"Climate Change" ... hmm... man-made, I presume? Who is being naive? [Real] science much? How much did the WEF pay you to slip that in?! Pathetic. "X"er.
Hey JJ just wanted to say that Bugs Life is not forgotten. Youre 40 so you missed the magic. Im 30 and bugs life is considered a holy grail to people my age. Go ask 30 year olds what they think of bugs life you might be surprised. Also, it wasnt just the graphics, it was the political messaging behind it that inspired us as well.
What’s this lost future? Would we have floating cars and fish tanks suspended mid air right now if society had kept using a certain design theme? It’s just an art style bro there’s nothing stopping you from creating work in the style. There’s nothing stopping other people from not caring either.
As an older Gen Z, I definitely grew up seeing this aesthetic in ads, textbooks, etc., often with the appeal of cool high-tech, eco-friendly design choices. Seeing this aesthetic categorized to me isn't gatekeeping, but rather finally having a way to describe this "vibe". I know people don't seem to like it, but this categorization trend is kind of an interesting way of seeing just how creative humanity has become that we have this many aesthetics, genres, -cores, etc. and can have so many people enjoy them.
@@jumpvelocity3953 But why? You hear or see a new thing, you learn the term for it, and you go about your day. New term you've never heard before? Learn what it means, go about your life. Idk how it seems pretentious when everyone learns new words all the time, it's just how language and culture works.
Pretty much sums up how art movements are named. Artists don't really have much of a say on it. Usually, it's the art critics that come up with a name, sometimes decades down the road to better categorize it for academia. Internet just happened to breed tons of niche micro-movements in art in design, so Gen-Z are now stepping up to categorize them.
I dont know how he can say that 80s and 90s nostalgia has never been outright politicized. Vaporwave itself, the whole genre, started as a criticism of hyper consumerism
Exactly what I was thinking. Every criticism that he offers can be applied to Vaporwave. I have yet to hear him make the same complaints about Vaporwave, an aesthetic that he obviously feels strongly for. Vaporwave started out as a form of cultural critique and was influenced by Mark Fisher and Derrida's concepts of hauntology and lost futures. Also, he ignores the fact that corporate marketing teams and designers don't create designs without an embedded message. Frutiger Aero was meant to calm people's anxieties about artificiality and big tech's rise to power. It was geared toward older people who were ambivalent about new technology more so than younger demographic groups. Design is visual marketing and if it doesn't have some kind of call-to-action or promise of utopia, it won't resonate with the public. Design is a mirror of the desires of the public that it's catered to, which makes it's inherently political, even if that political message isn't consciously realized. Also, all someone needs to do is google Vaporwave subgenres to see how many inane subcategories the aesthetic has. The need to categorize everything into smaller and smaller units started with Millennials and it has more to do with the way search algorithms function than some flaw in the mindset of a certain generation. I'm not even a Zoomer but I feel the need to defend them when people start doing this kind of thing to them. As a Millennial, I'm acutely aware of being blamed for all the things that have happened as the result of the actions of previous generations by people from those very same generational groups. The Boomers did it us and now we're starting to do it to the new guys on the scene. I think this is a kind of reaction to a feeling of anxiety people feel when they realize they're not young anymore. We become nostalgic and talk about how everything was soooo much better when we were the newer, younger and cooler generation. This need to feel that the grass was always greener 20 years ago is a "we" problem, not a "them" problem. Let's all try to break the cycle and not become just like the Boomers. I have no problem with nostalgia, as long was we appreciate it for what it is and realize it's not an accurate picture of the past. Nostalgia is not reality, it's heavily biased and you can be aware of that fact and still enjoy it.
@@PhilEdwardsInc I think that description is on the right track & shows good foundational understanding, but I'd add that Gen Z grew up immediately after Pokémania (Mid '00's to Mid '10's). I remember a few kids playing with the trading cards at school once in a while, a bunch of kids played the games & I think most of us saw the anime, but it wasn't as much of a defining thing as it was for millennial kids. For Gen Z TV nostalgia (at least in the US), SpongeBob is easily the most impactful show of the 00's, either Adventure Time or Phineas & Ferb were the biggest in the early 10's, although there's a lot of strong contenders from all 3 big kids networks (Nick, Disney, CN) & their spinoff channels. Dreamworks & Pixar easily ruled theatrical animation. PBS is an honourable mention though. For Games, there were 2 kinds of kids. Kids that got caught up in the console war between Xbox & PlayStation & got games that were probably too mature & the kids that played it safe with Nintendo systems (particularly Wii & DS). Browser games are an honourable mention too, great time-wasters in Computer class & probably the one type of game to unify all of Gen Z. For Pokémon-type IPs specifically, I might just be tired, but I can't think of a super toyetic franchise that was unique to gen Z kids (Beyblade, Yu-gi-oh, & Bakugan were at least somewhat big, but mostly peaked in the early 00's when Gen Z was too young to engage with them that much yet). When it comes to Gen Z food the only thing that immediately comes to mind is Caprisun & Lunchables (which both overlap w/ younger millennials as well), although there has to be more that I can't think of right now. For traditional media in general, it should be fairly simple to look up the most popular/most played games, movies, songs, &c of the 00's & 10's, which Gen Z kids would've grown up with, seen parodies/commentary about on TV or online & so on, which form our cultural frame of reference. But you also have to account for online media & internet culture/subcultures of the time which are much more difficult to generalize or track down. There's probably a bunch of subreddits & stuff you can go to for more engaging/insightful/personal discussion about this. I'm running out of steam at this point, so I'll leave it here.
@@zanzamanzaanza5981 For toys, maybe LPS? Sure, it was originally marketed to young girls, but it seriously became a cultural phenomenon on TH-cam- one that we haven't really seen replicated in the same way, though that might just be my nostalgia talking lol
@@PhilEdwardsInc Hey Phil, big fan of the videos! As a zillenial (born in '99) nerd, I can say that a lot of my nostalgia is tied to that big wave of early CGI, around when things like "jimmy neutron" and the original playstation were coming out. It's very much abstract art, but if you want to check out a modern online series that plays heavy on Gen Z nostalgia, I'd recommend looking up "ENA".
this is very weird? born in 96, elder gen z, and have clear memories of this style on my school computers and in tv commercials. there is also a clear reason this style is emotionally impactful for us growing up. it's how we saw the future. not sure what you're trying to accomplish with this gatekeepy video.
this is the exact opposite of gatekeeping. nowhere did he say that you can't enjoy this aesthetic, but trying to confine it into a narrow sensibility with strict criteria is killing what makes it fun in the first place. to say nothing of people trying to attach political meanings where there are none
wait yall genuinely looked at that as a kid and thought, “ah this is what the future looks like”? 😭 i thought we all just liked it because it was pretty to look at
If you were born in 1996 you are not gen z you're a millennial, defined as someone who was a child during the turn of the millennium. If you did not exist during the year 2000 you're gen z. A generation is 20 years.
yea this tyle bring back good memories but i have to be honest when it comes to music the 2000s was just bad and nothing like the fruiter areo music and the 2000s were very emo and only when looking back later on do i appreciate this look and the best things from the 2000s
It’s the same as if you ran a survey next to a bus stop asking people if they own a car or not. A disproportionate amount of people will not own a car. Hyper online kids that were bullied in school make up a disproportionate amount of the people who even know what the term Frutiger Aero refers to.
Generally: yes. However: we should consider that, with both Millenials and Zoomers, "online" statistics are going to resemble the broader population better and better, especially for upcoming generations, since so many more of us are spending so much more time online.
Agreed. I’m not at all familiar with the hypertaxonomized “Aesthetics wiki” so frequently cited by JJ, and learned of the term Frutiger Aero independently of it. I’d imagine the same to be true of most other Gen-Z individuals indulging in the same nostalgia.
I think that the “future we were promised” isn’t really about climate change. I think it’s about the hopefulness that the Internet provided when it was first gaining popularity, contrasted with which many view the internet now.
Yeah I agree. I have no idea where he got that from. I think the phrase just refers to the idea that Frutiger Aero often depicts a certain view for the future, that did not end up coming to fruition, as well as what you said about hopefulness.
i think what also drives zoomers to have that "future we were promised" mentality was how optimistic humanity was about the new millennium and being the first generation the be born right before, during, and after Y2K
@@funkyjoebob6121yes and I don’t feel that it’s a naive view either. Sure, it is colored by the fact the zoomer generation were largely naive and happy kids at the time, but people in general did still believe in a bright happy future, especially coming out of the Y2K scare. 2008 was largely a turning point and I think that’s why a more simple, hipster aesthetic took its place. People grew more and more cynical in general
Why are we talking like this is in the past? Those ideas can still happen. If we imagine humanity surviving with our tech for more than the next 50 years, those hopes for the future will be the only way we achieve it. It just might have taken longer than many hoped, myself included.
@@CPTginyu1015I still prefer “techno-optimism” to describe this rather than using an exotic pairing of words. Makes it more accessible (even if someone hasn’t heard the term before, they can pick up on context clues to understand the concept).
I think the reason why this generation tends to hyper-categorize everything is because we have grown up in a time where there is an internet full of things that require keywords to search for, and the internet is our main interface with culture. In previous generations if you heard a song you liked, you didn't need a very specific genre to describe it because your only ways to listen to music were on a radio station, which plays broadly similar music, or to buy a cd from a cd store. If you liked a song you'd just tune into the same radio station, or you would ask a music savvy friend or a shopkeeper at the CD store for a recommendation and they'd point you to something similar. There was no technological interface that you needed to use to find it. Nowadays if I hear a song that i like, I need to link it to a word that I can put into google to find more music that is in a similar style. It doesn't suffice to tell google that I want to listen to electronic music, I need to tell google that I want to listen to speed garage, or colour bass, or jungle, or psystyle, and that will let me find what I want to listen to
Yeah, I agree that a lot of the push towards categorizing things into hyper specific terms is at least partially due to search engines being so broken that they don't really do a good job of actually providing usable results with vague keywords anymore.
I agree! Communities in online spaces have dissolved so much that you would be hard pressed to find any obscure aesthetic, or visual vibe if you don't know the specific keywords. The online experience is so individualized nowadays that this is needed.
This was exactly how I started my craze with the Post Rock Genere- I found some band called April Rain and I would’ve thought that band was all there was to this sound if I didn’t see it labeled as being this post rock thing. Any other generation would’ve just said it’s Rock and that gets me no where
I kinda like that it has a name. Now if I want to see it, I can just say "fruitiger aero", not "hey you know that way some things looked in 2004, but not all of the things?"
yeah he complains about categorization, but its literally an aesthetic about a time when the internet was exploding and nostalgia for the kids that grew up in that era. it makes it a searchable web term. it just makes sense.
Humans create names and categorizations for everything. It’s why we have names for eras in art history; otherwise we wouldn’t know how to find styles we like. Fruitier aero is definitely a style of design, just like how other designs have names. It would’ve been categorized sooner or later.
@@Zectifin He's not complaining about categorizing he's complaining about how people are trying to shove more and more into that term to the point of it being meaningless.
"A lot people have this obsessive desire to name, and sort, and categorize as specifically as possible." Biologists: 👀 Linguists: 👀 Physicists: 👀 The basic instinct of human mind: 👀
15:40 its being able to google exactly what you mean googling "00s aesthetic" or "00s computer aesthetic" or "00s 3d graphic aesthetic" will not get you that specific "frutiger aero" style
i agree, the satisfaction that comes with being able to search for an exact look, vibe, memory, etc is worth having all the sub-categorization. we just can't exclude folks or start fights over aesthetics like JJ's critiquing.
