Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?

In this era... design was the product. Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same... Ever since modernism brought industry into design, tastes have cycled ... A forward-looking, high-tech style obsessed with mass commercial appeal ... to one that’s backward-looking, handmade, authenticity-obsessed ... to some new variation on tech-forward mass style...filtered through the reliable desire for the world ... when we were young... back 30 or so years to ... pastel pop of the ’80s and ’90s... the latest iteration ... the “millennial aesthetic”...

hipster aesthetic harked back to a grimy past... lumberjack beards and ’70s rec-room mustaches... something preindustrial or at least pre-internet...

millennial aesthetic ... Propagated by brands ... is a fundamentally commercial aesthetic... Simplicity of design encourages an impression that all errors and artifice have fallen away... thanks to innovation and refinement... the objectively correct way for things to look...

Pink is not the only soft color in the millennial palette... green, often in the form of plant life ... wholesome appeal... seafoam, terra-cotta, lavender, and (especially) ocher... colors that soothe ... All that time spent staring into a glowing screen makes ... something literally easier on the eye — enticing... the opposite of glare...

pink that’s sweet even though it knows better... a constantly self-conscious sensibility... of someone who is always performing, always watching themselves be watched...soft in its colors and in its lines, curved and unthreatening... beveled, as are ... logos for apps ... smoothly rounded edges... Minimalism... demands severity, and the millennial aesthetic has none...

A voice of chatty positivity... fun typography... text is casual, friendly, and impersonal — the verbal equivalent of a beveled edge...the visual experience of a phone favors images...as legible as possible as quickly as possible... millennial branding — clean typefaces, white space — are less a matter of taste than a concession to this fact... For an unknown start-up ... design performs the work of salespeople and stores... the hook... the promise of legitimacy...

mid-century plastic ... bright surfaces and new conveniences presented an appealing alternative to existential dread. Looking back, their inadequacy is obvious... Design created an astonishing amount of value in the last ten years, and increasingly that value looks ephemeral.