At first glance, the blog Animated Text, with its neatly stacked rows of glittering, undulating, pixelated, neon-hued catchphrases, looks like a relic of the ’90s, an untouched time capsule from last-generation social sites like GeoCities.
Cat Frazier, the 23-year-old graphic designer who runs it, calls the site a “guilty pleasure” that offers a giddy reprieve from her day job, designing for corporate clients and, therefore, working in the visual language of the present. Animated Text is part of a retro aesthetic renaissance sweeping the Web, one that pays homage to old-school computing systems and software like Windows 95 and Microsoft Paint. Nostalgia certainly plays a part, in the same way it does with collectors of vinyl or old typewriters, and for good reason: This revival is, in many respects, a reaction to the manicured lawns of Facebook and Twitter and a celebration of the earlier, less sterile (and surveilled) environments that people once inhabited and created online.
The work largely lives on Tumblr blogs and in smaller online communities like Dump.fm, where people share animated GIFs, Shockwave Flash animations and MIDI song samples, often without context, which has the effect of elevating them; presented in isolation, these nearly extinct images and file formats become something like works of art — or at least digital tchotchkes for a generation too young to remember the blend of frustration and awe a 56K modem could inspire but old enough to appreciate the beauty of its early transmissions.
