The return of retro.

Although I have yet to see this aesthetic turning up on my local store shelves quite yet, it does seem we are at the start of a backward looking design trend in food packaging, retro styles are quickly becoming the rage.

General Mills, Kraft, Pepsi, Coke and Nabisco all seem to be hopping onto this style and I for one think it’s great. Gone is the wave of gradients, drop shadows, outer glows, and swooshes. Replace now with simple, bold colours and a generous dose of white space.

A few examples of dropping the gradients include:
Miracle Whip
Rits Crackers, Oreo Cookies
Pepsi
Coke
General Mills cereals

I hope this trend sticks around for a few years, because as I’ve mentioned before modern food packaging often leaves something to be desired in terms of classiness and taste.

Can it work on the web?

This topic also peaks my interest because I’m interested to see how this gradient free trend will combine with our gradient mad web 2.0 world. Everything in web 2.0 has been dipped in plexiglass and polished to a high gloss sheen. Do simple bold shapes and colours like this work on the web?

Often times we rely on gradients & drop shadows to introduce some depth to our flat canvas, given that we don’t have the influence of outside light and texture in the same ways print design does. So it will be interesting to see what happens on the web when you take away our often (ab)used layer styles.