About

What is Frutiger Aero?

Frutiger Aero is a visual (NOT a fashion one!!) aesthetic existent from around 2005 up to 2013 that focused on mainly digital media and graphic design.

The name, coined by the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI) in 2017, mixes two of the most important terms for this influential aesthetic:

Windows Aero, the graphic user interface (UI) included both in Windows Vista and Windows 7. You might think the "Aero" comes from it having a light, fresh design, but it's actually the initials for Authentic, Energy, Reflective and Open (AERO), which was the design values of Windows at the time.

Frutiger, the Swiss man behind the typefaces that set the whole font aesthetic, Adrian Frutiger. His work, mainly seen on airports, transportation and train stations, was what inspired the computer fonts of the 2000s, namely Segoe UI; the font used on Windows Vista that is still used nowadays on Windows 11, Myriad; a font used by Apple from 2002 to 2017, and my favorite (and the one used for this website!) LT Asus; a free version made by Daniel Lyons, amongst many others.

The main motifs of this aesthetic are:

Skeuomorphism: "The what now?", I hear you say. In graphic design, the term is used for those elements that imitate a real-life, physical object. Like how the old Instagram logo used to look like a camera, or how the calculator app used to look like an in-real-life one, etc.

Glossy and Glassy: As you might have noticed, this website's nav bar, text background, buttons, and logo are all shiny and have quite a glassy feeling to them. That is a huge part of the aesthetic, too! Making elements have that glassy effect on them makes them look more realistic, while the gloss effect makes them pop out even more, like polished glass.

The aforementioned typefaces: To add more into this topic, these kinds of typefaces are part of the Humanist category. Humanist typefaces are those that draw inspiration from hand written forms, making them warm, approachable, and best of all, really easy to read!

The Bokeh effect: In photography, Bokeh is a visual effect that consists of ethereal, blurry and shiny visuals. If you use Procreate you might have noticed a brush called Bokeh that renders shiny, blurred circles. That is pretty much the effect. It helps accentuate the shines of an image, which as you may know by now, is realy important on this aesthetic.

Green and Blue are your best friends: The most predominant colors on the palette are green and blue due to the nature of them, quite literally! The vivid green grass and the bright blue skies are the main source of inspiration, even so that most photos and graphics within the aesthetic are pretty much of cloud free fields. The legendary Windows XP background comes to mind as the most common example.

There is much, much more I could say about this aesthetic, but I will leave that to the many different sources that are out there and that will be linked right below!

I hope you learned something new today, and thanks for reading! 😊💕

– Neo 🍊💙✨

Sources:

Frutiger Aero Blog | Frutiger Aero Archive | Humanist fonts

or if you wanna see other stuff I do: