Retro

One of the readers of this blog sent me a very nice and friendly email today, pointing out that the site has an extremely retro design, and that perhaps it might make sense to update to something more modern.

I thus find myself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, I enjoy these sorts of retro things. For example, the smartest phone I am currently using looks like this:

and the telephone I use at home is this charming replica of a candlestick phone from the 1920s:

When are old fashioned things charming, and when are they just old? People tend to like my candlestick phone, presumably because it evokes a lost world of long ago. Yet my Samsung flip-phone seems to inspire something closer to bemusement.

In our modern cyber world, so relentlessly focused on the latest and greatest, is it valid to employ a retro web page design?

Or is it, in the immortal words of Seth MacFarlane, “still too soon”?

4 thoughts on “Retro”

  1. This blog? Retro? Naw, more like “default”.

    True retro is found here: http://telehack.com/

    (warning: Telehack is backed by actual data recorded from the era and may suck hours surfing through it. Create an account with “newuser” to get started.)

  2. Ha, well, fair enough! I guess the one thought I might lob in reply is that I’m not sure it’s quite right to say that “old-fashioned things are charming.” Isn’t it more like “charming old-fashioned things are charming?”

    Take the two phones, for example. I’m going to venture a guess that you get many more unqualified compliments on the home phone than the mobile one. This is, of course, because it’s a design that’s been cherry-picked from the entire history of telephone industrial design.

    So, is the design of the blog, in your mind, cherry-picked from the history of web designs? Maybe it is.

    I’m a fiction writer and spend a fair amount of my time using software like Write Room to turn three-thousand dollars worth of display technology into a replica of the hundred-dollar 80-line monochromatic green monitor that sat on top of my Iie in my bedroom when I was a kid.

    So I definitely get the appeal of retro. But let me ask this… can it really be considered a retro design choice if it’s been the choice since the design was modern? I mean, isn’t there a difference between replacing a modern phone with a retro phone because you love the design and looking up one day and realizing that you haven’t updated your phone in so long that it’s become retro? Maybe there isn’t… I’m not totally sure, to be honest. It’s maybe an interesting question.

  3. That’s certainly a valid point. The candlestick is undeniably a classic, and deservedly so.

    And I agree that laziness is not the same as a proud lifestyle choice. 🙂

    In my case, the Samsung was a deliberate decision. I chose to adopt the simpler flip phone after having spent some time with an up-to-date Android SmartPhone.

    Having tasted the modern alternative, I realized that I enjoy the peace of mind of not having my phone be the center of my life.

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