design that fixated around glossy textures, cloudy skies, tropical fish, water and bubbles – seen in Windows XP and late 2000s user interfaces. Conversely, preceding aesthetics such as Utopian Scholastic, coined by Evan Collins, has a thematology of dinosaurs, solar system facts, the human body and contemporary history, all seen in late 90s education texts – although the two aesthetics seem very different, they’re genetically related and serve as springboards into eccentric family trees of design trends. Just a little time spent on CARI, Aesthetics Wikia or Evan’s prolific Are.na will have you reeling from information overload.

Look around and ask yourself: why is that there? Why does it look that way? What kind of bigger story is this fitting into? Where did it come from and where will it go? Everything is embedded in a larger context. Consumer aesthetics offer an expansive study for our human condition – and Cari presents the information in an unbiased, non-judgmental and educational fashion. Design trends – as maximalist visual commentaries on the way we think, feel and accessorise – become a picture you can infinitely zoom into. They become an opportunity to find new documents hidden within – artefacts that simultaneously light both paths to the past and the future.

The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute proves that subcultures are thriving more than ever - It’s Nice That Magazine, 2025