@@a_disgruntled_snail How come? It's been around for long enough at this point to become tiresome. There's a sort of staleness and lack of personality in the flat design trend, leads to a lot of designs being the same as one another in a way
@@KrazyKaiser Because the sociological analysis is extremely flawed . It's very HBombreguy marxist "i have a narrative and will twist all of reality to fit into it" video essay to give you even though it's wrong. No one cares about frutiger Aero but theyre trying to use it as a prism to look into the soul of society when it was just a way of people trying to show 4k resolution since the best people could do before that for aesthetics was ugly pixel art garbage. Im not pro capitalist but they just take buzz words and throw them into their essays: "the CORPORATION, GLOBAL WARMING!, the FUTURE WE WERE PROMISED! NATURE!".
Fun Fact: Hyper-Categorization for the sake of categorization pretty clearly originates from Millennials. 2005-2015 was the heyday of that kind of thing. What we’re doing is called “Absurd Specificity”.
@@JJMcCullough Remember how you listed descriptors of Ryan Celcius's vaporwave music as Fonk, Glitch Hop and Vapor Trap? Yeah those are just as vague as Frutiger Aero. Rewatch your Millennial Middle Class art video and you'll suddenly see where we Gen Z got the ideas from. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
This man lived under a rock during the 2000's and it's sad because he is genuinely old enough to know that those things existed. I guess he was not familiar with AOL,those weird glossy colored apple computers,and the 2000s obsession with making interior design the most glossy,futuristic,and freshly designed style.
honneeesstttlly! as someone pushing 40, I was there for all this. The way he is talking and acting in this video reminds me a lot of how boomers treated everything back then.
But that is not the point he's making. I don't think he meant to imply these things didn't exist, but rather question the obsession with labeling and micro-categorizing every perceived style variation after the fact, the critique being it overcomplicates things in an attempt to formalize, gatekeep and give legitimacy to an otherwise rushed attempt of replicating the weight and originality of 90's nostalgia, also pointing out the fact that 2000's aesthetics were generally devoid of meaning and were mostly concerned with form.
@@nacholatinoFrutiger Aero is a pretty distinctive style, and the design trend has ended in mainstream design. This is the prime time to formalize the style, because it's out of use. How else do we discuss the style?
@hermasmora i can't tell if this is a joke or not 😭 i disagree with the main point of JJs video, i think he just made this for engagement bait tbh (and I'm a fan so I'm happy to help out lol). but the aesthetics wiki is just absurd and clearly not ran by people with any authority on design
3:20 "The Gen-Z tendency to make everything a Pokemon" Did this friend of yours realize he was speaking to the writer of *Canadamon: Canadian Culture Monsters*?
I'm a zoomer but he literally said that gen z CAN have nostalgia, just that its inaccurate to chalk up some aesthetic to having deep societal implications when it was just a trendy style created by computer graphics
Hi JJ love your videos. Early Zillenial here. Unfortunately I think you're a little off base with this one. All sorts of specific aesthetics and design trends were broken into different strata by designers of the 20th century too. Art Deco alone has many ultra specific spinoffs and styles like streamline moderne and googie. Categorization and overcategorization are just components if how humans think. We like recognizing patterns.
He's not saying that. He literally says at the beginning and the end that he likes seeing Gen Z nostalgic for our early lives. His argument is that frutiger aero is a part of a larger emphasis on 3D graphics. It's more just an excuse to discuss the topic more than anything else in my opinion
I actually think it's cool to classify and discover aesthetic styles. It just shows how rich and diverse the aesthetics of that time were. 2000s nostalgia doesn't have to be the same as 80's nostalgia and that's ok.
That’s not even to mention that you can get specific even from there. This Fruitger Aero for instance isn’t the same as Y2K aesthetics, so you could get more specific then just a generalization of 2000s nostalgia if you wanted to
I’m Gen Z and was so confused by the title. I have no idea what Frutiger Aero means as a term, but as soon as I saw the aesthetic I instantly knew it and was nostalgic for it. I just thought if it as the Wii/DS aesthetic since that was where I remember it from the most. I definitely have noticed an uptick in nostalgia among people my age. All my friends and I have been playing late 2000s/early 2010s pop hits that we grew up listening to and we all talk about the Wii and older Xbox games. Stuff like beyblades has seen a big resurgence among people my age too. There is also a lot of nostalgia for the mid 2010s era of SoundCloud music that dominated while we were in middle school (I was born in 2004).
@@jumpvelocity3953 Just wait, I promise you it will feel even weirder and more surreal a few years from now when you suddenly realize the little gen-alpha kids are walking, talking, grown-ass adults in the workplace who fondly remember those really old PS5 and Nintendo Switch games from their childhood. You'll stand there confused thinking "Wait, but that's... that's not old. That wasn't even that long ago. Wasn't that just like... last year or something? How were you a child such a short time ago? How the hell is the stuff you're nostalgic about so... _recent?"_ Then you'll finally understand how I feel when people, despite being adults, tell me their childhood game was Minecraft. Not Monkey Island or Mario 3, but freaking _Minecraft._
@@LittleLordFancyLad I don't agree. I'm too young to have a memory of it, granted, but retrospectively speaking, popular culture from the 90s seems like quintessental Gen X to me.
@@azazelazel @lainiwakura1776 Only the late 90s, and by then the Millennials were starting to come in to their own. The Gen X cohort was just too small and too apathetic to make the same impact.
Did this man really go "Yeah, my generation made music about going to the barber shop and mall in the 90s called Barbercore and Mallcore music. By the way, Gen Z is dumb because they have to name their nostalgia!" Love this channel, but how can you directly contridict your point before you've even made it?
You always come up with names and concepts in your videos for trends you observe and care about, and then say zoomers have a tendency to name everything, my man, that’s a human tendency, that’s what you do in your videos
the irony of saying "erm frutiger aero isnt actually a thing" while being able to very very accurately describe, identify, and categorize it consistently, is very strange. You do have a point that sometimes some people can maybe tend to possibly over categorize and subdivide labels, but why yell at a cloud like that when talking about an aesthetic that clearly captured a particular look of a certain era? This feels more like a case of being proud of being meta, like this odd pride in being the first to say "this isnt a thing", rather than some substantive debunking of an aesthetic.
You completely missed the point of the video. He acknowledges the design era and gives reasons for its existence. The reasons just aren't "hope for a green future" like those creating these sublabels ascribe.
I'm a younger millennial and don't have a problem with the label of "Frutiger Aero", and I don't think it's a problem that the name isn't necessarily intuitive or used at the time (which I think is also true of a lot of prominent art and design movements). The main thing to me is that you'll know it when you see it, and even though I never heard of this before this video, I instantly recognised what it meant with some visual examples. These images were really a trip down memory lane for me just because it's a style that is now so out of fashion that it really feels like a time capsule. I agree with the point that these basically existed as a way to show off fancier computer graphics at the time because shiny, glowy, colourful, photorealsitic design really looked very futuristic at the time just because computers couldn't do that stuff before. It really didn't have anything to do with techno-optimistic propaganda. I do have to say though that while I sort of get why people see it as optimistic, it also leaves me with a weird sort of cold and ethereal feeling too. This design always seemed to depict things that were pristine and devoid of any kind of actual human life. Like the liminal spaces discussed in a previous award winning video, there's often something kind of unnerving about how empty and lifeless it all is. On a surface level it looks realistic but that also serves to highlight how artifical it is at its core. I still like it though just because I really started getting into computers at the time and wanted to trick out my whole interface with as many shiny glowing orbs as possible when it was in style.
From what I understand Frutiger Aero is the name of a type of font that was highly popular in these designs at the time. Or it's a reference to the font artist whose font was popular, something along those lines 😅 And for sure I agree with you there, well said. We were all optimistic about the digital future but were still living in much simpler times compared to the 2010s and up. Before social media and big tech ruined everything.
it truly does, its like slapping eco-friendly stuff on everything that is mass produced on chinese poor provinces, its not as hopeful as they present to be Also i just think its cool that it has a name and ID as a graphic designer those kinda things are important to have in ur design vocab to appear amazing w/ clients 🤣
what you described is exactly what i like about it. its that bright happy dreaminess with a creepy vibe because of how fake and empty it looks. it reminds me of youtube videos that say places you've seen in your dreams because of that unnatural emptiness
Look I’m gonna be honest, I don’t vibe with this one JJ. I love your videos, as have I loved this one however, the need to categorise aesthetics is sort of born from the archival nature of the internet is it not? I think names grant access to a specific type of subject, one that encodes a certain feeling not akin to those found using more broad strokes. For example, we can say “I like metal” but you can also say “I like Finish gothic Black Metal” (metal heads please don’t kill me, I love you dearly.) The first example is said to someone who may not be as familiar with you or this fact while the more specific option could be said to someone who is also familiar with the genre of metal music. By giving names to “cores” and aesthetics we can communicate more effectively the visual and feeling we are trying to describe. We can rag on them but Gen Z have an amazing knack for navigating the infinite archive of the internet and gathering information. They can very easily create mood boards, places of discussion and also contribute to these aesthetics that then dominate advertising campaigns, clothing and even promote a way of thinking that applies itself to the real world. I do appreciate the time and effort you put into your videos. I am an avid watcher of your channel and having a Canadian partner myself, I am able to relate to topics he has mentioned when talking about his home country. That’s all I have to say really, if you see this (doubtful) all the best wishes from your many European viewers :)
your example sidesteps something that JJ mentions in the video. As someone who knows little about metal music, the phrase “Finnish black gothic metal” still gives me enough information to have a pretty good idea of what you’re talking about. “frutiger aero” does not do this. The phrase is completely uninformative, and like he says “2000s era shopping mall aesthetic” DOES provide the listener with adequate context. Most of the commenters talking about this point are actually just considering search engine optimization, and the fact that “frutiger aero” is searchable. But this isn’t very insightful. It’s searchable because it’s the name that chosen, not the other way around.
@@elmomierz I understand what you are saying, but I have to ask you about your opinion on trends. Not everything starts with a name; Art nuevo is the vaguest term at its inception. “New Art”. What does that even mean? Anything created now is new art but we understand now that new art referred to a specific movement. I’m fumbling but do you kind of get what I’m trying to say?
@@shan4364 it’s beginning to sound like we agree that the name is bad. We can argue over whether or not it’s anyone’s fault, but it seems that at least you’ve admitted that these trends don’t always have good names.
@@aclstudios yeah, lived; typos galore. The only thing I miss about the past is the Blackberry keyboard. Seriously, I despise typing on smart phone touch screens.
It isn’t just Gen Z, but us younger early/mid 90s millennials find it nostalgic too. Along with McBling and Frutiger Metro it was the aesthetic of our teen and very early adult years.
I dont think that the designers who create the frutiger aero aestetic were trying to create that narrative about how the future betrayed us, but that narrative resonates with a lot of the zoomer generation and can generate new artistic ideas
The designers were trying to create a bright and optimistic view of the future, as the "end of history" was still fresh, and the millennium bug wasn't the apocalypse. Except for 9/11 shock that stirred up American jingoism, the decade until 2008 was really optimistic. That's why GenZ has that "lost future" feeling
No, they weren't. That said, the culture oozed with the promise that tech would remove the downside of nature, and enhance the upside, and a kurzweilian singularity just around the corner.
I think that’s very true. JJ saying that shifts in artists’ work and new aesthetics are driven by new artistic modalities/technologies feels super reductive. Art is absolutely influenced by culture and current events and values, even if it’s just in the reading of it.
There is definitely merit to what JJ said. I remember being at Best Buy with my father in the mid 2000s to look at a plasma flatscreen TVs to replace the gargantuan 50" CRT we had. Every demo screen had nature videos so they could show you how vibrant and life like it looked. I vividly remember watching a video that looked like an aquarium tank with fish and thinking to myself "this looks just like real life." Crazy how that's not even a thought I'd have regularly anymore because it's the norm.
