Vintage design, or retro aesthetics and branding, is making a big impact on today’s design trends. Designers are using Art Deco patterns, retro typography, or Mid-century aesthetics in brand identities and ad campaigns; all these things make audiences nostalgic and connect them to happy times of their past.
It’s always relevant to create innovative designs, but a vintage-inspired approach and retro designs never go out of fashion. It invokes nostalgia and can trigger a strong emotional connection to a product or design of the past.
What is Retro Branding?
Retro branding is bringing back old fashions, designs, and styles into modern trends and connecting your target audiences of consumers to their past good memories and making them feel nostalgic. Brands and companies use old logos, tag lines, colour palettes, or packaging to make people remember their old good times and create a sense of authenticity.
Vintage Elements That Make Your Brand Prominent
When planning out your next vintage-inspired design project, it is important to modernize historical elements in order to grab attention. Audiences are open to reinterpretations of this trend while being attracted to elements that tap into nostalgia. Finding a balance between these approaches is what will make a retro branding design uniquely compelling.
Simple Shapes And Circles
Minimal graphic elements are a timeless design that can be used to draw attention within branding, website design, and advertising. The simplicity of this trend refers back to mid-century and Bauhaus design. Simple shapes and circles can be combined with cut-out images related to your design. Premium photographs for this collage look can be found in Stills extensive library. These elements can also be mixed with serif typefaces to create juxtaposition within the design.
Read more: Bauhaus Design Principles – Tate
Limited Color Schemes
Limited color schemes refer back to various retro-inspired design styles. To embrace this trend, you can pair it with other elements that allow you to make a bold statement. This can be done with more striking vectors or imagery. To place emphasis on a key part of your design, use a contrasting tone for one element to best utilize your vintage color palette.
Read more: Color Psychology – Verywell Mind
Vintage Typography
Vintage-inspired typefaces aren’t going anywhere. When choosing more ornate serif typography, it’s best to mix with a modern San serif font to create balance. Pairing two opposing fonts allows for more dynamic and interesting compositions. If you are limited to using one typeface, another way to stand out is by utilizing vivid colors or clean patterns to add contrast with more traditional typography.
Read more:: History of Typography – Britannica
Vintage Textures and Noise
When creating a vintage design, texture and noise can be the finishing touches that make a photo or composition look antique. Placing a vintage texture over a photograph can add an unexpected stylistic feature to any design. This allows a composition to stand out because of the positive nostalgic references it can pull from with older forms of photography and editing styles.
Imagery And Illustrations
These are important elements of any design that have the power to evoke feelings from a certain era. Imagery and illustrations can be a dominant player in classifying a design as vintage and creating a unique impact on its audience. Feel free to pair vintage imagery and illustrations with modern text for a fresh new approach to your layout. You can also experiment by mixing more modern imagery with vintage-inspired illustrations or vice versa. Our eyes tend to be attracted to imagery first, so it’s essential to have high-quality images in your design. Stills can be your go-to resource for that.
Read more: History of Illustration – The British Library
Latest Vintage Trends
Some vintage design trends come and go through cycles while others take the stage for long periods of time. The possibilities and inspiration are endless when it comes to implementing vintage and retro aesthetics into our modern designs. Two popular throwback trends that are relevant now are retrofuturism and pop art.
Retrofuturism
What better way to look ahead into the future than through the lens of the past? This ‘80s style trend is all about combining imaginative futuristic design with old-fashioned stylistic themes. It blends the nostalgic fascination with things of the past. Elements following this trend would be rounded shapes, bright ‘80s-inspired color palettes, futuristic themes of tech and space, grunge textures, and mixes of retro mechanics and machinery. An effective example of this retrofuturism can be found in movie advertisements and poster design, where we see the past and future collide through colors, typography, and graphic elements.
Read more: Retrofuturism – Wikipedia
Pop Art
Pop art was all about using shapes and illustrations to create an artistic representation of popular imagery. It is usually done in bright pops of color with recognizable items or faces.
Swiss typography also plays a role here, as it consists of block layouts and bold Sans Serif fonts, which pair well with pop art. During the 1980s, this movement transitioned into a more punk style with grunge themes, cut-out letters, and chaotic graphic elements.
Read more: Pop Art Movement – MoMA
How Do You Create Designs With Vintage And Retro Branding Touches?
Once you have your vintage and retro inspiration, it’s time to implement them into your creative work. Here are 3 easy ways you can add these trends into your font and color palettes while providing the right balance between each element.
Color Palette
Choosing the right color palette sets the tone for your overall style in your design or brand. Colors can evoke different emotions, even when using them to relate back to a historical time period. When creating a color combination for your brand, be sure to refer to color psychology while also referencing the vintage theme you are looking to incorporate. Colors are a great place to experiment by adding an unexpected pick to your palette. colorhunt.co is one the best website to choose color palettes
Fonts
Typography can be the ideal avenue for you to easily relate back to a vintage era. Choosing the right font will take some research into what was popular during the time period you are influenced by. It can be helpful to look back at advertisements during that time and see how various fonts were paired. If you are looking to implement a 1950s aesthetic, mix playful with clean and bold typefaces. Google fonts are best to find vintage style fonts. For an Art Deco-inspired look, find tall San Serif fonts and pair them with geometric rounded shapes.
Balance
By now it is no surprise that the best way to balance out vintage elements is by pairing them with their contemporary counterparts. This is the best way to approach vintage design in a fresh style. It’s key to make obvious differences between two opposing styles so the dominant elements can stand out while the more modern graphics are secondary. This will allow you to create more visual polarity, which makes compositions more attractive and dynamic. Design is always about balance and experimentation.
Conclusion
Now that you have an understanding of how to identify and use this design trend, feel free to experiment with different elements in your creative work. Retro and vintage-inspired aesthetics have paved the way for an exciting time in design. As modern designers, The Mighty Apes have the opportunity to resurge timeless aesthetics of the past by putting our own spin on it. Throwback design styles have the power to transport the viewer into positive memories and emotions of the past.
Ready to create a vintage vibe for your brand? Contact The Mighty Apes today and craft something nostalgic!
