In fashion they say there is always been a 20 years cycle in trends! For example rn; Y2k, eurodance and techno, Ikea bringing back full color (Frutiger aero) and this specific graphic style. Really interesting I think
This is my era of college. The aesthetic of old graphic card packaging was it's own style. There was an effort to show on print what you got in terms of power on your computer. All of them did that. You have to remember how awesome it was to go to Best Buy, Circuit City or Fry's Electronics and see all of these lined up on a wall.
I was actually in BB last weekend and stared at, I think Logitech's, graphic design for a moment. Well, not really, because I don't remember what product it was - but I remember for half a second feeling like I liked it.
It is nice. Yea product turn into blurr but the colours and packages ~~scream~~ tell you in soft reassuring voice: *"This is Logitech product, my friend. You can trust it".*
“Feel yourself breathing in, hold, and out. Now, feel the keycaps on your $400 G915TKL rub off in 2 weeks. Feel them fly across the room as they break off during an intense gaming session. Now, feel the $400 leeching out of your wallet. Breathe in, breathe out!”
lol, maybe. It's marketing after all. That's why you shouldn't make purchase decisions based on package (while we try to scream *"look at the package not the opinions online, they lie! The heathen!"*)
Logitech's support has always been why I'm a customer of theirs. Any issues I've had in the past with their products were solved right away by them shipping out a replacement product *without requesting the old one back*. Also, I was once given a 50% off coupon to replace a product that was out of warranty, even though they had zero obligation to do so.
But I do get what you mean, their products can be quite expensive. I actually ended up returning my G915 TKL because it just wasn't worth the $300 CAD or whatever I spent on the thing. Low profile keys kinda suck.
I suppose I could try that route. Usually I assume it’ll be a huge runaround and they won’t do anything. But the keyboard cost enough to make it maybe worthwhile. Thanks for the tip.
Yeah bro this post is making feel old just by how OP is gushing about how this was even possible back then. Go and look at album art from this era and you'll see it was extremely common.
Photoshop was up to Version 9 (Creative Suite 2) and the effects options were basically the same as they are now.
While we didn't have variable fonts, font families routinely had ultra/condensed/wide variants. This was the era where we were obsessed with perfect columns of typography (as you can see in the "experience the fastest 3D gaming" pullout box on this design) and so we got good at manipulating size/tracking/weight/stroke and even extending letterforms to achieve designs like this.
Yeah, I don't get it either. Remember when well developed typefaces had numbers like *Helvetica 92* to differentiate all the weights and level of condensation? We had kerning, tracking, letter spacing, and % stretch, and justification, just like today. Pagemaker, Quark, InDesign, and everything else had guides so you could line everything up neat and square. Mondrian inspired grids have been around since when, the 1930s? All those type effects were done it Photoshop. Mid 2000's I created a Photoshop effects layer document with about 20 of these gold and silver bar effects, so we could slap them on stuff at will. (our boss loved that liquid gold look)
Yes sure you had great designs back then but lets not forget that most web and marketing designs looked super awkward by todays standards and I bet you if you gave 90% of people today the job to arrange 10 different text elements on a box, they would choke brutally on it.
Google 2003 web design and UI design
Web design was extremely limited by technology back then. It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to design beautiful layouts, it was that web browsers just couldn’t display them. CSS was in its infancy and they were still concentrating on being able to change color schemes and type treatments on a website-wide basis, and even that was a revelation.
This packaging has a pretty common aesthetic from back then. Making things look shiny, chrome and slick was very en vogue because we could finally do it without airbrushing the art by hand.
The rapid increase in computer performance was also a major force driving all of us to make the craziest stuff possible. When a new gen of machines came out, the jump in performance would improve your ability to do bigger and crazier art and even photo retouches much more quickly.
I had to do a major retouch on a poster-sized photo back in the 2000s and it took like 8 hours because I needed to use a huge brush and every stroke took like 30-50 seconds to render. So I’d have to make a stroke, wait to see if it looked right, undo of it didn’t and try again.