TBF we millenials were guilty of this overspecification trend first. We chopped up the 80's retro aesthetic into such specific peaces that they have become indistigushiable from each other (Vaporwave, Outrun, Synthwave, Chillwave, Dark Synthwave, Retrowave, etc.) no matter, which of these you look up, you'll find the same virtual highway sunset image.
well i can help you distinguish a bit, synthwave and outrun are the same thing. and everyone tags that grid highway stuff with all these terms for SEO, which muddies the waters for people. you just have to learn how to tell some apart. for example, i find synthwave/outrun is more 80's city night time themed, and often consumerism positive. while vaporwave is more late 80's early 90's daytime mall, and questionable on the consumerism stance. and thus ends me proving your point by being a millennial and being very pedantic with aesthetics.
Crusty old millennial here, and tbh I was going to comment this exact thing. We're absolutely guilty of turning every possible visual vibe into a curated, labelled aesthetic. We were the ones out here making micro-subcultures that died in a day like fucking slimepunk, we don't really have the right to mock zoomers for this. its just young people doing young people shit, trying to make sense of a big confusing world by giving names to things and trying to find patterns in all the chaos. To that I say "have fun".
As a gen z myself, I only see this in certain spaces anyway. No one I know irl knows or cares. I wouldn’t necessarily be nostalgic over it. There’s plenty of media that came out of the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s that I am nostalgic over, and I liked seeing those designs as a kid. But most of my nostalgia is not purely aesthetic driven.
You guys realize this is how language evolves right? You make some sounds with your mouth or scribble some shapes onto paper and if enough people understand what you are trying to convey then it becomes as real as any other word.
I am truly sorry i don’t understand your title of gen z “trying to be nostalgic?” Excuse me what do you mean trying? Do you not think that gen z is old enough to be nostalgic? Sound like you’re gatekeepering. I am gen z almost 25 and nostalgic for a lot of things. Frugtiger Aero geels like its supposed to be build on fun, comforting and down to earth. I am gen z almost 25 and nostalgic for a lot of things. A perfect blend of technology and nature. Thats what makes it so appealing. So what if its not realistically accurate its supposed to be fun. Im not about to have some Millennial tell me otherwise
I just turned 21 today and I couldn't agree more. As a kid I grew up with my cousin and her older sister who is a millennial, and I remember her and her friends were all nostalgic over 90s stuff back in the early 2010s when she was an older teenager. I remember Gen Xers from my parent's age saying millennials couldn't be nostalgic for 90s stuff that time because they were children and that bugged me. Why does it matter to older people what youngsters are nostalgic for? You can only be nostalgic when you're like, 40? As a 13yo or so I couldn't understand the concept of "90s nostalgia" my millennial cousins and other people their age used to talk about, but since I became a little older, I began to understand, and now in my 20s, I totally understand.
@@pyrotechnic96I mean, when I was a teen in the 00s, it wasn't "cool", it was corporate allegria but 15 years earlier. You can like it (I personally hate it but that's just my opinion) it just wasn't a thing the youth at the time even liked, I thought it was random, like vaporwave but neutered and corporate. I think JJ also just doesn't like arbitrary labels that much.
@@fuosdi64 It's noted that what we refer to as Frutiger Aero raised popularity in the late 90s and lost in around 2016/2017. This means the oldest of our generation was 20/21 years old when it ended, while the youngest was 4/5 (for myself I was 13/14), and this is enough time for most of the entire generation to remember and grow up with it and be nostalgic over it. I began using a PC when I was 2, that was in 2005, and I bet most gen Zs born in families who could afford a PC or tablet/smartphone spent a lot of time in front of a screen as well. I used Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 7, and on. What people forget is that most of us didn't start using internet now or only after we became teens, we were mostly basically born using PCs or for the kiddos, smartphones.
@@fuosdi64 it was still 2014-2015 when those designs still existed 💀 I even had a computer with that design, and my phone and tablet at the time had that design...what are u talking about??
I am kind of lost how can you appreciate somthing "whole" but to an extent, when you classifying something you are separating one thing from another. and also appreshateing something "whole" but to an extent is not possible because literally "whole" means every part or everything of something and to an extent is up to some part of something. I hope I am making sense sorry about this, did not meen to be rood or anything. (sun)
@@nandishhiremath1439 can a doctor appreciate a human body even though she classifies different parts? Can someone appreciate their country even though the country is made of different provinces?
@@cara-seyunnobody appreciates America because of the history and culture of Hummingdinger Arizona along with the other few hundred thousand towns in the country, which is a more analogous example.
Even being Raised in Mexico for the first 12 years of my life, i can even say we Went through this Frutiger Aero Nostalgia, it irritates me that i have heard people say the early 2000s didn't have the nostalgia the 80s or 90s brought, but as someone who wasn't allowed to get out of home at a young age, and I would submerge myself into my computer for Hours at a time, I can assure you that I can remember when i would have vivid dreams of this Futuristic warm future feeling the themes of Microsoft and even early 2000s phones would bring, before I even knew what an asthetic was or before I knew how to even describe it. There wasnt a lot of money in our house hold but all i wanted was a computer to play those Flash Games Cartoon Network advertised all over on TV in the early 2000s, i can clearly remember when i was trying to navigate the slow Internet we had back in the day. Good times
1994 baby here, I was in junior high when Frutiger Aero began and ended high school at its end. I never knew how popular this would become in the realm of nostalgia, and now I kind of miss it being the default aesthetic.
@cara-setun Idk, but as a Zoomer (2006), some of my nostalgia is for Skylanders, Zool Pals, Club Penguin, Animal Jam, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and old Minecraft TH-camrs. Stuff like that.
@@cara-seyunthings as they where. Helps to educate yourself or talk with people from the era instead of just making stuff up from an uninformed basis. But Gen Z be Gen Z ...
@@christianconrad5200 Frutiger Aero certainly was a part of the style of the 2000’s, and it’s not like that’s the only thing Gen Z is nostalgic about (as the comment section itself shows)
Ok, but genuinely, the the shiny stuff and gradients and blues and transparents and all that stuff from the 2000s looks a billion times better than the terrible 2010s and 2020s artstyles of everything. Like, people complain about the "corporate" artstyles, but that stuff is literally everywhere, not just in corporate messaging.
As a Gen Z myself, I think why we like the fruitger aero aesthetic so much is because we finally have something to be nostalgic about, instead of being called “too young” to be nostalgic for anything, we’re just trying to cling onto our childhood as much as possible.
as part of Gen Z myself, I feel like we're a very nostalgic and sentimental generation in general. But specifically with fruitger aero, I think it comes from how we "grew up" fast and were exposed to adult things very young, so now we cling to anything that represents a sense of innocence before our unrestricted internet access. Things like fruitger aero provide a sort of romanticized view of the internet, not that the items in fruitger aero themselves are "hopeful" or "optimistic", but that our views at the time of seeing them were, if that makes sense. It's not the images or the creation of the images that represents the aesthetic, it's the context in which we consumed them, as optimistic kids ourselves.
I don't know how Gen-Z can be characterized as growing up quickly. No teenager in the US has worried about being drafted since the 1970s. If anything the more recent generation are the first the never had to stop doing what they did as kids. Spongebob, the Simpsons, etc., are still on the air.
@@JustAManFromThePastThis is true to an extent but to be fair the newest generations have to worry about at least a few things older generations didn't. For example I think younger people don't feel as safe in schools nowadays due to a variety of reasons.
@@Copperkaiju @Copperkaiju I think the greatest detriment to the younger generation is the lack of hope in a better future, probably appropriate for our times. People care about how they're moving, not where they are. If you woke up tomorrow with 50 million bucks you'd be overjoyed, unless you were a billionaire, then you'd be suicidal. An unprecedented and impossible to replicate historic run made almost everything better for most people, at least in the West, from 1870 to 1970. Not only did you go from hot-air balloons to men on the moon, the homes of the average person became filled with devices that would have gotten them hanged for witchcraft in Salem a few centuries before, things we wouldn't even want to try to live without: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, central heating, air conditioning, running hot and cold water, let alone TVs and radios, then VCRs and DVD players. Women, racial and sexual minorities saw honest to God remarkable progress in their own lifetimes. With the election of Obama a lot of that low hanging fruit was gone. We had our black president, gay marriage is law. Everything after this is getting at margins, in culture and technology, much more work for much less gain.
I think you may have missed the mark on this one unfortunately, though this kind of fanaticism over aesthetic 'lore' is not something I partake in, I see it as a communal activity that is good for this generation, I don't think its an exclusionary thing to chop it up, merely by doing so I think it provides a easier way for young people to define and then discuss and create in those styles, I'd say that by merely calling it the '2000's aesthetic', you would be depriving the opportunity for lots of young people to create interesting things for each other, and how is that not a good thing? I think you may be seeing this level of fanaticism as something of a symptom of this generation's internet obsession, but I think it is unfair for a generation which was (involuntarily) raised in large part by the internet to then use the internet in this way, to me this comes across as someone a bit older misunderstanding a new social phenomenon as some kind of crisis, Though I agree that intenet-fuelled isolation and obsessiveness are issues with our current youth, this is an outlet of that which doesn't see any real harm and is not a good use of time to try to discredit.
yeah i agree, not gonna lie he is definitely acting like this is some type of problem when it’s not. like idk man i think its just the first generation of smart phone kids just like…becoming adults and trying to remember stuff from their youth (as every generation has done). obviously that experience for early gen z is very different than his as a millennial so i just think he doesn’t really understand
@@christianconrad5200 wtf you mean by political stuff, this is just nostalgia lmao silly pictures that gen z grow up with most gen z doesn't even care about politics also what history bending??? You can't be serious
i feel like this is really contradictory when you literally THE vaporwave album in the background. you need an explanation for it. Frutiger Aero is just a subsect of the Y2K aesthetic. you are really sounding like boomer here more than usual.
And on this episode of JJ Doesn't Get It™: Why modern schools of graphic design aren't real. JJ, I love you, but Frutiger Aero was a legitimate design movement that had wide reaching influence on many different industries including architecture and interior design. Your comments about why having to explain what the name Frutiger Aero means demonstrates its failure could be said about literally any design style with strange or silly names (Art Deco and Bauhaus come to mind). Also, being able to subdivide the style into more specific aesthetics is useful to narrow down the emotional impact of art composed in those styles. Having been exposed to far more diverse media over our lives, Gen Z attaches emotion to our nostalgia differently to Millennials, but that doesn't mean it's any less significant or valuable than yours.
I agree with all of this and I’m particularly baffled by the claim of most design movements being value neutral, especially coming from someone who made an entire video on the ideological underpinnings of pre/post-modernism.
@@ztl2505 I don't read him as saying "most design movements are value neutral" - his point is more along the line that nostalgia itself is not inherently political. Trying to interpret a feeling about a particular style associated with a specific era as political statement or philosophy about the present is a misguided analysis. The more useful thing to do, would be to study the values and views of the style, and only then relate it to our present.
In what way do you mean Gen Z has "been exposed to far more diverse media"? Previous generations are still alive and being exposed to the same media Gen Z is.
