Among a great variety of styles in contemporary design, vintage and retro appear more and more often nowadays. You see elements of them everywhere: at advertisements, at CD covers, in fashion and interior design. At web design retro and vintage become more and more popular as well.

There are few presumable reasons for the usage of old-fashioned motifs: sometimes stemming from the content of a website, sometimes out of the need to associate the site with some element from the past, in other cases just the wish of the designer to make the website somehow different and unique. Anyhow, websites developed in retro style look really smashing. Accurately executed, they create a nostalgic atmosphere, wake the memories of the past, finally, they are simply stylish and not boring.

So what are retro and vintage designs made of?

First of all images. Old vehicles, old devices, old packaging, old photos and illustrations from magazines, photos of famous people of the time, old-styled signs, scrapbooks, torn, used yellowish paper with stains textures.

The next important thing is a color palette. It of course depends on the period of time you aim to represent. Dark, dirty colors (brown, dark red, dark blue, bottle-green), yellowish and beige are often used in retro (1910s-1940s) websites, in vintage ones (1950s -1980s) bright, pop-art colors are more often met.

And the last but not the least – retro founts. Typefaces can make your website a masterpiece or completely destroy it. So be careful when choosing a font.

Here are some examples of retro and vintage web templates, developed by our designers:

Well, remember - the best wine comes out of an old vessel. So don’t be afraid to go back in time.

This entry was posted on Oct 15 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.