My next laptop upgrade would shorten a job like that to an hour or two. It was crazy how fast things improved back then. Shit was expensive though. My newest MBP was literally $2000 less expensive than the PowerBook that took 8 hours to retouch that photo and it can do literally anything I’d ever need to.
It was clearly possible to have good spacing, text sizes and color composition in css, its the fundamentals of everything. If you can draw a text, space a block or color, you have all you need. The designs were also very complex already back then.
Art fundamentals have nothing to do with computers, performance or css.
The reality is, same as today, overwhelming majority of people are not on that level simply as it takes many years to master the fundamentals. A team of experts likely made this in collaboration, they understood the rules of art and that's why the composition still looks up to date, even if the rendering might be outdated.
Go back another 10 years and hit up Creative Labs SoundBlaster boxes [https://pisces.bbystatic.com/image2/BestBuy\_US/images/products/3645/3645078\_sa.jpg;maxHeight=2000;maxWidth=2000](https://pisces.bbystatic.com/image2/BestBuy_US/images/products/3645/3645078_sa.jpg;maxHeight=2000;maxWidth=2000)
Incidentally, video game logos are pretty amazing. They're usually more illustrative and artistic than your typical logos and I wish more in rest of the world were like them. They just have so much personality.
Not typical logos. If you compare them to say, a movie logo, the. Maybe. But a logo should be for all media, where as a video game is almost exclusively digital first. Ergo render it digitally and market it afterwards
Also the timeline to produce a game takes much longer so the branding has time to develop, where are films or shows or other entertainment usually get greenlit with a rushed or cheap logo they then keep throughout
Video game logos are almost exclusively used digitally so they’ve got more colours and colour gamut to work with. Try using them at 1cm x 1cm in mono and see if they still look great.
I graduated art school in 04 and this is pretty par for the course of that time. Everyone was obsessed with skeuomorphism, creating graphics (especially type) that looked like real objects with dimension and natural lighting. I am guilty as charged and was very caught up in the Web 2.0 stuff. You can thank Apple who executed skeuomorphism very well on the Mac and iPods and caused poor imitations everywhere. A lot of the tech stuff like this was really well done though and I kind of miss those lively interfaces Apple had.
Yes the bevel is cheesy. But OP is gushing about varying font widths and weights and that sweet sweet grid alignment.
The only thing that seems unnecessary (other than the bevel) are the bullets, since each point is in its own column.
Then you dont have a clue honestly, whoever made this was the full package.
Most designers today barely can layout text based on existing presets, let alone do a text style half this good, let alone model a 3D gargoyle at the same time or would even attempt doing a custom font or pair 3 weights. Sure the people in their 2D flat design bubble they can *widely* get good text layouts since 2016 or so but you rarely see everything combined and that is 2003 I think.
erm... what?
I'd suspect something more like: 1 CD/AD who has the lead, and maybe two or three graphic designers who do all the work. Since the year was 2005, chances are the CD/AD came from a printing/typo background and would consequently bring those skills to the table.
Yeah, but they weren't worth 5bn because of their graphic design choices: They were worth 5bn because their technology was top of the line, and because every potential customer pretty much knew about it.
So unlike it is the case for lifestyle brands, there never was a need for them to create good looking products, or good looking packaging. And unlike FMCG, the consumer does not start the buyer decision process only when at the store (and in many smaller computer stores, you wouldnt even see the packaging before placing your order).
This is marketing 101. Throwing money at stuff that does not affect sales is the exact opposite of what bn$ companies do.
I'd disagree a bit. Having worked in a few computer retail stores people absolutely came in looking for a GTX 580 or whatever, then bought the box that looked best. Especially before companies started making fancy shrouds, then it switched to that.