@@MisterM2402 Gen Z has had exposure to the Internet from birth, meaning they began their lives with the highest density of media exposure throughout our lives compared to the previous generation, which in turn had a higher exposure than the generation previous. Internet > Mass and Media > Traditional Media
The reason im nostalgic for frutiger aero is not because its an ”aesthetic”… It’s a god damn style of graphic design! The time TH-cam looked like a TV, and Instagram looked like a camera! When graphig design wasn’t flat and soulless, but had depth and shading. It looked nice :) Unlike the flat interfaces, icons, and design we have today…
Regardless of whether Gen Z is really more prone to hyper-categorizing concepts into smaller and smaller subcategories, I don’t see how that objectively encourages gatekeeping or minimalization. You can easily label multiple different aesthetics while still recognizing their similarities and how they can heavily overlap one another, or even fall within larger, more encompassing genre umbrellas. Even JJ admits that Millennial vibes like Vaporwave or Synthwave can be further broken down into further subgenres and this presumably doesn’t have a negative affect on their greater nostalgic aesthetic, it feels weird that he thinks this is fine but when Zoomers do the same thing suddenly it’s “narrowminded” or “limited”. Also how can we be too fixated on categorization, but also trying to “broaden the term” to include “unrelated themes” at the same time? Are we really the ones being nitpicky here?
just watch his Vaporwave video man, he is not bashing people for categorising stuff, just for pretending the categories are the set on stone things they are claimed to be, instead of a small part of a bigger thing
as a gen z, i agree w this 100%. i felt very confused with what point this was trying to make. to me the hypercategorization serves to give names to and appreciate the smaller aspects of a whole. to say that it somehow stifles our appreciation is incongruent to me
Is every generation doomed to forget what it was like to be young? Kids in the 90s did the same thing with their hyper specific sub cultutes and music genres. A lot of these "zoomer" classifications were originally coined by millenials and gen x.
I was born in 1968. Everything about this video is utterly incomprehensible to me. I will now go off to a cabin in the woods. Good night and God bless.
Don't worry, us millennials are marching ever closer to that same inevitable destination with each passing year. So, assuming you're still alive then, you won't be alone.
I get that it might seem a bit excesive and hence annoying to you that all of these sub-categorazations keep being added to the Frutiger Aero family, but to me they're as necessary as music subgenres are. Let's say that you wanna listen to rock music, but not just something stereotypical of our general notion of rock music like AC/DC or Led Zeppelin; sometimes you might wanna go more into a psychedelic path with bands like Pink Floyd or a progressive one with King Crimson. For people searching for visual aesthetics of the mid 00's to early 2010's it's more or less the same: a couple of years prior it would've been quite hard to find a specific sub-branch of images you remember from your childhood, put that in contrast to today with all of these new nomenclatures and it's a breeze.
Hahaha! OMG he totally is a Boomer in a Millennial body. He's going on 40, but has the attitude of a stuffy 70 year old man a lot - especially with this weird video and his cringe take on Wikipedia.
“Make believe nostalgia” yeah man. Nostalgia is make believe. What do you think vaporwave was? That never happened, it’s the imagined sensation of nostalgic aesthetics being modified to represent a feeling that transcends its original setting. Nostalgia is just a form of make believe.
This video is actually awful. He makes like 1 point in the entire video and then for the rest of it he rambles on about how gen Z "just wants to be nostalgic". He LITERALLY AGREES that the aesthetic was popular in the late 2000's and early 2010's, so he refutes that one point he made. Just generally a badly put together video
I had never heard this term but somehow I immediately got it. The font and the Windows interface immediately came to mind. With every JJ video I learn a new cultural concept.
Not that it’s terribly important, but the whole “desire to categorize everything” is something I do a lot of, mainly so I can use those terms in ways to either search for more of that thing. It’s like finding amazing chocolate and wanting to know exactly what type it is so I can go find the store that made this specific chocolate, and “it’s just chocolate” is kind of unhelpful.
This is what happens when you get into your 40s and still refuse to grow up and accept the fact people born after you have their own version of nostalgia.
I think JJ doesnt get that aesthetics have become their own subculture. Its not just "2000s era UI", its the broad aesthetic that itself is a culture. In the past, most subcultures only had aesthetics as a by-product, but it wasnt the main thing the subculture was based upon. Punk has a look, but its mostly based around music and politics. In current times though, a lot of subcultures have sprouted out, probably because of Tiktok, that are almot entirely based on aesthetics, like Cottagecore, or Dark Academia. The aesthetic itsrlf is the subculture.
Agreed. Previous generations' cultures were defined more by music/art/fashion/design: i.e. Grunge, Memphis, Woodstock, Art Deco, Jazz, Bauhaus, etc. I think that the current focus on aesthetics might have something to do with the ubiquity of computers.
Make believe? Just because you don't experience or relate to something doesn't make it less real. I used to believe the future was going to be some beautiful, eco friendly utopia because of this aesthetic. I loved the aesthetic before it had a name.
I think the problem you're finding is less that people want to label parts of their nostalgia, but more that smaller video essayists have a tendency to shoehorn in shallow political commentary to justify their videos existing. Nothing wrong with being excited to talk about a particular aesthetic, but it's sophomoric to try and turn them into these grand narratives about capitalism and climate change.
I have to disagree that the video essayists are trying to have "political" commentary, only one of them in the clips shown talked about climate change, with the rest expressing what they thought they aesthetic expressed
@@Subzearo You can connect just about anything to capitalism or other grand narratives, but the way these people do it is inevitably shallow and poorly supported. If you want to make a grand point about a cultural trend of tech optimism you need more support than just a niche design style or it ends up being empty. It's elevating Frutiger Aero to be the main representative of something it was only a minor symptom of.
Half agree with what you say. If the political commentary is relevant to the aesthetic, then it’s not dumb to talk about it. Every aesthetic exist for some reason, and sometimes economic conditions, pop culture are at the center of it. Some people have some interesting stuff to say about it, but of course not everyone.
dude felt the last of his youth stripped away when he realized the generation beneath him missed the past, and did everything in his power to pretend it wasnt real. including documenting this cope on youtube.
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You're such a Boomer JJ, get with the times. 🤣🤣🤣
"Climate Change" ... hmm... man-made, I presume?
Who is being naive?
[Real] science much?
How much did the WEF pay you to slip that in?!
Pathetic.
"X"er.
Hey JJ just wanted to say that Bugs Life is not forgotten. Youre 40 so you missed the magic. Im 30 and bugs life is considered a holy grail to people my age. Go ask 30 year olds what they think of bugs life you might be surprised. Also, it wasnt just the graphics, it was the political messaging behind it that inspired us as well.
A dissection of the polarizing "corporate art style" deserves a video of its own.
"JJMCC"? JJ Metropolitan Community Church? 😊👍🌈
Frutiger Aero is the same to the 2000s as Vaporwave is to the late 80s/early 90s. Some real elements but highly exaggerated and romanticized.
It acts a lost future, like some kind of alternate history of if that aesthetic remained rather than it being this big cultural thing at the time.
Didn't expect to see you here.
What’s this lost future? Would we have floating cars and fish tanks suspended mid air right now if society had kept using a certain design theme? It’s just an art style bro there’s nothing stopping you from creating work in the style. There’s nothing stopping other people from not caring either.
Regarding it being romanticised, that's just nostalgia in general
Simulacra?
As an older Gen Z, I definitely grew up seeing this aesthetic in ads, textbooks, etc., often with the appeal of cool high-tech, eco-friendly design choices. Seeing this aesthetic categorized to me isn't gatekeeping, but rather finally having a way to describe this "vibe". I know people don't seem to like it, but this categorization trend is kind of an interesting way of seeing just how creative humanity has become that we have this many aesthetics, genres, -cores, etc. and can have so many people enjoy them.
yup
As a young millennial, completely agree
It’s simply too pretentious for me, the layman, and definitely seems like it would be harder for people like me to discover and enjoy.
@@jumpvelocity3953 But why? You hear or see a new thing, you learn the term for it, and you go about your day. New term you've never heard before? Learn what it means, go about your life. Idk how it seems pretentious when everyone learns new words all the time, it's just how language and culture works.
Pretty much sums up how art movements are named. Artists don't really have much of a say on it. Usually, it's the art critics that come up with a name, sometimes decades down the road to better categorize it for academia. Internet just happened to breed tons of niche micro-movements in art in design, so Gen-Z are now stepping up to categorize them.
"Frutiger Aero isn't a thing!" proceeds to very accurately describe what Frutiger Aero is in excruciating detail
15:10-15:34 You didn't even watch the video, that's not a real quote.
@@BeedramWallatusksorry we insulted your lord and saviour jj
@@60sbabydoll777 Sorry you feel the need to attack others because your Wii Menu screen aesthetic was mocked.
missed the point award 🏅
I dont know how he can say that 80s and 90s nostalgia has never been outright politicized. Vaporwave itself, the whole genre, started as a criticism of hyper consumerism
Exactly what I was thinking. Every criticism that he offers can be applied to Vaporwave. I have yet to hear him make the same complaints about Vaporwave, an aesthetic that he obviously feels strongly for. Vaporwave started out as a form of cultural critique and was influenced by Mark Fisher and Derrida's concepts of hauntology and lost futures. Also, he ignores the fact that corporate marketing teams and designers don't create designs without an embedded message. Frutiger Aero was meant to calm people's anxieties about artificiality and big tech's rise to power. It was geared toward older people who were ambivalent about new technology more so than younger demographic groups. Design is visual marketing and if it doesn't have some kind of call-to-action or promise of utopia, it won't resonate with the public. Design is a mirror of the desires of the public that it's catered to, which makes it's inherently political, even if that political message isn't consciously realized. Also, all someone needs to do is google Vaporwave subgenres to see how many inane subcategories the aesthetic has. The need to categorize everything into smaller and smaller units started with Millennials and it has more to do with the way search algorithms function than some flaw in the mindset of a certain generation. I'm not even a Zoomer but I feel the need to defend them when people start doing this kind of thing to them. As a Millennial, I'm acutely aware of being blamed for all the things that have happened as the result of the actions of previous generations by people from those very same generational groups. The Boomers did it us and now we're starting to do it to the new guys on the scene. I think this is a kind of reaction to a feeling of anxiety people feel when they realize they're not young anymore. We become nostalgic and talk about how everything was soooo much better when we were the newer, younger and cooler generation. This need to feel that the grass was always greener 20 years ago is a "we" problem, not a "them" problem. Let's all try to break the cycle and not become just like the Boomers. I have no problem with nostalgia, as long was we appreciate it for what it is and realize it's not an accurate picture of the past. Nostalgia is not reality, it's heavily biased and you can be aware of that fact and still enjoy it.
Vapor wave is not only fake but incredibly materialistic
i may have paradoxically been converted into a fruitiger aero fan by this video
i need a 101 in gen z nostalgia. pokémon? suite life
of zack and cody? is there gen z food and drink? i'm obsessed now
that’s right
@@PhilEdwardsInc I think that description is on the right track & shows good foundational understanding, but I'd add that Gen Z grew up immediately after Pokémania (Mid '00's to Mid '10's). I remember a few kids playing with the trading cards at school once in a while, a bunch of kids played the games & I think most of us saw the anime, but it wasn't as much of a defining thing as it was for millennial kids.
For Gen Z TV nostalgia (at least in the US), SpongeBob is easily the most impactful show of the 00's, either Adventure Time or Phineas & Ferb were the biggest in the early 10's, although there's a lot of strong contenders from all 3 big kids networks (Nick, Disney, CN) & their spinoff channels. Dreamworks & Pixar easily ruled theatrical animation. PBS is an honourable mention though. For Games, there were 2 kinds of kids. Kids that got caught up in the console war between Xbox & PlayStation & got games that were probably too mature & the kids that played it safe with Nintendo systems (particularly Wii & DS). Browser games are an honourable mention too, great time-wasters in Computer class & probably the one type of game to unify all of Gen Z. For Pokémon-type IPs specifically, I might just be tired, but I can't think of a super toyetic franchise that was unique to gen Z kids (Beyblade, Yu-gi-oh, & Bakugan were at least somewhat big, but mostly peaked in the early 00's when Gen Z was too young to engage with them that much yet). When it comes to Gen Z food the only thing that immediately comes to mind is Caprisun & Lunchables (which both overlap w/ younger millennials as well), although there has to be more that I can't think of right now.
For traditional media in general, it should be fairly simple to look up the most popular/most played games, movies, songs, &c of the 00's & 10's, which Gen Z kids would've grown up with, seen parodies/commentary about on TV or online & so on, which form our cultural frame of reference. But you also have to account for online media & internet culture/subcultures of the time which are much more difficult to generalize or track down. There's probably a bunch of subreddits & stuff you can go to for more engaging/insightful/personal discussion about this. I'm running out of steam at this point, so I'll leave it here.
