Retro Graphic Design
Retro graphic designs tug at deep sense of nostalgia. A viewer may look at an advertisement down in a retro style and remember simpler times like their childhood, high school or even wild college days. This feeling is priceless, as the viewer will then associate these warm feelings with the product or message being sold. Retro graphic design covers a great deal of territory. The retro graphic designer has decades worth of reference material to draw from.
Definition
Retro graphic design is any graphic design that incorporates font, color, layout and styles from previous decades. These elements can be recombined in new ways, but the overall theme and style of the picture should be narrowed to one specific type of retro art. For instance, a retro design cannot incorporate a 1950s' style of cartoon figure with thick airbrushed style letters from the 1980s.
Limited Color Range
One way the graphic designers can create a retro look is to use a limited color palette. This simulates the lack of colors available for printing in the past. Artists can restrict themselves to using four colors to recreate the four-color process that was done on almost all printed ads in the past. Black and white or sepia colors can be used to further restrict the palette and create an even older look.
Texture
Artists often make use of texture to create a retro look in the graphic designs. This is most often done digitally using a scanned image of wrinkled and yellowed paper or canvas. This can then be placed as a layer under an illustration to give the image the appearance of having been printed on an older medium.
Font
Graphic designers can use fonts to create retro looks. Each decade tends to have its own particular font. Early decades like the 1940s and 1950s used cursive fonts or block lettering. The 1970s were known for the large bubble letters. The advent of personal computers and computer graphics in the 1980s led to block-like machine and computerized fonts.
Backgrounds
Backgrounds can also create a retro look in graphic design. The 1940s and 1950s ads rarely featured any background at all. This absence of a background can isolate the figures in the drawing and give the image a distinct look. Swirling psychedelic colors were a staple of the 1960s' and 1970s' backgrounds and are instantly recognizable as being from that period. The 1980s' backgrounds often featured neon grids to give the appearance of high technology.
