Index of Aesthetics | Hacker News Reader

Index of Aesthetics

cari.institute

171 pointsdetaro34 comments

a more elaborate version of this lives at AestheticsWiki:

* https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Aesthetics_Wiki

* https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Aesthetics

While similar in spirit, CARI (the website linked in the post) is about aesthetics that can be found in consumer products. Aesthetics Wiki is broader, looser, and involved anything that people want to assign a name to. There are many things on Aesthetics Wiki that do not correspond to anything found in the consumer market.

I created https://aesort.com/ from this, with which one can create a personal ranking (takes some time though, since there are 836 aesthetics). It can be really fun/beautiful to put a list of one's top aesthetic names into Midjourney, and generate images of people, fashion, buildings, rooms etc.!

man I gotta say, I know this isn't your fault because you're just working with the material provided, but - it sucks that so much of the art subjects boil down to "cute/pretty/beautiful girl(s)"

it's like, what's cyberpunk look like? it looks like a hot girl with neon. what does nerdpunk look like? it looks like a nerdy girl playing on a computer. what's roleplay punk look like? it looks like a cute girl cosplaying as an elf.

it's hard for me to decide which styles really tickle my fancy, unless I get to see cute boys kitted out in it. endless variations of "quirky japanese girl uwu" gets old awfully fast.

I've prepared the site to be able to work with different example images for each aesthetic, but I haven't put in the full work of downloading these from the wiki for each one yet. That will hopefully increase the diversity of examples somewhat, although many aesthetics still need further contributions on the wiki itself, having only one example picture and no gallery.

The same issue occurs when generating images with Midjourney using a list of names of aesthetics, even without specifying a person, generated images usually result in a woman.

Very cool, thanks for making this

The green-wireframe thing which this site somewhat misleadingly calls "Laser Grid" https://cari.institute/aesthetics/laser-grid (the main influence is of course CRT vector graphics, with technical drawing and art inspired by it probably coming second and lasers well behind) played a much more central role in 1980s SFish commercial art's image of the future than you'd realise now. (You'd naturally see a lot of it on places like pulpy SF juvenile novels, not a source that's very well-represented on CARI.) Note that usually (though not always) the phosphor lines are quite crisp while the space between them remains uniformly dark, a respectable approximation to actual CRT vector images. Blown-out lines glowing like neon tubes, and mesh polygons which look like normal, lightable surfaces thanks to a glow or to light reflections, have more to do with synthwave https://cari.institute/aesthetics/synthwave and other recent pastiches than the real thing.

MICR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni... or MICR-inspired fonts as a totem of a Space Agey future is another part of the '80s visual language which hasn't made it into the nostalgia image of the '80s. But unlike the wireframe it definitely felt like an older ('60s-'70s) thing which was on its way out even then.

Sure, but this is a list of aesthetics, not a list of techniques or tools. Their artist-assigned labels may have nothing to do with how they were created. For example, "Corporate Memphis" has nothing to do with the Memphis Group or the design movement they drove in the 80s— it stemmed from a Facebook documentation branding initiative that was just another page in the big book of bland postmodern corporate art. However, artists and designers needed to reason about that aesthetic differently than, say, an art historian, called it "Corporate Memphis" because of several key aesthetic similarities to the Memphis design movement and it's distinct corporate blandness.

I don't have anything to add to the argument just that I happened to watch Escape from New York this weekend and there's an epic "green laser grid" sequence as he flies in to the city!

https://youtu.be/xxYmMRxnEic?si=J62FQIU-V7-9BI8x

Edit: and apparently they did it with practical effects rather than actually animating with a computer? Seems like they were aiming for that exact aesthetic.

> and apparently they did it with practical effects rather than actually animating with a computer?

The same was (perhaps not suprisingly) true of the computer displays in Kubrik's 2001, apparently.

https://www.quora.com/Were-the-wireframe-models-on-the-scree...

https://twitter.com/2001archives/status/1010885260274352128 https://archive.ph/npCBf https://archive.org/details/AmericanCinematographerJune1968/...

(Apparently more or less the first example of genuinely computer-generated or -manipulated graphics in a "real" live-action film or TV production was the Gunslinger's "Terminator-vision" from (the original, 1973) Westworld.)

I'm tickled by how humorously opinionated and even judgemental many of the names are. Of course I'd be disappointed by the same thing in a context that demands more objectivity. But in-context, it's entertaining. The world is much richer with creatives in it.

