Lo-Fi Design lofi art

Most designers working today didn’t get their start pushing pixels around with their wrist. They drew something, built something, had that Aha! Moment without a screen in front of them. We shouldn’t be surprised that lo-fi design is taking off at this moment when it’s never been easier to fabricate something that looks like the real thing.

Why now and what’s next?

Elliot Ulm

The website for this Brooklyn nightclub is heavy on lo-fi design elements. The all-caps, sans-serif font feels like a nod to the early days of Ticketmaster, and all that’s missing is a seat number and a barcode. Primary colors dominate— especially the blue that looks an awful lot like cyan—taking us back to the halcyon days of inkjets that worked all their magic with just a few cartridges. The website for this Brooklyn nightclub is heavy on lo-fi design elements. The all-caps, sans-serif font feels like a nod to the early days of Ticketmaster, and all that’s missing is a seat number and a barcode. Primary colors dominate—especially the blue that looks an awful lot like cyan—taking us back to the halcyon days of inkjets that worked all their magic with just a few cartridges. The website for this Brooklyn nightclub

Good Room BK

Airbnb

Lo-Fi Girl started out as a YouTube channel that played lo-fi music (think Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Pavement) set to imagery of an anime girl studying and relaxing in a room. She was inspired by a character in the 1995 Studio Ghibli film Whisper of the Heart and bears many of the hallmarks of lo-fi design, like muted colors and nostalgia for a pre-HD world. 10 million subscribers and 818 thousand Instagram followers later, it’s become a cultural movement. VICE Media partnered with Lo-Fi Girl for a viral campaign to raise awareness about mental health issues in teens. Lo-Fi Girl started out as a YouTube channel that played lo-fi music (think Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Pavement) set to imagery of an anime girl studying and relaxing in a room. She was inspired by a character in the 1995 Studio Ghibli

Lo-fi Girl

Elliot Ulm is a graphic designer whose aesthetic seems to call to mind the ’80s and ’90s, while his self-awareness and a sense of irony that’s more modern. “Graphic design is very important!” shouts one poster (available for sale on his site), only to be answered by another headline below: “No it isn’t.” Another of his posters pokes at the whole “design thinking” trend, describing it as follows: “If it looks cool then it is good.” His font choices are dominated by a mid-century sans-serif look that brings to mind Articulat, a font that was popular about 30 years ago. Elliot Ulm is a graphic designer whose aesthetic seems to call to mind the ’80s and ’90s, while his self-awareness and a sense of irony that’s more modern. “Graphic design is very important!” shouts one poster (available for sale on his site), only

This recent campaign by tech giant Airbnb is literally just a slideshow set to music. For about a minute, we watch as photos of a mom and her two daughters on vacation appear. Their surroundings aren’t tropical; the pictures don’t look Photoshopped, and there’s no fancy editing or post-production to speak of. But its lack of slickness makes it totally transfixing, and you can’t look away. It’s as if you’re flipping through someone’s private collection of photos graphs instead of watching a produced brand campaign. This recent campaign by tech giant Airbnb is literally just a slideshow set to music. For about a minute, we watch as photos of a mom and her two daughters on vacation appear. Their surroundings aren’t tropical; the pictures don’t look Photoshopped, and there’s no fancy editing or post-produc

The site for this AI research lab that claims to be “expanding the imaginative powers of the human species” features a font that looks like it’s straight off a dot matrix computer. The pattern of letters in constant motion is an unsubtle nod to The Matrix, one of the biggest hits of the ’90s. But beyond the pop culture references, there’s also a simplicity to the way the site unfolds; it feels like a conscious reference to the early days of the World Wide Web. Remember when sites were merely a collection of menus and buttons? Midjourney’s design seems to ask the question: Is what we have today really an improvement on that? The site for this AI research lab that claims to be “expanding the imaginative powers of the human species” features a font that looks like it’s straight off a dot matrix computer. The

Midjourney

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Alexandra Wozniczka

Design

Mesh Flinders

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don't call it a comeback

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The latest trend in design puts cutting-edge

technologies in their place, letting the idea itself take center stage.

You’re 16, it’s the mid-1990s. You know your crush’s class schedule better than your own. You’ve spoken to them once or twice—about what else, music—so, clenched tightly in your palm at the bottom of your jeans pocket is your first mixtape. As you hand it over, you feel your insides drop, certain of the coming rejection. But they take it and smile. They say something like “Cool,” or “Can’t wait to listen.” You could float away.

With a mixtape, you often heard siblings or dogs in the background. Or, if you’d recorded a track off the radio, there'd be static left over, and maybe the voice of the DJ for a few seconds. This quality of sound or imagery being imperfect—often intentionally so—is at the heart of the lo-fi aesthetic, regardless of its artistic medium. Lo-fi artists consciously lean into the difficulty that was inherent in the creation of their work, rather than try to cover it up.

Good Room BK

cool then it is good.” His font choices are dominated by a mid-century sans-serif look that brings to mind Articulat, a font that was popular about 30 years ago.

