The look of technology between roughly 2004 and 2013: glossy, translucent, full of water and sky, and quietly certain that the future would be clean and green.
Frutiger Aero is a name given (around 2017, by people cataloguing consumer aesthetics) to a style that had no name while it was everywhere. Think of the desktop of a mid-2000s computer: a glossy blue bar, windows with see-through frames, a wallpaper of a green hill under a huge blue sky. Think of the boxes electronics came in: bubbles, water droplets on leaves, dolphins, lens flares, a globe with an orbit ring around it. Think of the fonts, rounded and humanist, and the sense that a phone or a laptop was a friendly object from a cleaner tomorrow.
The name is a mash-up: Frutiger, after the typeface family that set the tone of the era's signage and interfaces, and Aero, after the translucent window style of Windows Vista and 7. But the look was bigger than either. It lived in operating systems, in adverts, in airports, in the packaging of MP3 players, in the menus of games and the early web.
Buttons that look like gel capsules, with a highlight along the top. Windows and bars you can see through. Reflections under everything, as if the whole interface sat on a wet floor.
Bubbles rising through blue. Droplets on leaves and lenses. Ripples, koi, dolphins, whole aquariums behind the icons.
A green field under a blue sky, with a wind turbine or a glass tower in the distance. Leaves next to circuit boards. The message: technology was going to be clean.
Lens flares, sun rays through clouds, bokeh circles, auroras. Everything was lit from somewhere pleasant.
Friendly sans-serifs with open shapes, often in white on blue with a soft shadow.
Not the leather and felt of the early 2010s; more a glossy hint of a real object, a CD's rainbow, a chrome sphere.
Interfaces went flat after 2013, and for good reasons. But flat design also removed something: the sense of place. A Frutiger Aero desktop was somewhere. It had weather. It had a horizon. People who grew up with it remember the calm optimism more than the exact pixels, which is why the style has come back as a mood on video sites, in communities that collect old wallpapers and packaging, and in music and art that borrows its blue.
There is also the simple fact that it was cheerful. It assumed things would be fine.
Zurbax is a small social app built entirely in the style, not as a costume but as the whole idea. The glass is real: panes refract the wallpaper behind them, and the light moves as you tilt or move. The wallpapers are drawn live, a city of glass towers over a meadow of daisies, a green hill, a lagoon with fish. The stickers are bubbles, droplets, koi and Y2K discs. The trading cards are the motifs of the era with serial numbers. Even the sign-up screen is a setup assistant from a 2009 desktop, with a starry aurora behind it.
What you do there is slower than the usual feed: sealed letters from strangers every few hours, small communities called pods, a page you arrange yourself, short videos from friends. It's free, and it runs as an app on Android and iPhone.