@@zanzamanzaanza5981 For toys, maybe LPS? Sure, it was originally marketed to young girls, but it seriously became a cultural phenomenon on TH-cam- one that we haven't really seen replicated in the same way, though that might just be my nostalgia talking lol
@@PhilEdwardsInc Hey Phil, big fan of the videos! As a zillenial (born in '99) nerd, I can say that a lot of my nostalgia is tied to that big wave of early CGI, around when things like "jimmy neutron" and the original playstation were coming out. It's very much abstract art, but if you want to check out a modern online series that plays heavy on Gen Z nostalgia, I'd recommend looking up "ENA".
this is very weird? born in 96, elder gen z, and have clear memories of this style on my school computers and in tv commercials. there is also a clear reason this style is emotionally impactful for us growing up. it's how we saw the future. not sure what you're trying to accomplish with this gatekeepy video.
this is the exact opposite of gatekeeping. nowhere did he say that you can't enjoy this aesthetic, but trying to confine it into a narrow sensibility with strict criteria is killing what makes it fun in the first place. to say nothing of people trying to attach political meanings where there are none
wait yall genuinely looked at that as a kid and thought, “ah this is what the future looks like”? 😭 i thought we all just liked it because it was pretty to look at
If you were born in 1996 you are not gen z you're a millennial, defined as someone who was a child during the turn of the millennium. If you did not exist during the year 2000 you're gen z. A generation is 20 years.
yea this tyle bring back good memories but i have to be honest when it comes to music the 2000s was just bad and nothing like the fruiter areo music and the 2000s were very emo and only when looking back later on do i appreciate this look and the best things from the 2000s
TELL EM DISH!!! (what a surprise seeing you here lol)
I think the people who gate-keep and fight about niche subcultures like you mention tend to be hyper online rather than gen z as a whole
It’s the same as if you ran a survey next to a bus stop asking people if they own a car or not. A disproportionate amount of people will not own a car. Hyper online kids that were bullied in school make up a disproportionate amount of the people who even know what the term Frutiger Aero refers to.
Generally: yes.
However: we should consider that, with both Millenials and Zoomers, "online" statistics are going to resemble the broader population better and better, especially for upcoming generations, since so many more of us are spending so much more time online.
Yeah, I'm just a couple years older than Gen Z, and I've never heard of this, nor does it make me feel anything.
Fair point.
Agreed. I’m not at all familiar with the hypertaxonomized “Aesthetics wiki” so frequently cited by JJ, and learned of the term Frutiger Aero independently of it. I’d imagine the same to be true of most other Gen-Z individuals indulging in the same nostalgia.
I think that the “future we were promised” isn’t really about climate change. I think it’s about the hopefulness that the Internet provided when it was first gaining popularity, contrasted with which many view the internet now.
Yeah I agree. I have no idea where he got that from. I think the phrase just refers to the idea that Frutiger Aero often depicts a certain view for the future, that did not end up coming to fruition, as well as what you said about hopefulness.
i think what also drives zoomers to have that "future we were promised" mentality was how optimistic humanity was about the new millennium and being the first generation the be born right before, during, and after Y2K
@@funkyjoebob6121yes and I don’t feel that it’s a naive view either. Sure, it is colored by the fact the zoomer generation were largely naive and happy kids at the time, but people in general did still believe in a bright happy future, especially coming out of the Y2K scare. 2008 was largely a turning point and I think that’s why a more simple, hipster aesthetic took its place. People grew more and more cynical in general
Why are we talking like this is in the past? Those ideas can still happen. If we imagine humanity surviving with our tech for more than the next 50 years, those hopes for the future will be the only way we achieve it. It just might have taken longer than many hoped, myself included.
@@CPTginyu1015I still prefer “techno-optimism” to describe this rather than using an exotic pairing of words. Makes it more accessible (even if someone hasn’t heard the term before, they can pick up on context clues to understand the concept).
Im so so sorry for finding joy in things
This sums up what it’s like to be on the internet pretty well
Please find joy in something slightly less corporate. This is kind of horrifying.
You should be
@@osakanone its not that deep
@@Paul-xu6gt im not
I think the reason why this generation tends to hyper-categorize everything is because we have grown up in a time where there is an internet full of things that require keywords to search for, and the internet is our main interface with culture. In previous generations if you heard a song you liked, you didn't need a very specific genre to describe it because your only ways to listen to music were on a radio station, which plays broadly similar music, or to buy a cd from a cd store. If you liked a song you'd just tune into the same radio station, or you would ask a music savvy friend or a shopkeeper at the CD store for a recommendation and they'd point you to something similar. There was no technological interface that you needed to use to find it. Nowadays if I hear a song that i like, I need to link it to a word that I can put into google to find more music that is in a similar style. It doesn't suffice to tell google that I want to listen to electronic music, I need to tell google that I want to listen to speed garage, or colour bass, or jungle, or psystyle, and that will let me find what I want to listen to
Yeah, I agree that a lot of the push towards categorizing things into hyper specific terms is at least partially due to search engines being so broken that they don't really do a good job of actually providing usable results with vague keywords anymore.
I agree! Communities in online spaces have dissolved so much that you would be hard pressed to find any obscure aesthetic, or visual vibe if you don't know the specific keywords. The online experience is so individualized nowadays that this is needed.
Good point!
Wow
Never thought about it, makes so much sense
This was exactly how I started my craze with the Post Rock Genere- I found some band called April Rain and I would’ve thought that band was all there was to this sound if I didn’t see it labeled as being this post rock thing. Any other generation would’ve just said it’s Rock and that gets me no where
I kinda like that it has a name. Now if I want to see it, I can just say "fruitiger aero", not "hey you know that way some things looked in 2004, but not all of the things?"
yeah he complains about categorization, but its literally an aesthetic about a time when the internet was exploding and nostalgia for the kids that grew up in that era. it makes it a searchable web term. it just makes sense.
Humans create names and categorizations for everything. It’s why we have names for eras in art history; otherwise we wouldn’t know how to find styles we like. Fruitier aero is definitely a style of design, just like how other designs have names. It would’ve been categorized sooner or later.
I used to have to say that too, but now I can say the name of it. Thank you internet.
@@Zectifin He's not complaining about categorizing he's complaining about how people are trying to shove more and more into that term to the point of it being meaningless.
this exactly! it's concise and easy, and it's all ours
"A lot people have this obsessive desire to name, and sort, and categorize as specifically as possible."
Biologists: 👀
Linguists: 👀
Physicists: 👀
The basic instinct of human mind: 👀
Humans, basically.
Finally, someone who also thinks subcategorizing things is just human nature
15:40 its being able to google exactly what you mean
googling "00s aesthetic" or "00s computer aesthetic" or "00s 3d graphic aesthetic" will not get you that specific "frutiger aero" style
i agree, the satisfaction that comes with being able to search for an exact look, vibe, memory, etc is worth having all the sub-categorization. we just can't exclude folks or start fights over aesthetics like JJ's critiquing.
Jj really missed the mark with this one 🤦♂️
yeah it only existed in interface designs and toothpaste lables
I think people are just sick and tired of flat design tbh and want a return to colorful, vibrant styles
Same you know you can change your icons
I absolutely am not and do not.
@@a_disgruntled_snail How come? It's been around for long enough at this point to become tiresome. There's a sort of staleness and lack of personality in the flat design trend, leads to a lot of designs being the same as one another in a way
@@a_disgruntled_snail That's a hilarious joke! Flat design style was a mistake.
@@MrOpinions-f3o I strongly disagree.
naming all the fish on the aquarium channel was one of my core memories
"Old man yells at glossy clouds"
I am also an old man (JJ's age) and laughed too hard at this comment
It's perfect 😂
Like, literally. He's describing Frutiger Aero the same way FrankJavCee describes vaporwave. But like, unironically.
@@KrazyKaiser Because the sociological analysis is extremely flawed . It's very HBombreguy marxist "i have a narrative and will twist all of reality to fit into it" video essay to give you even though it's wrong. No one cares about frutiger Aero but theyre trying to use it as a prism to look into the soul of society when it was just a way of people trying to show 4k resolution since the best people could do before that for aesthetics was ugly pixel art garbage. Im not pro capitalist but they just take buzz words and throw them into their essays: "the CORPORATION, GLOBAL WARMING!, the FUTURE WE WERE PROMISED! NATURE!".
I'm his age and completely disagree with him.
Fun Fact: Hyper-Categorization for the sake of categorization pretty clearly originates from Millennials. 2005-2015 was the heyday of that kind of thing. What we’re doing is called “Absurd Specificity”.
Don’t bring us down with you!
examples please
@@JJMcCullough You and us, _We are not so different_
@@JJMcCullough Remember how you listed descriptors of Ryan Celcius's vaporwave music as Fonk, Glitch Hop and Vapor Trap? Yeah those are just as vague as Frutiger Aero. Rewatch your Millennial Middle Class art video and you'll suddenly see where we Gen Z got the ideas from. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
@@calliemyersbuchanan6458 TV Tropes
This man lived under a rock during the 2000's and it's sad because he is genuinely old enough to know that those things existed. I guess he was not familiar with AOL,those weird glossy colored apple computers,and the 2000s obsession with making interior design the most glossy,futuristic,and freshly designed style.
honneeesstttlly! as someone pushing 40, I was there for all this. The way he is talking and acting in this video reminds me a lot of how boomers treated everything back then.
But that is not the point he's making. I don't think he meant to imply these things didn't exist, but rather question the obsession with labeling and micro-categorizing every perceived style variation after the fact, the critique being it overcomplicates things in an attempt to formalize, gatekeep and give legitimacy to an otherwise rushed attempt of replicating the weight and originality of 90's nostalgia, also pointing out the fact that 2000's aesthetics were generally devoid of meaning and were mostly concerned with form.
@@nacholatinoFrutiger Aero is a pretty distinctive style, and the design trend has ended in mainstream design. This is the prime time to formalize the style, because it's out of use. How else do we discuss the style?
JJ found the aesthetics wiki and was not pleased
Tbf it's kinda absurd how many Aesthetics are on there. Feels overbloated imo.
@@Foogi9000 yeah they definitely need moderation because what the hell is poolcore? it's just pools? lmao
@@buttershy_ it's kinda funny tbh
@@buttershy_ no it's art and not anyone's to limit
@hermasmora i can't tell if this is a joke or not 😭 i disagree with the main point of JJs video, i think he just made this for engagement bait tbh (and I'm a fan so I'm happy to help out lol). but the aesthetics wiki is just absurd and clearly not ran by people with any authority on design
3:20 "The Gen-Z tendency to make everything a Pokemon"
Did this friend of yours realize he was speaking to the writer of *Canadamon: Canadian Culture Monsters*?
Did he get rid of a part of the video?
@@lithunoisan no, wrong timestamp 3:10
@@YourFatherVEVO What if there was 10 seconds of the video he cut out so now it’s at 3:10?
Holy shit he is like a child in that
I'm a millennial and this just feels like weird copeing with your ageing. Is gen z not allowed to have nostalgia? Odd take.
@@danizanzibar4344 waaa waaa waaa
Fr
@@danizanzibar4344dawg what did we do to you 😭‼️🙏🏼
That’s what I also thought..
I'm a zoomer but he literally said that gen z CAN have nostalgia, just that its inaccurate to chalk up some aesthetic to having deep societal implications when it was just a trendy style created by computer graphics
Hi JJ love your videos. Early Zillenial here. Unfortunately I think you're a little off base with this one. All sorts of specific aesthetics and design trends were broken into different strata by designers of the 20th century too. Art Deco alone has many ultra specific spinoffs and styles like streamline moderne and googie. Categorization and overcategorization are just components if how humans think. We like recognizing patterns.
