brainshitting - Luis Alves's Website - CSS and XHTML Expert. Portuguese Wordpress Designer. Info, hints and help for webdesigners. Loose toughts and ideas.

During the last years some music genres gained a lot of strenght. I’m talking about Chill out or Chillout, lounge, trip hop, ambient, liquid jazz, liquid acid, down tempo house and trance, etc. Music that means relax.
Along with this down tempo music boom, and taking advantage of the huge success of the genre, bars were created, places where the genre is the main track list. To go along with this kind of music and influenced by it, designers adopted some graphic elements taken from the 70’s, like circular elements, round cornered squares and rectangules, sillouetes of human figures, modern vector illustrations like the ones created by Jordi Labanda are also often used. In terms of colour, vivid ones like oranges, reds and greens are the favorite, but browns, warm grays and pastel colors are also used.

This has also influenced other design forms like interior design by the use of open space, graphic elements like the ones mentioned painted on the walls, or just a wall in the room painted with a solid color, relaxing furniture items like pufs, simple forms lamps like cilinders and spheres, objects used in the 70’s and pendant objects are also very common.

In industrial, the creation of simple objects with one solid color applied like the example chair displayed. Form follows function returns again as the main concern when creating.
This simple use of forms influenced the web 2.0 design also with the use of round cornered rectangules and squares. This state of mind and spirit that down tempo music is all about has everything to do with web 2.0 open minded way of living the web, a chilled out cool way of relinquinshing control that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.

In fashion design, Bell bottom trousers returned and many stores sell hippie like clothing. Dark glasses have increased size and some are just like the ones used in the 70’s.

Why the 70’s has main inspiration?
I think it’s because of the hippie movement, since those were the coolest, relaxed, chilled out years in the history of mankind, especially due to drugs use, but that’s another story…

Anyway, my point of view resides in the fact that all forms of art are connected to each other and one of them might trigger the others and a new movement starts.

Think about it.

P.S.: I recomend visiting the the Chill Out boulevard cafe, a cofee shop in Lisbon, near Saldanha. I think they don’t have a website yet, so I haven’t posted the link.

web 2.0 | down tempo | chillout