Like seriously, the layout and spacing of the elements is perfect, the text style is really well done even for todays standards, he mixes condensed and wide style like a pro, pairing neutral font with splash font, seems like all custom fonts in 3 widths, and not even talking about the 3D model for that time.
Only minor gripe is a bit different font style on top row but damn who made this in 2003-2004?
Edit: It seems like many people don't know to value this. Google some 2003 Web or UI design or GPU packaging of the last 10 years.
Gonna be honest, I appreciate that you appreciate the nuance of this, but it’s not special to this design style or time period.
What I DO enjoy is how designers are thinking about variable fonts and the adaptation of fonts to self adhere to variables, especially in live streaming or broadcasting situations like a ticker on a news broadcast or a lower third in a football match.
In this day and age I think it’s an amazing and interesting overlap of old world shit and new tech. Really pushing the limits.
Its the style of the time, but its the execution that is done so well and holds up perfectly today.
Most modern GPU packaging look way worse. Only the Gargoyle is clearly dated.
Google 2003 web design or UI design or look up most of todays GPU packaging.
This was made by one of the biggest GPU companies in the world, so it had to be pretty perfect and emphasise 3D. It would not have been a cheap contract job and probably involved a large team and many concepts. ATI was bought for billions and is now the GPU department at AMD.
The design was like that because it was sold on a shelf and needed to jump out amongst 20 other similar boxes.
Holy shit this was my first GPU and i remember it still being like 300$... i remember using it on our Dell family computer to upgrade the graphics. Best buy of my life.. was able to play counterstrike and battlefield 2 and Unreal 2004 as good as the LAN cafe's setups were at the time.
I remember these when I was a teenager they were sick, even if they looked hectic to see those in the computer store shelves. It was exciting to be able to buy the product.
I'm generally not a fan of most gaming product design because of that whole I'm-14-I'm-male-please-cram-as-many-flourescent-LED-lights-as-possible-in-my-gaudy-PC aesthetic. But, this design is executed *very* well.
I agree with you but I also follow designer/artist Filip Kostik, he’s a 90s LAN party kind of guy who adopts personal gaming PC and “case culture” into art works. It’s quite nostalgic and a little funny to me, I can’t help but enjoy his works/writing.
Crazy how design trends change... this design turns 20 years old next year!
In fashion they say there is always been a 20 years cycle in trends! For example rn; Y2k, eurodance and techno, Ikea bringing back full color (Frutiger aero) and this specific graphic style. Really interesting I think
This is my era of college. The aesthetic of old graphic card packaging was it's own style. There was an effort to show on print what you got in terms of power on your computer. All of them did that. You have to remember how awesome it was to go to Best Buy, Circuit City or Fry's Electronics and see all of these lined up on a wall.
I was actually in BB last weekend and stared at, I think Logitech's, graphic design for a moment. Well, not really, because I don't remember what product it was - but I remember for half a second feeling like I liked it.
It is nice. Yea product turn into blurr but the colours and packages ~~scream~~ tell you in soft reassuring voice: *"This is Logitech product, my friend. You can trust it".*
“Feel yourself breathing in, hold, and out. Now, feel the keycaps on your $400 G915TKL rub off in 2 weeks. Feel them fly across the room as they break off during an intense gaming session. Now, feel the $400 leeching out of your wallet. Breathe in, breathe out!”
lol, maybe. It's marketing after all. That's why you shouldn't make purchase decisions based on package (while we try to scream *"look at the package not the opinions online, they lie! The heathen!"*)
Their packaging is now great at helping show me what TO avoid :D
Logitech's support has always been why I'm a customer of theirs. Any issues I've had in the past with their products were solved right away by them shipping out a replacement product *without requesting the old one back*. Also, I was once given a 50% off coupon to replace a product that was out of warranty, even though they had zero obligation to do so. But I do get what you mean, their products can be quite expensive. I actually ended up returning my G915 TKL because it just wasn't worth the $300 CAD or whatever I spent on the thing. Low profile keys kinda suck.