Good take !
“Zoomers, please stop the Pokémonification of everything!” says the guy who literally Pokémonified CANADA!!
I’ll Pokémon YOU next if you don’t pipe down
@@JJMcCullough haha You need to say that in your next video! Hearing you say those words would make my day!
@@JJMcCullough Haha! 😂 I still gotta get you to sign my Canadmon book someday! 🇨🇦👹📖
@@JJMcCullough JJ used "Dad on a family road trip" energy. It's super effective! :D
lmao
“you can’t be nostalgic! because i don’t feel the same way!”
Did you watch the video or
He's not saying that. He literally says at the beginning and the end that he likes seeing Gen Z nostalgic for our early lives. His argument is that frutiger aero is a part of a larger emphasis on 3D graphics. It's more just an excuse to discuss the topic more than anything else in my opinion
@@BillimanMCjon With their attention span I would be surprised if he got past the minute mark…
What video did you watch?
His issue is with the annoying online habit of assigning an aesthetic to literally everything
I actually think it's cool to classify and discover aesthetic styles. It just shows how rich and diverse the aesthetics of that time were. 2000s nostalgia doesn't have to be the same as 80's nostalgia and that's ok.
That’s not even to mention that you can get specific even from there. This Fruitger Aero for instance isn’t the same as Y2K aesthetics, so you could get more specific then just a generalization of 2000s nostalgia if you wanted to
an immense accumulation of spectacles
very well said
I’m Gen Z and was so confused by the title. I have no idea what Frutiger Aero means as a term, but as soon as I saw the aesthetic I instantly knew it and was nostalgic for it. I just thought if it as the Wii/DS aesthetic since that was where I remember it from the most. I definitely have noticed an uptick in nostalgia among people my age. All my friends and I have been playing late 2000s/early 2010s pop hits that we grew up listening to and we all talk about the Wii and older Xbox games. Stuff like beyblades has seen a big resurgence among people my age too. There is also a lot of nostalgia for the mid 2010s era of SoundCloud music that dominated while we were in middle school (I was born in 2004).
Wii/DS is Technozen not Frutiger Aero
@@JlMMEY man I don’t know all these labels and shit. This is exactly what JJ was saying is wrong with us🤦♂️
Isn’t it crazy that our generation has porn stars now, it feels like yesterday when I was clicking “I’m 18” and feeling devious
@@JlMMEYis this troll or nah 😂
@@jumpvelocity3953 Just wait, I promise you it will feel even weirder and more surreal a few years from now when you suddenly realize the little gen-alpha kids are walking, talking, grown-ass adults in the workplace who fondly remember those really old PS5 and Nintendo Switch games from their childhood. You'll stand there confused thinking "Wait, but that's... that's not old. That wasn't even that long ago. Wasn't that just like... last year or something? How were you a child such a short time ago? How the hell is the stuff you're nostalgic about so... _recent?"_ Then you'll finally understand how I feel when people, despite being adults, tell me their childhood game was Minecraft. Not Monkey Island or Mario 3, but freaking _Minecraft._
this video is so genuinely filled with seethe its actually insane
As Gen X can attest, every generation struggles with the feeling of aging out of the cohort that the majority of culture is targeting.
Gen X never aged in. The boomers went on too long and then the Millennials started early.
@@LittleLordFancyLad I don't agree. I'm too young to have a memory of it, granted, but retrospectively speaking, popular culture from the 90s seems like quintessental Gen X to me.
@@LittleLordFancyLad A lot of shows in the 90s targeted Gen X.
@@azazelazel @lainiwakura1776 Only the late 90s, and by then the Millennials were starting to come in to their own. The Gen X cohort was just too small and too apathetic to make the same impact.
@@azazelazelyeah agree, the late 80's and all of the 90's were incredibly GenX (in both the best and the worst ways)
Did this man really go "Yeah, my generation made music about going to the barber shop and mall in the 90s called Barbercore and Mallcore music. By the way, Gen Z is dumb because they have to name their nostalgia!"
Love this channel, but how can you directly contridict your point before you've even made it?
You always come up with names and concepts in your videos for trends you observe and care about, and then say zoomers have a tendency to name everything, my man, that’s a human tendency, that’s what you do in your videos
its so funny that he came up with a name to categorize the phenomenon of people categorizing things too much
Literally 😂
It's almost like categorization is a human trait or something
This feels like when Obi-Wan accidentally said something that could make some people think he is a Sith because of how broad a brush he painted Sith.
The past is now old man!
I think the point is that, at least from a Boomer point of view, is that the future isn't new!
The past is now young man
the irony of saying "erm frutiger aero isnt actually a thing" while being able to very very accurately describe, identify, and categorize it consistently, is very strange. You do have a point that sometimes some people can maybe tend to possibly over categorize and subdivide labels, but why yell at a cloud like that when talking about an aesthetic that clearly captured a particular look of a certain era? This feels more like a case of being proud of being meta, like this odd pride in being the first to say "this isnt a thing", rather than some substantive debunking of an aesthetic.
100%
So true lol
@@VeraEdelman Not true.
@@gibbyjibby0 Feels aren't truth.
You completely missed the point of the video. He acknowledges the design era and gives reasons for its existence. The reasons just aren't "hope for a green future" like those creating these sublabels ascribe.
All i pretty much hear from this is “im 40, blah blah, gen z isnt allowed to be nostalgic blah blah.”
That IS what it is
He literally says he thinks it's cool Gen z is old enough to be excited and he's excited himself to see what they do next. What video did yall watch?
I'm a younger millennial and don't have a problem with the label of "Frutiger Aero", and I don't think it's a problem that the name isn't necessarily intuitive or used at the time (which I think is also true of a lot of prominent art and design movements). The main thing to me is that you'll know it when you see it, and even though I never heard of this before this video, I instantly recognised what it meant with some visual examples.
These images were really a trip down memory lane for me just because it's a style that is now so out of fashion that it really feels like a time capsule. I agree with the point that these basically existed as a way to show off fancier computer graphics at the time because shiny, glowy, colourful, photorealsitic design really looked very futuristic at the time just because computers couldn't do that stuff before. It really didn't have anything to do with techno-optimistic propaganda.
I do have to say though that while I sort of get why people see it as optimistic, it also leaves me with a weird sort of cold and ethereal feeling too. This design always seemed to depict things that were pristine and devoid of any kind of actual human life. Like the liminal spaces discussed in a previous award winning video, there's often something kind of unnerving about how empty and lifeless it all is. On a surface level it looks realistic but that also serves to highlight how artifical it is at its core. I still like it though just because I really started getting into computers at the time and wanted to trick out my whole interface with as many shiny glowing orbs as possible when it was in style.
It feels sterile, which many depictions of the future are.
That's a very good take, you have put into words what I couldn't. It feels fesh and naturalistic, but also hauntingly artificial.
From what I understand Frutiger Aero is the name of a type of font that was highly popular in these designs at the time. Or it's a reference to the font artist whose font was popular, something along those lines 😅
And for sure I agree with you there, well said. We were all optimistic about the digital future but were still living in much simpler times compared to the 2010s and up.
Before social media and big tech ruined everything.
it truly does, its like slapping eco-friendly stuff on everything that is mass produced on chinese poor provinces, its not as hopeful as they present to be
Also i just think its cool that it has a name and ID as a graphic designer those kinda things are important to have in ur design vocab to appear amazing w/ clients 🤣
what you described is exactly what i like about it. its that bright happy dreaminess with a creepy vibe because of how fake and empty it looks. it reminds me of youtube videos that say places you've seen in your dreams because of that unnatural emptiness
Look I’m gonna be honest, I don’t vibe with this one JJ. I love your videos, as have I loved this one however, the need to categorise aesthetics is sort of born from the archival nature of the internet is it not? I think names grant access to a specific type of subject, one that encodes a certain feeling not akin to those found using more broad strokes. For example, we can say “I like metal” but you can also say “I like Finish gothic Black Metal” (metal heads please don’t kill me, I love you dearly.)
The first example is said to someone who may not be as familiar with you or this fact while the more specific option could be said to someone who is also familiar with the genre of metal music.
By giving names to “cores” and aesthetics we can communicate more effectively the visual and feeling we are trying to describe. We can rag on them but Gen Z have an amazing knack for navigating the infinite archive of the internet and gathering information. They can very easily create mood boards, places of discussion and also contribute to these aesthetics that then dominate advertising campaigns, clothing and even promote a way of thinking that applies itself to the real world.
I do appreciate the time and effort you put into your videos. I am an avid watcher of your channel and having a Canadian partner myself, I am able to relate to topics he has mentioned when talking about his home country.
That’s all I have to say really, if you see this (doubtful) all the best wishes from your many European viewers :)
your example sidesteps something that JJ mentions in the video. As someone who knows little about metal music, the phrase “Finnish black gothic metal” still gives me enough information to have a pretty good idea of what you’re talking about. “frutiger aero” does not do this. The phrase is completely uninformative, and like he says “2000s era shopping mall aesthetic” DOES provide the listener with adequate context.
Most of the commenters talking about this point are actually just considering search engine optimization, and the fact that “frutiger aero” is searchable. But this isn’t very insightful. It’s searchable because it’s the name that chosen, not the other way around.
@@elmomierz I understand what you are saying, but I have to ask you about your opinion on trends. Not everything starts with a name; Art nuevo is the vaguest term at its inception. “New Art”. What does that even mean? Anything created now is new art but we understand now that new art referred to a specific movement. I’m fumbling but do you kind of get what I’m trying to say?
@@shan4364 it’s beginning to sound like we agree that the name is bad. We can argue over whether or not it’s anyone’s fault, but it seems that at least you’ve admitted that these trends don’t always have good names.
Bro just let us remember and enjoy the good parts of our lives and some of our childhoods
I think you're too harsh on this. Literally the same thing as vaporwave which I've never seen you disapprove of.
the harsh title is a gimmick, but he's overall point seems reasonable
GenXer here. Screw all this fake nostalgia crap. I lived these decades; they weren’t that great.
@@gravityissues5210 Loved or lived?
@@aclstudios yeah, lived; typos galore. The only thing I miss about the past is the Blackberry keyboard. Seriously, I despise typing on smart phone touch screens.
That's not what the word literally means.
How is it make believe? Some people chose bad examples of it, but I was alive in the late 2000s/early 2010s and this was definitely a trend.
It was a design language, that was all. Zoomers think that this is some sort of universal shared experience. It's not.
@@fuosdi64 No one thinks that.
@@Momo-qe2zk I've watched about a dozen other videos and they all push that narrative
@@fuosdi64 Sure....
@@fuosdi64where are the other dozen videos
It isn’t just Gen Z, but us younger early/mid 90s millennials find it nostalgic too. Along with McBling and Frutiger Metro it was the aesthetic of our teen and very early adult years.
I dont think that the designers who create the frutiger aero aestetic were trying to create that narrative about how the future betrayed us, but that narrative resonates with a lot of the zoomer generation and can generate new artistic ideas
The designers were trying to create a bright and optimistic view of the future, as the "end of history" was still fresh, and the millennium bug wasn't the apocalypse. Except for 9/11 shock that stirred up American jingoism, the decade until 2008 was really optimistic.
That's why GenZ has that "lost future" feeling
No, they weren't. That said, the culture oozed with the promise that tech would remove the downside of nature, and enhance the upside, and a kurzweilian singularity just around the corner.
I think that’s very true. JJ saying that shifts in artists’ work and new aesthetics are driven by new artistic modalities/technologies feels super reductive. Art is absolutely influenced by culture and current events and values, even if it’s just in the reading of it.
