This Retro Minimalism Is Starting to Get a Little Old

As cool as they may be — and they can be pretty cool — retro/minimal nerdy posters are starting to get a little old.

It was cool when it started, but I’ll be honest: I’m starting to get a little tired of a particular sort of retro design craze that constantly pops up in my Twitter and Google Reader feeds. I first came across it some time last year, when Kottke linked to this Flickr set of movie novelizations done in the classic Penguin books style. Since then, it seems like a new retro design meme crops up every other week. For example, classic albums done in the Pelican style, minimalist Star Wars planet posters, minimal Star Wars-themed posters, and some Star Wars travel posters.

The latest example of this comes from Blastr: “5 retro-awesome travel posters for superheroic cities.” Don’t get me wrong: they all look cool, but I’ve seen this style done so many times that, frankly, it’s getting old (no pun intended) and I find it hard to differentiate one retro-minimal set from the next.

That being said, and at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I wouldn’t mind having a copy of the Neo-Tokyo poster hanging on my wall.

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