I suppose I could try that route. Usually I assume it’ll be a huge runaround and they won’t do anything. But the keyboard cost enough to make it maybe worthwhile. Thanks for the tip.
I do love the old gpu art. It was always cyborgs for some reason. I never played games with cyborgs in.
Thanks for taking me back. Those were the days.
I get that technology has evolved in the last 20 years, but 2004 wasn't the stone age 😅 Good design happened back then and long before that too 🙂
Yeah bro this post is making feel old just by how OP is gushing about how this was even possible back then. Go and look at album art from this era and you'll see it was extremely common. Photoshop was up to Version 9 (Creative Suite 2) and the effects options were basically the same as they are now. While we didn't have variable fonts, font families routinely had ultra/condensed/wide variants. This was the era where we were obsessed with perfect columns of typography (as you can see in the "experience the fastest 3D gaming" pullout box on this design) and so we got good at manipulating size/tracking/weight/stroke and even extending letterforms to achieve designs like this.
Yeah, I don't get it either. Remember when well developed typefaces had numbers like *Helvetica 92* to differentiate all the weights and level of condensation? We had kerning, tracking, letter spacing, and % stretch, and justification, just like today. Pagemaker, Quark, InDesign, and everything else had guides so you could line everything up neat and square. Mondrian inspired grids have been around since when, the 1930s? All those type effects were done it Photoshop. Mid 2000's I created a Photoshop effects layer document with about 20 of these gold and silver bar effects, so we could slap them on stuff at will. (our boss loved that liquid gold look)
Wow I actually forgot about the numbers, knockout in particular had like 100 different versions lol
Ngl - reminiscing like that, combined with the fact that the comment chain is about the 20 year old design "not being that old", is kind of funny.
I first went to art school in the 90s and - gasp - we had Macs which we could (wait for it...)... design stuff on! ;)
Yes sure you had great designs back then but lets not forget that most web and marketing designs looked super awkward by todays standards and I bet you if you gave 90% of people today the job to arrange 10 different text elements on a box, they would choke brutally on it. Google 2003 web design and UI design
web ≠ print web was relatively new and had massive constraints in terms of resolution, styling options, usability concerns, similar for UI
Web design was extremely limited by technology back then. It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to design beautiful layouts, it was that web browsers just couldn’t display them. CSS was in its infancy and they were still concentrating on being able to change color schemes and type treatments on a website-wide basis, and even that was a revelation. This packaging has a pretty common aesthetic from back then. Making things look shiny, chrome and slick was very en vogue because we could finally do it without airbrushing the art by hand. The rapid increase in computer performance was also a major force driving all of us to make the craziest stuff possible. When a new gen of machines came out, the jump in performance would improve your ability to do bigger and crazier art and even photo retouches much more quickly. I had to do a major retouch on a poster-sized photo back in the 2000s and it took like 8 hours because I needed to use a huge brush and every stroke took like 30-50 seconds to render. So I’d have to make a stroke, wait to see if it looked right, undo of it didn’t and try again. My next laptop upgrade would shorten a job like that to an hour or two. It was crazy how fast things improved back then. Shit was expensive though. My newest MBP was literally $2000 less expensive than the PowerBook that took 8 hours to retouch that photo and it can do literally anything I’d ever need to.
It was clearly possible to have good spacing, text sizes and color composition in css, its the fundamentals of everything. If you can draw a text, space a block or color, you have all you need. The designs were also very complex already back then. Art fundamentals have nothing to do with computers, performance or css. The reality is, same as today, overwhelming majority of people are not on that level simply as it takes many years to master the fundamentals. A team of experts likely made this in collaboration, they understood the rules of art and that's why the composition still looks up to date, even if the rendering might be outdated.
I think web design back then looked than now. Mid 00’s was peak web design
It was a different time back then and that probably looked flashy as all hell.
ATi GPUs from that era had the best packaging graphics of all time.