There is definitely merit to what JJ said. I remember being at Best Buy with my father in the mid 2000s to look at a plasma flatscreen TVs to replace the gargantuan 50" CRT we had. Every demo screen had nature videos so they could show you how vibrant and life like it looked. I vividly remember watching a video that looked like an aquarium tank with fish and thinking to myself "this looks just like real life." Crazy how that's not even a thought I'd have regularly anymore because it's the norm.
literally how vaporwave works. dont hear him complaining about that though.
"As someone who is turning 40 this year"
Damn, I wish I'll look nearly as good at almost 40.
Haha
is the gay magic, for some reason most gay men age a lot better.
@@juanfranciscovillarroelthu6876anyone that marries men ages well
@@juanfranciscovillarroelthu6876 Less women nagging them.
@@URProductions I'm not gay but I've never been married and have always been single, and I think I look good for 42.
JJ: "I'm interested in the advancement of culture and its effect on people"
Culture: **advances and has an effect on people**
JJ: "NO! NOT LIKE THAT!"
TBF we millenials were guilty of this overspecification trend first.
We chopped up the 80's retro aesthetic into such specific peaces that they have become indistigushiable from each other (Vaporwave, Outrun, Synthwave, Chillwave, Dark Synthwave, Retrowave, etc.) no matter, which of these you look up, you'll find the same virtual highway sunset image.
I'm a millennial and we were the anti label generation.
well i can help you distinguish a bit, synthwave and outrun are the same thing. and everyone tags that grid highway stuff with all these terms for SEO, which muddies the waters for people. you just have to learn how to tell some apart. for example, i find synthwave/outrun is more 80's city night time themed, and often consumerism positive. while vaporwave is more late 80's early 90's daytime mall, and questionable on the consumerism stance.
and thus ends me proving your point by being a millennial and being very pedantic with aesthetics.
Crusty old millennial here, and tbh I was going to comment this exact thing. We're absolutely guilty of turning every possible visual vibe into a curated, labelled aesthetic. We were the ones out here making micro-subcultures that died in a day like fucking slimepunk, we don't really have the right to mock zoomers for this. its just young people doing young people shit, trying to make sense of a big confusing world by giving names to things and trying to find patterns in all the chaos. To that I say "have fun".
I honestly just called it retro and vaporwave as its easier to search it that way
it does have a purpose if you want a certain style of music
As a gen z myself, I only see this in certain spaces anyway. No one I know irl knows or cares. I wouldn’t necessarily be nostalgic over it. There’s plenty of media that came out of the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s that I am nostalgic over, and I liked seeing those designs as a kid. But most of my nostalgia is not purely aesthetic driven.
fr, I'm way more nostalgic for the shitty color grading of the early 2000's films than any OS aesthetic.
it’s the connection to that time that’s visualized as an aesthetic
@@RealMacJones brian eno stated something about that, the flaws of a technology becoming memorable and nostalgic
You guys realize this is how language evolves right? You make some sounds with your mouth or scribble some shapes onto paper and if enough people understand what you are trying to convey then it becomes as real as any other word.
it’s literally documenting things, idk why he has a problem with that
if mallsoft is real then why not frutiger aero mr mccanada
Exactly.
I feel like I'm getting reprimanded by my dad
for real tho lol
I am truly sorry i don’t understand your title of gen z “trying to be nostalgic?” Excuse me what do you mean trying? Do you not think that gen z is old enough to be nostalgic? Sound like you’re gatekeepering.
I am gen z almost 25 and nostalgic for a lot of things.
Frugtiger Aero geels like its supposed to be build on fun, comforting and down to earth.
I am gen z almost 25 and nostalgic for a lot of things.
A perfect blend of technology and nature. Thats what makes it so appealing.
So what if its not realistically accurate its supposed to be fun.
Im not about to have some Millennial tell me otherwise
I just turned 21 today and I couldn't agree more. As a kid I grew up with my cousin and her older sister who is a millennial, and I remember her and her friends were all nostalgic over 90s stuff back in the early 2010s when she was an older teenager.
I remember Gen Xers from my parent's age saying millennials couldn't be nostalgic for 90s stuff that time because they were children and that bugged me.
Why does it matter to older people what youngsters are nostalgic for? You can only be nostalgic when you're like, 40?
As a 13yo or so I couldn't understand the concept of "90s nostalgia" my millennial cousins and other people their age used to talk about, but since I became a little older, I began to understand, and now in my 20s, I totally understand.
As someone who is 25, I feel your pain lol
I bet this one will be as controversial as the Wikipedia episode.
Yeah idk if I can even make it through this one. Seems like strained finger wagging to me
@@pyrotechnic96 Would some temple run gameplay in the corner help you make it through?
jj loves to be so beyond self righteous and contrarian it turns into cringe💔
@@pyrotechnic96I mean, when I was a teen in the 00s, it wasn't "cool", it was corporate allegria but 15 years earlier. You can like it (I personally hate it but that's just my opinion) it just wasn't a thing the youth at the time even liked, I thought it was random, like vaporwave but neutered and corporate.
I think JJ also just doesn't like arbitrary labels that much.
@@pyrotechnic96gotta watch the video to hear the argument…
I think that categorizing aesthetics is pretty inconsequential. It's nice to have a name for a style that you see every now and then
Bro is acting like gen z didn’t also grow up with fruitiger aero when I vividly remember this from my childhood
Same. Some people seem to think older gen Zs are like 12 when they're actually 27 lol
Gen Z runs from 1997-2012. A good portion of your generation did not grow up seeing this design language.
@@fuosdi64 It's noted that what we refer to as Frutiger Aero raised popularity in the late 90s and lost in around 2016/2017. This means the oldest of our generation was 20/21 years old when it ended, while the youngest was 4/5 (for myself I was 13/14), and this is enough time for most of the entire generation to remember and grow up with it and be nostalgic over it. I began using a PC when I was 2, that was in 2005, and I bet most gen Zs born in families who could afford a PC or tablet/smartphone spent a lot of time in front of a screen as well. I used Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 7, and on.
What people forget is that most of us didn't start using internet now or only after we became teens, we were mostly basically born using PCs or for the kiddos, smartphones.
I'm gen z but on the younger side (I'm 16) but I still remember this aesthetic. it was everywhere before the switch to minimalism
@@fuosdi64 it was still 2014-2015 when those designs still existed 💀 I even had a computer with that design, and my phone and tablet at the time had that design...what are u talking about??
turning 40 means shit that happened 10 years ago isn't nostalgia. that just happened like .. a minute ago.
I don't see why you can't both categorise and appreciate as a whole to a certain extent.
Exactly
“If you break nostalgia up into tons of micro-labels, you can’t appreciate it” why?
I am kind of lost how can you appreciate somthing "whole" but to an extent, when you classifying something you are separating one thing from another. and also appreshateing something "whole" but to an extent is not possible because literally "whole" means every part or everything of something and to an extent is up to some part of something. I hope I am making sense sorry about this, did not meen to be rood or anything. (sun)
@@nandishhiremath1439 can a doctor appreciate a human body even though she classifies different parts?
Can someone appreciate their country even though the country is made of different provinces?
@@cara-seyunnobody appreciates America because of the history and culture of Hummingdinger Arizona along with the other few hundred thousand towns in the country, which is a more analogous example.
@@jumpvelocity3953 not really? No one is claiming Frutiger Aero is the entirety of Gen Z nostalgia
Liking things isn't supposed to be stressful.
i feel like i’m being gaslit
Don't we all
how are you telling me that FF7 (@ 12:17) didnt look geat as a kid!?!?!?!
You are being gaslit. Don't fall for it. Your feelings are valid.
“There is no war in Ba Sing Se”
Educated*
Even being Raised in Mexico for the first 12 years of my life, i can even say we Went through this Frutiger Aero Nostalgia, it irritates me that i have heard people say the early 2000s didn't have the nostalgia the 80s or 90s brought, but as someone who wasn't allowed to get out of home at a young age, and I would submerge myself into my computer for Hours at a time, I can assure you that I can remember when i would have vivid dreams of this Futuristic warm future feeling the themes of Microsoft and even early 2000s phones would bring, before I even knew what an asthetic was or before I knew how to even describe it.
There wasnt a lot of money in our house hold but all i wanted was a computer to play those Flash Games Cartoon Network advertised all over on TV in the early 2000s, i can clearly remember when i was trying to navigate the slow Internet we had back in the day. Good times
"I'm getting old, so let me tell people half my age on the internet that their childhood is make-believe!"
1994 baby here, I was in junior high when Frutiger Aero began and ended high school at its end. I never knew how popular this would become in the realm of nostalgia, and now I kind of miss it being the default aesthetic.
god forbid gen-z be nostalgic about something!
I’m curious about what JJ thinks zoomers *should* be nostalgic about
@cara-setun Idk, but as a Zoomer (2006), some of my nostalgia is for Skylanders, Zool Pals, Club Penguin, Animal Jam, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and old Minecraft TH-camrs. Stuff like that.
Did you even watch the video? He welcomed you to be nostalgic, just don't make stuff up and educate yourself instead.
@@cara-seyunthings as they where. Helps to educate yourself or talk with people from the era instead of just making stuff up from an uninformed basis. But Gen Z be Gen Z ...
@@christianconrad5200 Frutiger Aero certainly was a part of the style of the 2000’s, and it’s not like that’s the only thing Gen Z is nostalgic about (as the comment section itself shows)
“Old man yells at the clouds for 20 minutes and 25 seconds”
Welp, it’s real. JJ McCullough mentions Frutiger Aero.
I get the sense that he didn't really enjoy having to say those words so many times in one day lol
Ok, but genuinely, the the shiny stuff and gradients and blues and transparents and all that stuff from the 2000s looks a billion times better than the terrible 2010s and 2020s artstyles of everything. Like, people complain about the "corporate" artstyles, but that stuff is literally everywhere, not just in corporate messaging.
bro is 40 and yapped about a nostalgia term for 20 minutes 😭💀
As a Gen Z myself, I think why we like the fruitger aero aesthetic so much is because we finally have something to be nostalgic about, instead of being called “too young” to be nostalgic for anything, we’re just trying to cling onto our childhood as much as possible.
as part of Gen Z myself, I feel like we're a very nostalgic and sentimental generation in general. But specifically with fruitger aero, I think it comes from how we "grew up" fast and were exposed to adult things very young, so now we cling to anything that represents a sense of innocence before our unrestricted internet access. Things like fruitger aero provide a sort of romanticized view of the internet, not that the items in fruitger aero themselves are "hopeful" or "optimistic", but that our views at the time of seeing them were, if that makes sense. It's not the images or the creation of the images that represents the aesthetic, it's the context in which we consumed them, as optimistic kids ourselves.
So true, I never thought about it but my whole life i felt that I was either learning things earlier then I should or later then everyone else
MY generation is SPECIAL because we were exposed to things at a young age! Other generations are DIFFERENT!!
I don't know how Gen-Z can be characterized as growing up quickly. No teenager in the US has worried about being drafted since the 1970s. If anything the more recent generation are the first the never had to stop doing what they did as kids. Spongebob, the Simpsons, etc., are still on the air.
@@JustAManFromThePastThis is true to an extent but to be fair the newest generations have to worry about at least a few things older generations didn't. For example I think younger people don't feel as safe in schools nowadays due to a variety of reasons.
@@Copperkaiju @Copperkaiju I think the greatest detriment to the younger generation is the lack of hope in a better future, probably appropriate for our times. People care about how they're moving, not where they are. If you woke up tomorrow with 50 million bucks you'd be overjoyed, unless you were a billionaire, then you'd be suicidal. An unprecedented and impossible to replicate historic run made almost everything better for most people, at least in the West, from 1870 to 1970. Not only did you go from hot-air balloons to men on the moon, the homes of the average person became filled with devices that would have gotten them hanged for witchcraft in Salem a few centuries before, things we wouldn't even want to try to live without: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, central heating, air conditioning, running hot and cold water, let alone TVs and radios, then VCRs and DVD players. Women, racial and sexual minorities saw honest to God remarkable progress in their own lifetimes. With the election of Obama a lot of that low hanging fruit was gone. We had our black president, gay marriage is law. Everything after this is getting at margins, in culture and technology, much more work for much less gain.
