Memorables

Retro Design

Retro design that borrows from old screens and tapes: CRT glow, VHS type and 1-bit pixels.

Retro design borrows the look of earlier technology: the scan lines of a CRT screen, the tracking errors of a VHS tape, the coarse pixels and dithering of early computers, the dialog boxes of old desktop systems. Done well, it is more than a filter: the reference is precise, and the nostalgia serves the idea, whether it gives a brand warmth or makes a new product feel familiar. This page gathers VHS-inspired type specimens, logo animation run through a CRT shader, 1-bit games and sketches coded in Processing, websites that open on an old computer and interface histories told from pixel icons to Aqua, by designers and studios such as Hawaii Design, Lionel Mora, PERFECTLOOP and IORAMA.

24 works by 20 creators, newest added 10 November 2026. Each is credited to the people who made it and links to the original.

All 24 Retro Design

  1. Marble Logo by Lionel Mora — A logo animation for Marble, a company building AI for children, written entirely in code with a shader for the CRT screen, where the M becomes an arcade ghost before the wordmark lands.
  2. Momentum Album Covers by Oliver Hamrin — Album cover art explorations offered for free to Kuka, an independent Mexican artist found on a Spotify playlist, for his upcoming album Momentum, mixing poppies, pixels and scribbles.
  3. Arcade Cabinet by Dann Petty — An animated SVG illustration of a retro arcade cabinet with a CRT screen, where a pink bear’s winning game is cut short when an arm reaches in and pulls the plug on the machine.
  4. ASCII Rocket by Raunak Das — An ASCII art 3D rocket built from tiny dot characters, a retro space motion study that turns slowly on its axis so the porthole circles away, as convincing as a rendered model.
  5. Quartr Posters by Oliver Hamrin — Posters, newsletter covers and episode art for Quartr, the Stockholm company for public-company research, where an earnings call gets a poster, from chicken nuggets to Meta’s Hyperion.
  6. Origin III Incense Holder by Han Gao — A product film for Origin III, an anodised black incense holder made exclusively for Xander Zhou, where a slow camera reads the object like a craft from early dreams of space travel.
  7. Rubric Labs Website by Rubric Labs — The new website of Rubric Labs, an AI engineering agency that builds agents and trains models, introduced as its address is typed on a retro computer sitting in a salt flat at dusk.
  8. Origin III by Han Gao — An incense holder made exclusively for Xander Zhou, an anodised black disc on three rounded feet inspired by early visions of space travel, the three echoing a Taoist idea of creation.
  9. Aeonik Super Magnetic by Hawaii Design — A kinetic typography specimen for the Aeonik Superfamily of CoType Foundry, where VHS tape echo becomes a type effect: each jump of the word Super leaves a trail of coloured copies.
  10. Aeonik T-120 by Hawaii Design — A VHS-inspired type specimen for the Aeonik Superfamily of CoType Foundry, where tape markings make a motion poster and T-120 breaks into chunky pixels before rebuilding as smooth type.
  11. Aeonik PLAY Cassette by Hawaii Design — A looping kinetic typography specimen for the Aeonik Superfamily of CoType Foundry, set on a VHS cassette label where the four letters of PLAY tumble and swap places between turning reels.
  12. macOS Folder Icon Timeline by Raul Dronca — An interactive timeline of the macOS folder icon from 1984 to 2026, where dragging one scrubber morphs a single folder through every era, from 1-bit pixels to Aqua and today’s flat blue.
  13. Boarding Pass Scanner by Mike Barton — A skeuomorphic drag interaction where a boarding pass is swiped through a scanner of lovely aged plastic, its little screen running from READY through ERROR before letting you in.
  14. NOKIA by Andreion de Castro — A creative coding sketch in Processing that reworks the reaching hands of Nokia’s old startup screen with 2D grids and dithering, the two pixel hands reaching without ever quite meeting.
  15. MD Vinyl on iPhone Duo by MD Studio — MD Vinyl, a vinyl-style player for Apple Music and Spotify, adapted to the folding iPhone Duo, whose crease turns a 3D shelf of covers into a turntable when half-folded.
  16. prekesh.design by Prekesh Chavda — The portfolio website of a designer at Poolside, formerly at Vercel and Sketch, built as an interactive 3D gallery where icons, stickers and drawings drift by on retro tiles.
  17. Dekmantel Ten by CC Studio — Logo animation for the tenth anniversary of Dekmantel, the Amsterdam music festival, where a red oval works as a window and the word TEN drips through it in soft retro letters.
  18. Bouncing Grok Bots by Alex Abraham — A looping Grok Bot animation that plays on the old DVD screensaver, the mascot drifting across black and changing into a new character every time it bounces off an edge.
  19. Skate Handheld by Ruslan Tikhomirow — A 3D modelling study of a retro handheld console in chunky pink, made for fun with a little help from AI, its green screen playing a pixel art skateboarding game over crates and cones.
  20. Interactive Book Archive by Rohan Nuttall — An interactive image made with AI: asked to find the books in a photo for Are.na, Astra lifts each counterculture cover, from Radical Software to the 1970 Zodiac Datebook, into a card.
  21. Keep Climbing by PERFECTLOOP — A 3D loop in the webcore style, where the Windows 98 interface turns into architecture: a figure of tiny glyphs climbs an endless spiral staircase of Networking dialog boxes.
  22. A Fool’s Errand by IORAMA — A 1-bit pixel art game in dithered black and white, first released on Playdate in 2025 where the crank drives the climb, now on iPhone, its young hero scaling an endless spiral tower.
  23. The Life of a Button by Cole Derochie — A UI concept that tells the history of interface design through a single component: dragging a timeline from 2026 to 1986 morphs one button from flat blue to glossy Aqua to pixel Mac.
  24. Offline Footer by Alim Joldaspayev — A website footer for Offline that turns the end of a landing page into a quiet scene about logging off: a vintage Mac on a grassy hill goes dark as day turns into a starry night.

Featuring work by

Hawaii Design, Oliver Hamrin, Han Gao, Lionel Mora, Dann Petty, Raunak Das, Rubric Labs, Raul Dronca, Mike Barton, Andreion de Castro, MD Studio, Prekesh Chavda, CC Studio, Alex Abraham, Ruslan Tikhomirow, Rohan Nuttall, PERFECTLOOP, IORAMA, Cole Derochie, Alim Joldaspayev.

Related topics

Browse by category

Topics