[doright]

I think this is the reason why I feel so much nostalgia for the sort of 2012-era vectorflourish sort of aesthetic. Look at the first Google image result for "Zune" for an example[1]. Gradient-type stenciling with references to the organic world and a sort of optimism implied overall (the same sort that proponents of Frutiger Aero talk about but this is not quite the same thing, I think it's somewhat flatter but not ultra-flat like everything is now).

This aesthetic represents to me the dead tech-optimist future we were promised but never got. It's a "ghost future." Mark Fisher had a lot of interesting writing about this phenomenon as applied to music, termed hauntology[2]. It's about how some genres/labels of music (like Ghost Box) were characterized as a misremembered past that was perceived as more rosy than in reality.

I suspect but cannot be certain that "vectorflourish" aesthetics like those and/or simple but not condescendingly dumbed-down ones like Bootstrap 1.0 will experience a resurgence in the coming decade, the same as the "Windows XP" aesthetic of ten years prior had a while ago, in the name of reclaiming such a lost future. With today's CSS I imagine it would be much easier to recreate such an aesthetic than in the past when mostly you had to use Photoshop to create all the raster assets.

[1] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61hOqru2AWS.jpg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology?wprov=sfla1