Retro design is a timeless aesthetic that takes us on a journey back to past eras. It is a good medium for delivering a nostalgic vibe to your brand identity or artistic choices. However, to fully evoke this artistic style, you need to understand the key elements of retro design.
Let’s find out the essential elements of this style you must know!
10 Key Elements of Retro Design for a Nostalgia Vibe
Since it deals with bygone eras, retro design may have diverse variations from each decade. Thus, these key elements will help you incorporate retro style better.
1. Understanding the Era
There’s no specific time of retro design referred to. It can include styles from the 19th and 20th century. To be more specific, retro design often focuses on the design styles of the 20s to the 80s.
For this reason, it’s crucial to understand the era you want to adopt in your design since each era has a distinctive style. For example, art style during the World War tended to be geometrical with contrasting colors while the post-World War had more fluid and colorful designs.
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2. The Specific Styles of Each Era
As mentioned earlier, different periods often give rise to distinct art styles. Therefore, Selecting a certain style to guide your design choices is crucial, ensuring that it consistently reflects the characteristics of the time.
Below are some examples of art styles from different periods to consider.
- Art Deco: Originally popular in the 1920s and 1930s, this art movement blended vivid colors with geometric and architectural shapes.
- Pop art: In the 1950s and 1960s, this art style became increasingly vibrant and daring, reflecting the mood of American popular culture.
- Psychedelic art: The 1960s and 1970s art movement combined hallucination and surrealism to create a whimsical, dreamlike aesthetic.
- 80s neon art: In the 1980s, neon texts and bold, funky designs were a trademark of art design, creating an upbeat and optimistic mood.
3. Color Choices
Retro aesthetics are often characterized by burnt orange, avocado green, mustard yellow, and vibrant teal. Additionally, the key elements of retro design often include contrasting color combinations. As a result, these striking color combos contribute to a lively, enjoyable mood, and arouse feelings of nostalgia.
4. Shapes and Patterns
The retro art style has distinct shapes and patterns. Commonly, it features geometrical designs, such as clean lines, rectangular, or even polka dots, to evoke a sense of structure and order while still appearing lively and exciting.
Another example is the checkerboard design. This pattern was widely recognized throughout the 1950s and 1960s for creating intricate visual structures and a sense of depth.
5. Textures and Gradients
Texture not only improves visual appearance but also contributes to the nostalgic mood of retro design. This one of the key elements of retro design plays a crucial role in evoking the feel of a specific era.
For example, Art Deco in the ‘40s is associated with a rigid, polished metallic texture while Psychedelic art in the following ‘60s was more fluid and colorful.
Furthermore, certain effects and gradients were dominant in design from the ‘70s to ‘90s, such as neon light, VHS, and pixelated effects.
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6. Retro Typography
Typography is also crucial in building up and promoting a retro vibe. While there is no certain ruling, you can refer to fonts instilling geometric and bold shapes, dense stroke contrast, with vivid colors. Some of them also have typical swashes, cursive, or swirl. Those are typical characteristics of retro typography.
7. Images and Motifs
Images are one of the key elements of retro design since they capture the essence of a specific era. For example, the 1980s frequently used tropical themes like beaches and palm trees, whereas earlier designs from the 1950s tended to use hand-drawn, blurry graphics.
Therefore, incorporating the proper images can improve your retro style and transport readers to the past.
8. Vintage Imagery and Culture Reference
The whole point of making retro design is creating an imagery of the past. For that reason, it is perfectly okay to reference some iconic pop cultures from the specific era. You can think of old movie posters, vinyl albums, or even arcade games.
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9. Details and Craftmanship
Unlike the minimalist trends of today, vintage style focuses on rich details and artistry. Its designs often incorporate extravagant decorations and accessories, showing an attention to craftsmanship and complexity.
10. Contemporary Elements Combination
Although retro design focuses on the past, incorporating modern elements will improve the experience. This fusion allows audiences to connect with cultures and eras they’ve never personally experienced, promoting a sense of familiarity and connection through a blend of the old and new.
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Revive the Spirit of Bygone Eras with These Retro Design Elements!
Embracing the key elements of retro design helps give your creative projects depth and authenticity. These design choices stimulate a sense of nostalgia and moreover, make any project appear timeless and captivating.
To embrace retro design, selecting the right graphic assets can elevate the mood. Movink Graphic is the ideal place to find top-notch, retro-inspired visuals.
With its wide collections of premium vintage graphic assets, you can present a winning retro mood for your branding or product design. On top of that, if you have something unique in mind, the platform also offers custom asset creation to match your exact needs. Promptly recreate vintage vibes with Movink Graphic!