Elliot Ulm is a graphic designer whose aesthetic seems to call to mind the ’80s and ’90s, while his self-awareness and a sense of irony that’s more modern. Graphic design is very important!” shouts one poster (available for sale on his site), only to be answered by another headline below: “No it isn’t.” Another of his posters pokes at the whole “design thinking” trend, describing it as follows: “If it looks

Elliot Ulm

Instagram followers later, it’s become a cultural movement. VICE Media partnered with Lo-Fi Girl for a viral campaign to raise awareness about mental health issues in teens.

Lo-Fi Girl started out as a YouTube channel that played lo-fi music (think Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, early Pavement) set to imagery of an anime girl studying and relaxing in a room. She was inspired by a character in the 1995 Studio Ghibli film Whisper of the Heart and bears many of the hallmarks of lo-fi design, like muted colors and nostalgia for a pre-HD world. 10 million subscribers and 818 thousand

Lo-fi Girl

photo album instead of watching a produced brand campaign.

Airbnb

days of the World Wide Web. Remember when sites were merely a collection of menus and buttons? Midjourney’s design seems to ask the question: Is what we have today really an improvement on that?

The site for this AI research lab that claims to—and may well be—“expanding the imaginative powers of the human species” features a font that looks like it’s straight off a dot matrix computer. The pattern of letters in constant motion is an unsubtle nod to The Matrix, one of the biggest hits of the ’90s. But beyond the pop culture references, there’s also a simplicity to the way the site unfolds; it feels like a conscious reference to the early

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Midjourney

Why now and what’s next?

What Does Lo-Fi mean in the

What Does Lo-Fi Mean in the Design World?

With the proliferation of easy-to-use digital tools, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that even the best design work over the last decade has started to look boringly proficient. Filters and design software give even a 12-year-old the ability to create something that looks, to the untrained eye, like it was made professionally. Lo-fi design is a reaction to that. You could even go so far as to call it a rejection of it: It’s a nod to simpler times when we needed our fingers to do more than just move a mouse around. Here are a few recent examples of quality lo-fi design:

Lo-fi design reiterates that the most important element of any design is the idea itself, not the fancy toolbox of applications you used to gloss it up,”

—karen manganillo, creative director

Lo-fi design reiterates that the most important element of any design is the idea itself, not the fancy toolbox of applications you used to gloss it up. Lo-fi design reiterates that the most important element of any design is the idea itself, not the fancy toolbox of applications you used to gloss it up. Lo-fi design reiterates that the most important element of any design is the idea itself, not the fancy toolbox of applications you used to gloss it up.

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There it is again—the heart. What is it about lo-fi that makes us feel something that digital can’t? It’s what made VICE Media tap Lo-Fi Girl for its campaign on mental health, it’s what makes Good Room's calendar—which could have easily been given a flashier treatment—so captivating. And it’s what gives us that blast of teenage, mixtape angst whenever we see 8-bit graphics or a dusty CD case.

Why now? In three simple words: Context is everything. If Airbnb’s spot had appeared 10 years ago, people would have been sure it was a mistake (or the result of marketing budget cuts). But as we deal today with more digital content than anyone knows what to do with, it’s refreshing to see something pared down, unvarnished, from the heart.

This is lo-fi (short for low fidelity), both in its delirious pleasure and excruciating pain. Because let’s be honest, all that holding down Play and Record at the same time, hand-writing the names of each track—it was a chore. Much easier to drop tracks into a playlist, type the names of the songs, push pixels around with a mouse. But a mixtape, in all its labor-intensive, analog glory, was all heart. And all lo-fi.

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Lo-fi design is a stripped-down aesthetic that harkens back to a time before high-definition screens dominated our lives. Designers consciously going for a lo-fi look often use colors that are intentionally subdued and desaturated in order to make their work look older than it actually is—typically from the 1970s up to the turn of the 21st century. Sometimes, they’ll even go so far as to degrade the image quality itself. All of these techniques are aimed at expressing a longing for the past, for a simpler time, before the invention of smartphones. To this end, lo-fi often borrows colors from the Vaporwave art style (a throwback aesthetic style itself) that emerged in the early 2010s, combining those hues with imagery associated with anime, which gained popularity in the '80s and '90s. Lo-fi design reiterates that the most important element of any design is the idea itself, not the fancy toolbox of applications you used to gloss it up,” said Karen Manganillo, a creative director based in North Carolina.

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click on any of these floating boxes to read more

Lo-fi design reiterates that the most important element of any design is the idea itself, not the fancy toolbox of applications you used to gloss it up.

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Lo-fi design reiterates

Lo-fi design reiterates that the most important element of any design is the idea itself, not the fancy toolbox of applications you used to gloss it up.

Lo-fi lessons

@andrey azizov

@foxrockett studio

@swoop nebula

@jzcreative space

Get the analog look in under a minute with these tutorials.

@foxrockett studio

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