"Zoomers are inventing fake nostalgia, frutiger aero isn't real!"
- Man with a Floral Shoppe vinyl over his shoulder
an attitude towards nostalgia cant be right or wrong, it just IS and this gives us a more valuable lesson about the z gen
what would that lesson be?
@@matturner6890 hmm tbh i dont know but id love to listen to someone smarter than me talking about it
I think you may have missed the mark on this one unfortunately, though this kind of fanaticism over aesthetic 'lore' is not something I partake in, I see it as a communal activity that is good for this generation, I don't think its an exclusionary thing to chop it up, merely by doing so I think it provides a easier way for young people to define and then discuss and create in those styles, I'd say that by merely calling it the '2000's aesthetic', you would be depriving the opportunity for lots of young people to create interesting things for each other, and how is that not a good thing? I think you may be seeing this level of fanaticism as something of a symptom of this generation's internet obsession, but I think it is unfair for a generation which was (involuntarily) raised in large part by the internet to then use the internet in this way, to me this comes across as someone a bit older misunderstanding a new social phenomenon as some kind of crisis, Though I agree that intenet-fuelled isolation and obsessiveness are issues with our current youth, this is an outlet of that which doesn't see any real harm and is not a good use of time to try to discredit.
yeah i agree, not gonna lie he is definitely acting like this is some type of problem when it’s not. like idk man i think its just the first generation of smart phone kids just like…becoming adults and trying to remember stuff from their youth (as every generation has done). obviously that experience for early gen z is very different than his as a millennial so i just think he doesn’t really understand
"Aging millennial angry at kids for creating their own nostalgia language"
For bending History for their political narrative. Yes.
@@christianconrad5200 wtf you mean by political stuff, this is just nostalgia lmao silly pictures that gen z grow up with most gen z doesn't even care about politics also what history bending??? You can't be serious
@@christianconrad5200 how is any of this political, god forbid we find joy in something without thinking of the bad things in life
i feel like this is really contradictory when you literally THE vaporwave album in the background.
you need an explanation for it. Frutiger Aero is just a subsect of the Y2K aesthetic.
you are really sounding like boomer here more than usual.
And on this episode of JJ Doesn't Get It™: Why modern schools of graphic design aren't real.
JJ, I love you, but Frutiger Aero was a legitimate design movement that had wide reaching influence on many different industries including architecture and interior design. Your comments about why having to explain what the name Frutiger Aero means demonstrates its failure could be said about literally any design style with strange or silly names (Art Deco and Bauhaus come to mind). Also, being able to subdivide the style into more specific aesthetics is useful to narrow down the emotional impact of art composed in those styles.
Having been exposed to far more diverse media over our lives, Gen Z attaches emotion to our nostalgia differently to Millennials, but that doesn't mean it's any less significant or valuable than yours.
I agree with all of this and I’m particularly baffled by the claim of most design movements being value neutral, especially coming from someone who made an entire video on the ideological underpinnings of pre/post-modernism.
can’t agree more with you
@@ztl2505 I don't read him as saying "most design movements are value neutral" - his point is more along the line that nostalgia itself is not inherently political. Trying to interpret a feeling about a particular style associated with a specific era as political statement or philosophy about the present is a misguided analysis. The more useful thing to do, would be to study the values and views of the style, and only then relate it to our present.
In what way do you mean Gen Z has "been exposed to far more diverse media"? Previous generations are still alive and being exposed to the same media Gen Z is.
@@MisterM2402 Gen Z has had exposure to the Internet from birth, meaning they began their lives with the highest density of media exposure throughout our lives compared to the previous generation, which in turn had a higher exposure than the generation previous.
Internet > Mass and Media > Traditional Media
The reason im nostalgic for frutiger aero is not because its an ”aesthetic”… It’s a god damn style of graphic design! The time TH-cam looked like a TV, and Instagram looked like a camera! When graphig design wasn’t flat and soulless, but had depth and shading. It looked nice :) Unlike the flat interfaces, icons, and design we have today…
Regardless of whether Gen Z is really more prone to hyper-categorizing concepts into smaller and smaller subcategories, I don’t see how that objectively encourages gatekeeping or minimalization. You can easily label multiple different aesthetics while still recognizing their similarities and how they can heavily overlap one another, or even fall within larger, more encompassing genre umbrellas.
Even JJ admits that Millennial vibes like Vaporwave or Synthwave can be further broken down into further subgenres and this presumably doesn’t have a negative affect on their greater nostalgic aesthetic, it feels weird that he thinks this is fine but when Zoomers do the same thing suddenly it’s “narrowminded” or “limited”.
Also how can we be too fixated on categorization, but also trying to “broaden the term” to include “unrelated themes” at the same time? Are we really the ones being nitpicky here?
just watch his Vaporwave video man, he is not bashing people for categorising stuff, just for pretending the categories are the set on stone things they are claimed to be, instead of a small part of a bigger thing
as a gen z, i agree w this 100%. i felt very confused with what point this was trying to make. to me the hypercategorization serves to give names to and appreciate the smaller aspects of a whole. to say that it somehow stifles our appreciation is incongruent to me
Is every generation doomed to forget what it was like to be young? Kids in the 90s did the same thing with their hyper specific sub cultutes and music genres. A lot of these "zoomer" classifications were originally coined by millenials and gen x.
@annwn.Um, some Gen Z are adults now.
@gallophiliac-scum
Most Gen Zs are in their 20s now
And it's starting to happen with Gen alpha too I think
This guy is in my nightmare blunt rotation
I was born in 1968. Everything about this video is utterly incomprehensible to me. I will now go off to a cabin in the woods. Good night and God bless.
Don't worry, us millennials are marching ever closer to that same inevitable destination with each passing year. So, assuming you're still alive then, you won't be alone.
You're around the same age as my dad
[I'm not insulting you or anything]
With all due respect I laughed a bit
ah crap, who let the nursing home door unattended again ?
As a millennial, I don't claim this guy. Congrats dude, you've become the boomer.
lol right
I get that it might seem a bit excesive and hence annoying to you that all of these sub-categorazations keep being added to the Frutiger Aero family, but to me they're as necessary as music subgenres are. Let's say that you wanna listen to rock music, but not just something stereotypical of our general notion of rock music like AC/DC or Led Zeppelin; sometimes you might wanna go more into a psychedelic path with bands like Pink Floyd or a progressive one with King Crimson. For people searching for visual aesthetics of the mid 00's to early 2010's it's more or less the same: a couple of years prior it would've been quite hard to find a specific sub-branch of images you remember from your childhood, put that in contrast to today with all of these new nomenclatures and it's a breeze.
J.J. being a boomer trapped in a millennial's body is my favorite genre of his videos.
Hahaha! OMG he totally is a Boomer in a Millennial body. He's going on 40, but has the attitude of a stuffy 70 year old man a lot - especially with this weird video and his cringe take on Wikipedia.
“Make believe nostalgia” yeah man. Nostalgia is make believe. What do you think vaporwave was? That never happened, it’s the imagined sensation of nostalgic aesthetics being modified to represent a feeling that transcends its original setting. Nostalgia is just a form of make believe.
According to JJ: Kids aren't nostalgic like we used to be.
Nostalgia was better when he was a kid
I love watching other generations be confused about other generations
This video is actually awful. He makes like 1 point in the entire video and then for the rest of it he rambles on about how gen Z "just wants to be nostalgic". He LITERALLY AGREES that the aesthetic was popular in the late 2000's and early 2010's, so he refutes that one point he made. Just generally a badly put together video
I had never heard this term but somehow I immediately got it. The font and the Windows interface immediately came to mind. With every JJ video I learn a new cultural concept.
Not that it’s terribly important, but the whole “desire to categorize everything” is something I do a lot of, mainly so I can use those terms in ways to either search for more of that thing. It’s like finding amazing chocolate and wanting to know exactly what type it is so I can go find the store that made this specific chocolate, and “it’s just chocolate” is kind of unhelpful.
Dang, you’re right. I thought I had nostalgia for this kinda stuff but you made me realize I was just imagining things all along.
Gatekeeping nostalgia is the most millenial thing i’ve ever heard
As a millennial, I agree and this guy is making us all look bad. He never stopped being a hipster.
I'm a Zillennial proudly keeping it alive and looking proudly on a new generation of gatekeepers 🙏
This is what happens when you get into your 40s and still refuse to grow up and accept the fact people born after you have their own version of nostalgia.
Just out of pure spite for this man, I’m going to become a part of the Frutiger Aero community.
pack it up folks, our generation isn’t allowed to feel nostalgic apparently!
oh dear! definitely not because this man is angry at floating fish!
I think JJ doesnt get that aesthetics have become their own subculture. Its not just "2000s era UI", its the broad aesthetic that itself is a culture. In the past, most subcultures only had aesthetics as a by-product, but it wasnt the main thing the subculture was based upon. Punk has a look, but its mostly based around music and politics. In current times though, a lot of subcultures have sprouted out, probably because of Tiktok, that are almot entirely based on aesthetics, like Cottagecore, or Dark Academia. The aesthetic itsrlf is the subculture.
Agreed. Previous generations' cultures were defined more by music/art/fashion/design: i.e. Grunge, Memphis, Woodstock, Art Deco, Jazz, Bauhaus, etc. I think that the current focus on aesthetics might have something to do with the ubiquity of computers.
A good example of "it's not that deep". Sure, as someone born in 1996, the style does make me nostalgic, but Occam's razor seems to apply here.
"Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" 🤔
You aren't Gen Z, lol.
@@fuosdi64he’s edging on it though
@@boogers69420 So? It's still not considered Gen Z lol. Their experience is going to be Millennial.
@@fuosdi64that logic doesn’t make any sense
Make believe? Just because you don't experience or relate to something doesn't make it less real. I used to believe the future was going to be some beautiful, eco friendly utopia because of this aesthetic. I loved the aesthetic before it had a name.
don’t make it other peoples’ problem that you don’t understand things lol
it gives "get off my lawn"
do you actually think teenagers can't be nostalgic or something
I think the problem you're finding is less that people want to label parts of their nostalgia, but more that smaller video essayists have a tendency to shoehorn in shallow political commentary to justify their videos existing. Nothing wrong with being excited to talk about a particular aesthetic, but it's sophomoric to try and turn them into these grand narratives about capitalism and climate change.
Thanks for the new word "sophomoric " I knew what this was but I did not know this was the word.
But those things are related. It just sounds like you're a coward that just wants to bury your head in the sand.
I have to disagree that the video essayists are trying to have "political" commentary, only one of them in the clips shown talked about climate change, with the rest expressing what they thought they aesthetic expressed
@@Subzearo You can connect just about anything to capitalism or other grand narratives, but the way these people do it is inevitably shallow and poorly supported. If you want to make a grand point about a cultural trend of tech optimism you need more support than just a niche design style or it ends up being empty. It's elevating Frutiger Aero to be the main representative of something it was only a minor symptom of.
Half agree with what you say. If the political commentary is relevant to the aesthetic, then it’s not dumb to talk about it. Every aesthetic exist for some reason, and sometimes economic conditions, pop culture are at the center of it. Some people have some interesting stuff to say about it, but of course not everyone.
“GRRRR HOW DARE TEENAGERS BE NOSTALGIC GRRRR😡😡😡 KIDS THEESE DAYS MAN ”
Go cry about it old man
dude felt the last of his youth stripped away when he realized the generation beneath him missed the past, and did everything in his power to pretend it wasnt real. including documenting this cope on youtube.