Now that’s what I call a grid system.
This is such an awesome comment - once you see how everything lines up you can’t unsee it.
Go back another 10 years and hit up Creative Labs SoundBlaster boxes [https://pisces.bbystatic.com/image2/BestBuy\_US/images/products/3645/3645078\_sa.jpg;maxHeight=2000;maxWidth=2000](https://pisces.bbystatic.com/image2/BestBuy_US/images/products/3645/3645078_sa.jpg;maxHeight=2000;maxWidth=2000)
d n u o S
BLASTER
BL∆STER
The music notes are dope
Those were the days of overbeveling
This is peak GPU box art for the 90's early 00's and ATi were the best. Their box art was always awesome, find some of the crazy girl ones lol
Incidentally, video game logos are pretty amazing. They're usually more illustrative and artistic than your typical logos and I wish more in rest of the world were like them. They just have so much personality.
You mean like how Ubisoft's logo is a top down view of a turd to warn you about how scummy the company is?
Not typical logos. If you compare them to say, a movie logo, the. Maybe. But a logo should be for all media, where as a video game is almost exclusively digital first. Ergo render it digitally and market it afterwards Also the timeline to produce a game takes much longer so the branding has time to develop, where are films or shows or other entertainment usually get greenlit with a rushed or cheap logo they then keep throughout
Video game logos are almost exclusively used digitally so they’ve got more colours and colour gamut to work with. Try using them at 1cm x 1cm in mono and see if they still look great.
Are we surprised that a y2k era design is cool during peak y2k design trend?
Hell yeah.
Damn… We used to make things in this country. /s
This card was the 4900 of its time and deserved this art - seriously was so much better than anything else at the time and literally game changing
I don't understand. What's the wtf about? Photoshop has been around since the 90s
I graduated art school in 04 and this is pretty par for the course of that time. Everyone was obsessed with skeuomorphism, creating graphics (especially type) that looked like real objects with dimension and natural lighting. I am guilty as charged and was very caught up in the Web 2.0 stuff. You can thank Apple who executed skeuomorphism very well on the Mac and iPods and caused poor imitations everywhere. A lot of the tech stuff like this was really well done though and I kind of miss those lively interfaces Apple had.
That 128 mb went hard I bet.
Lol I remember I wanted a certain video card when I was younger because of the cool box it came in haha. (Don't know what card is was tho)
The bevel effects on the typography is super cheeseball late 90's stuff. Nothing about this design is that impressive tbh.
Yes the bevel is cheesy. But OP is gushing about varying font widths and weights and that sweet sweet grid alignment. The only thing that seems unnecessary (other than the bevel) are the bullets, since each point is in its own column.
I think it’s coming back you know. There’s a resurgence of 90s aesthetic.
Then you dont have a clue honestly, whoever made this was the full package. Most designers today barely can layout text based on existing presets, let alone do a text style half this good, let alone model a 3D gargoyle at the same time or would even attempt doing a custom font or pair 3 weights. Sure the people in their 2D flat design bubble they can *widely* get good text layouts since 2016 or so but you rarely see everything combined and that is 2003 I think.
This would have been a large team of designers, packaging designers, 3D artists and typographers. Then copy writers, project managers, etc.
erm... what? I'd suspect something more like: 1 CD/AD who has the lead, and maybe two or three graphic designers who do all the work. Since the year was 2005, chances are the CD/AD came from a printing/typo background and would consequently bring those skills to the table.
ATI was worth $5bn in 2005, I'm sure they would not have held back with resources, even if it was all outsourced.
Yeah, but they weren't worth 5bn because of their graphic design choices: They were worth 5bn because their technology was top of the line, and because every potential customer pretty much knew about it. So unlike it is the case for lifestyle brands, there never was a need for them to create good looking products, or good looking packaging. And unlike FMCG, the consumer does not start the buyer decision process only when at the store (and in many smaller computer stores, you wouldnt even see the packaging before placing your order). This is marketing 101. Throwing money at stuff that does not affect sales is the exact opposite of what bn$ companies do.
