My Top 5 Retro Websites
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It's been a hot minute since my last 'top 5' list. For this one, we're going to look at retro web design. Retro, specifically the early internet, millennial aesthetic, is a hugely popular design style at the moment. The retro design style is popular across all media, not just on the web. In Melbourne, building walls are adorned with print media that draws on aesthetics from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Without further ado, let's dive a little deeper into retro design, and then we'll find out my top 5 favourite retro websites.
What is retro web design?
Retro web design is a style that draws inspiration from the aesthetics of the past. It evokes feelings of nostalgia by using styles more commonly found in the past. Retro design currently utilises aesthetic choices from the late 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. As millennials start hitting their middle age, they look to the past and reminisce about times when the internet was young, mobile phones had green screens, and computer games were two-dimensional. Whilst it can refer to any design style from the past, for the rest of this article, we'll use retro to refer to the millennial aesthetic.
What are the hallmarks of retro website design?
Retro web design is a style that draws from the low-fidelity visuals of computers, game consoles, and mobile phones of the past. Expect blocky, boxy, and overtly pixelated design choices. Imagine a mix of an arcade game and a teenager's MySpace profile. Think blocky fonts and garish colour palettes, film photography and GTA-style illustrations. The intersection of all of these is retro design.
Why is retro design so popular right now?
At the time of writing, we are three days into the Chat-GPT 5 world. Technology is evolving at an ever-increasing pace. It seems our importance as individuals lessens every day. Jobs keep disappearing. Skills get outsourced to computers. The world as we knew it is becoming a rose-tinted memory. Our yearning for our golden past is why retro design is gaining popularity.
We long for those days when we dreamed of having the outfit-choosing computer from Clueless. The days when a gaming night meant a group of friends gathering at one person's house and passing around the controllers to play Mario Kart. The time when you had to choose between using the phone or the internet, you couldn't do both at the same time. Those days are long gone. They now live only as an homage in graphic design.
Why do I like retro websites?
Born in 1995, I am a millennial. I, however, only arrived at the end of this golden age. My appreciation for the retro design style speaks more to my taste for vintage styles than it does a longing to return to the past. I have always admired the aesthetics of bygone eras. Throughout my twenties, I styled my clothes after the punks of the late 70s and the ravers of the early 90s. Art deco furnishings and illustrated movie posters bring joy to my heart. As does retro website design.
I was too young to have a MySpace page when it was cool. My first social media account was on Bebo. My time using the self-styled social media pages and chatrooms was short. I joined Facebook in 2008 and never looked back. Whilst the aesthetic of the retro design style played only a minor role in my life, I still appreciate the nod to a past that means so much to so many.
My top 5 retro website designs
GT Planar Typeface
Typeface websites are a breeding ground for creativity and incredible creations. This one is no different.
It loads into a Star Wars-style scrolling text intro before hyper-spacing us into the page hero. As we move down the page, we experience a flawless scrolling animation that creates three-dimensional depth in a two-dimensional environment. The entire site feels like a nod to early Atari-style video games. The black background with white text and RGB highlights feeds the vintage video game aesthetic. Even the interactions with the fonts feel as much like a game as a website.
The user experience is simple and easy to master, much like early video games. While the designers have created a visually enthralling and playfully interactive site, they have not overcomplicated anything. Any lover of the space-age aesthetic of the late 70s and early 80s leaves this site filled with joy.
Poolsuite
An internet radio station that plays thirty-year-old music and video, the Poolsuite website is what happens when people think we should have stayed in the good old days.
Combining styles of mid-90s Windows and MacOS, this website feels like stepping back in time. The beige windows, flat icons, and grainy video clips evoke pure dot-com boom nostalgia.
Across all their channels, Poolsuite focus on bringing 80s and 90s music and video back to the fore. The design of their website does this perfectly.
To anyone who remembers dial-up internet and the risk of running up a huge phone bill downloading media over the internet, this site helps heal those old wounds. While the aesthetic takes you back in time, you stay in the present with cheap and fast internet, meaning you can listen and watch without risking your parents beheading you over the phone bill.
Le Puzz
Le Puzz brand themselves as a vibrant and whimsical brand. Their website feeds into this perfectly.
The primary brand colour is yellow, which typically evokes joy and playfulness. This colour choice, contrasted with bold black type, harks back to a mid-century vintage of jigsaw puzzle packaging. Add into the mix a frog illustration intermittently flying across the screen and some grainy, film photographs of half-completed jigsaw puzzles, and you do not doubt as to who Le Puzz are.
This website shows that retro design does not need to be all or nothing. You don't necessarily need to immerse yourself in the past to honour a retro style. Le Puzz do a great job of cherry-picking retro elements and weaving them into a classic e-commerce site to create a modern, retro website.
Phil's Finest
Phil's Finest contrasts a 20th-century American diner menu aesthetic with a modern website layout to create a classic retro design.
The site uses alternating background colours to sectionise its content. It alternates between bright, saturated colours and softer pastel shades. The brighter colours highlight the products, and the softer colours appear in sections to reassure readers of the company's credentials. Switching between these extremes creates movement and a sense of dynamism to the site.
Littered throughout the site are chalkboard-style, animated illustrations. These compound the dynamism of a site that could easily feel lifeless without them. Their chalkboard drawing style further feeds into the diner aesthetic.
The final ingredient of this retro masterpiece is the grainy yet vibrant product imagery. The vibrant colours in the images blend well with the bright backgrounds, whilst the grainy film photography completes the vintage aesthetic, adding the cherry on top of the retro cake.
Katharina Lou
If Paris Hilton and Gwen Stefani took creative direction for an e-commerce site, this grungey barbiecore aesthetic would be the result. Katharina Lou's all-pink-everything colour palette creates a powerful femininity compounded with love hearts, roses, and ribbons littered throughout. These feminine motifs get broken up by grainy film photographs of powerful women in plaid skirts and dresses, adding a new level of punk and grunginess to what would otherwise be a "girly" brand.
Bold sans-serif type juxtaposes the more luxurious cursive font used to highlight certain power words. This contrast showcases a website sending a clear message while elevating its style with elegance and femininity. Stop-motion GIFs contrast with MySpace-style smooth scrolling marquees, creating a feeling of nostalgic dissonance.
The retro design choices on this site draw inspiration from the chaotic ornamentations of teenage girls' MySpace pages, combined with elegant, modern design to create a powerful, feminine brand built for the modern era.