Frutiger’s Frankenstein: Revive Tech Maximalism

There was a time before American electronic technology was sleek, cool and minimalistic. In the past, electronics were boldly colored and dynamically designed, displaying visually the fun that comes with surfing the web.

Slowly, many are forgetting the internet is a marvel of human achievement, a public-access space for community, learning and enjoyment. 

The monotony minimalism brings to the internet is malignant and tech corporation stylings are in desperate need of a remodel. Perhaps these companies can do with looking back to a time of relative internet innocence — the 2000s.

The dominant technological corporate aesthetic of this epoch fell under the Frutiger Family, an umbrella term for a group of related design styles mainly used from the early 2000s to the mid 2010s. The two main movements under the Frutiger Family are Frutiger Aero, spanning from about 2001 to 2012, and Frutiger Metro, spanning from about 2004 to 2013, according to Dazed.

Frutiger Aero was the first defining aesthetic of the family to reach popular culture through the interface designs of Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.0, and was then adapted by many decade-defining technologies such as the iPod, the first iPhone, the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360. 

The characteristics of Frutiger Aero were its use of bold colors, glossy textures, vast flat backgrounds, lens flares, dynamic patterns, naturalistic subject matter, Frutiger fonts and 3D photorealistic design components — a stark difference from today’s sleek lines and minimalist logos.

The dreamlike bliss and sparks of inspiration embedded into Frutiger Aero made the consumer public share in the industry’s excitement for technological progress. There was a palpable buzz around the adolescence of the internet and its powerful use for the public in the designs alone.

Following Aero was Frutiger Metro with its sleek, 2D vector designs. Key characteristics of the Metro style are its focus on flat maximalist patterns and “bloom” elements, designs with a dynamic wave shape, creating an illusion of objects blooming from behind the focal point of the work.

Despite the large amounts of visual interest that popularized these design movements, they died out nearly unanimously in mainstream tech by the mid 2010s.

Following the Frutiger Aero and Metro, the Flat Design was introduced, developing into the contemporary design phase of Corporate Memphis. These styles are both characterized by their minimalistic approach to tech branding, valuing functionality over style and excitement with less variation in visual interpretations and color palettes.

Now with minimalistic corporate styles being in use with all tech, marketing sleekness and coolness over approachability, there’s a deprivation of human spirit in our devices. There used to be an excitement around being online, where navigating the internet felt more like an earned privilege than a fact of modern society. 

With the end of Frutiger Aero, the minimalist aesthetic began to represent the shift from tech as a luxury to a tool. Now to the modern mind, creating and selling laptops with bright colors, maximalist bubbly patterns and frilly designs not only seems unmarketable, but absurd. It would be like putting rhinestones on a power drill — what’s the point?

But the point isn’t just the functionality of technology — it’s the approachability and the feeling one gets when they interact with it. Modern technology, like the Macbook Pro or the Samsung Galaxy S24 5G, lacks all the unique human touches that gave Frutiger Aero and other aesthetics their flair. 

In the 2000s, it was obvious a human labored to design a device, its user interface or the artwork used throughout the appliance. Now, just a few decades later, there isn’t the same certainty there’s a real person behind any part of tech.

Minimalism has locked Americans into believing the internet and electronic technology is a boring and obsolete fact of life rather than a means for radical communal connection. Bringing back a humanist approach to design could help make this once again evident to all. 

But the cord isn’t cut on Frutiger Aero and Metro just yet. There’s a small but mighty revival in some online communities, like TikTok and Reddit, about acknowledging and appreciating the fun Aero and Metro brought to technology as a whole. 

It’s argued minimalism is the design style of the future and those who reminisce on past style movements are lost in nostalgia. Yet the code to unlocking a future where excitement for connection is visually celebrated through all things, even technology, might be hiding in plain, retrospective sight.