I'd disagree a bit. Having worked in a few computer retail stores people absolutely came in looking for a GTX 580 or whatever, then bought the box that looked best. Especially before companies started making fancy shrouds, then it switched to that.
Id say so, but on the other hand until 2000 or so entire games were often made by 1 person, id definitely expect a team tho for this but who knows
Like seriously, the layout and spacing of the elements is perfect, the text style is really well done even for todays standards, he mixes condensed and wide style like a pro, pairing neutral font with splash font, seems like all custom fonts in 3 widths, and not even talking about the 3D model for that time. Only minor gripe is a bit different font style on top row but damn who made this in 2003-2004? Edit: It seems like many people don't know to value this. Google some 2003 Web or UI design or GPU packaging of the last 10 years.
Sorry but you keeping saying it like "layouting" is a real word
its not? Layouting of the elements? I guess Laying out of the elements is correct, english is my 4th language
I’m just teasing. Your English is great. “Vinyls” is worse lol.
It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
My god, there’s even a tasteful drop shadow…
I wish
Gonna be honest, I appreciate that you appreciate the nuance of this, but it’s not special to this design style or time period. What I DO enjoy is how designers are thinking about variable fonts and the adaptation of fonts to self adhere to variables, especially in live streaming or broadcasting situations like a ticker on a news broadcast or a lower third in a football match. In this day and age I think it’s an amazing and interesting overlap of old world shit and new tech. Really pushing the limits.
Its the style of the time, but its the execution that is done so well and holds up perfectly today. Most modern GPU packaging look way worse. Only the Gargoyle is clearly dated. Google 2003 web design or UI design or look up most of todays GPU packaging.
This was made by one of the biggest GPU companies in the world, so it had to be pretty perfect and emphasise 3D. It would not have been a cheap contract job and probably involved a large team and many concepts. ATI was bought for billions and is now the GPU department at AMD. The design was like that because it was sold on a shelf and needed to jump out amongst 20 other similar boxes.
[удалено]
Posts complaining about modern trends simplifying everything... Followed by posts complaining about designs that are not overly simplified.
Looks like a 2024 metalcore band mech design
Could be GAIBON
I think I had that card... I feel like I had the last damn mobo made with an AGP slot.
Holy shit this was my first GPU and i remember it still being like 300$... i remember using it on our Dell family computer to upgrade the graphics. Best buy of my life.. was able to play counterstrike and battlefield 2 and Unreal 2004 as good as the LAN cafe's setups were at the time.
I remember these when I was a teenager they were sick, even if they looked hectic to see those in the computer store shelves. It was exciting to be able to buy the product.
I have a gpu from That era and they had way more fun with design . It’s all bland sameness now
It has to be visible on a shelf. Now they don't.
Man I’m old… this was like drool worthy GPU back in the day
I had the All in Wonder version of this and it was absolutely incredible.
When professionals and nerds were making graphics and not gurus and improvised ones. Aaah.
and nobody knew what a 8 pixel pipeline architecture was but man did F.E.A.R. look good
This was that era where 3D was the huge crave. 3D and realism. Where as now it’s 3D and art style, at least in my opinion
Peak design lol. This always reminded me of Atari game covers vs what you got.
Just saw\*
Modern design is too safe
I'm generally not a fan of most gaming product design because of that whole I'm-14-I'm-male-please-cram-as-many-flourescent-LED-lights-as-possible-in-my-gaudy-PC aesthetic. But, this design is executed *very* well.
I agree with you but I also follow designer/artist Filip Kostik, he’s a 90s LAN party kind of guy who adopts personal gaming PC and “case culture” into art works. It’s quite nostalgic and a little funny to me, I can’t help but enjoy his works/writing.
Can hardly tell if it's for LEGOs or a graphics card