I reckon the missing objectivity you allude to is important for academics and art historians. However, Ad-hoc or informal grouping/labeling/critique of abstract visual concepts is really important for serious visual work, and definitely one of the fun parts. These are the sorts of groupings and terms I use when engaging with other artists, designers, art directors, etc. What we're trying to communicate resists verbal description because it is often complexly visceral and emotional with too many important details to single out visually let alone enumerate verbally, and it's all dependent on cultural context. Being able to take hunks of visual culture and conceptually manipulate them is central to our professional funtion.

My reasoning as a developer is like building with Legos, and when I'm doing visual work, it's like sculpting with clay.

Totally. As a musician we do this all of the time. Just last week a group of friends and I were chuckling at a very specific flavor of folksy pop that dominated in the early 2010's that we jokingly refer to as "stomp clap hey".

Here's a Lumineers track to jog your memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCBSSwgtg4

The term "stomp clap hey" is a little bit derisive and by quantifying it in this way it probably becomes a target for people to mock (see: the "karen" phenomena), but it perfectly encapsulates the tenor of this particular trend and is instantly graspable by anyone steeped in contemporary music. It has it's uses.

Yeah— even as a non-musician who has to deal with music in a media production/directing capacity, I immediately knew what you meant. Someone who doesn't interrogate musical aesthetic deliberately might assume it encapsulated instrumentation, composition, and maybe artists or something definable like that, but it encompasses so much more than that— then-current trends in recording and production, cultural context, how it was intended to make people feel and then maybe how it really did make people feel, etc etc etc. WAY more things than you'd want to enumerate individually. Like I said, I'm not a musician, but as an art director, if I asked for a "twee ding dong ukulele whistle" song that builds energy into a "2012 bank-commercial stomp clap hey" bridge, which then turns into a weird al version of itself for comedic impact, you'd know what I was looking for enough to bring to an initial meeting.

Whenever I open a specific aesthetic, it is shown below a grey semi-transparent overlay, and a white box with "Title (untitled) Description (no description)" in the center. The overlay can't be closed as far as I can see. Strange behavior.

Safari on iPadOS.

Hello! I'm the developer of the CARI website. Do you know what resolution your iPad's screen is, or what model/year it is? Thought I took care of making the website responsive, but it sounds like I missed an edge case. Thanks!

Hi slothbake, thanks for making the site. iPad mini 5, the resolution is 2048 × 1536 at 326 ppi.

Here is a screenshot of the problem, and my iPad model number if that helps.

https://ibb.co/d2P0X2y https://ibb.co/19qBJBz

The overlay shows in both landscape and portrait.

Hope this is helpful in some way.

Thank you for the info! Will have to investigate this further - not able to reproduce the issue in Chrome dev tools with responsive layout testing, but one of my friends should have an iPad I can test with. So far it seems this is a Safari-specific issue.

Hey slothbake, here’s another friendly bug report: the site suffers from horizontal wiggling when vertically scrolling on my iPhone in Safari.

Thank you for letting me know! Will fix this issue as soon as I get my hands on an iPhone. Looks like the website has some issues in Safari, apologies for the inconvenience!

i think it’s a super cool concept. my favourite aesthetic must be the Gen X Soft Club

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMeoeGGEimE Great video on the topic

Very interesting, thank you! Do have more resources on that topic (not just the genx aesthetic but more in general)?

I saw some other channels and videos about aesthetics, but couldnt find any that were as compelling. I'd love to know that myself.

i can very recommend Mina Le:

https://www.youtube.com/@gremlita/videos

Same!

Feels like these classifications are AI generated and possibly some of the art too. Can an art expert weigh in?

This is a great sample of "truth [being] stranger than fiction". Can verify many of the examples from memory. Most memorable: the Encarta Encyclopedia CD-ROM illustration/splash screen.

This website is meticulously curated by passionate artists who love this sort of thing. So no, neither of those things is true.

This website has existed for a while. I know some of the examples to be real. When it comes to names, I think they've explained the origin in some cases. There's a log of the changes they've made over time.

Professional designer and commercial artist here: all looks legit. The names are either in very common parlance (eg vaporwave, Corporate Memphis) or slightly less common but still used (eg Zen-X) and the images I saw I either recognized, or they seemed genuine. Even if they were AI-generated, I think "inspo/mood board" type applications like this are probably one of their only genuinely useful professional applications right now. Grouping images by some conceptual underpinning communicates that concept far easier and more effectively than words ever could: and as long as those images convey that idea, it doesn't matter if that one little inanimate objects in a tiny part of the frame is inexplicably made of elbow skin or all the chairs in the image have an odd number of legs.

No, they're all real (some are even rather insightful) and all the examples that I have seen are real.

Yes the website has some credibility..

pagination is the worst aesthetic

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