Aiyo Archive

Futuristic Design trend between 1994 and 2001, and maybe a bit thereafter. visit aiyowah.com

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Desktop Imperium (2000)

Jens Magnus Karlsson invited digital artists to submit their own desktop wallpapers to his site while also sharing the pieces he created himself. The project lived on under the name Desktop Imperium, which began as his personal gallery before growing into a small community space where artists could submit their work.

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Vanity 9 was an early 2000s project that blended French house with raw freestyle performance. The videos were built around dancers improvising in front of the camera while Seb Janiak shot everything in single takes, then added simple post effects that gave each clip its own texture. You can still find pieces of it on YouTube, including the Vanity Girls dancing to tracks by DJ artists like Thomas Bangalter, Alan Braxe, DJ Mehdi and Le Knight Club. The captures here are from their website back in 2001, which promoted the DVD, announced events, posted casting calls and acted as the main hub for everything they were doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfRO5ED4x-I&list=RDHfRO5ED4x-I&start_radio=1

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DeRush - set 1

Derush started in 2001, by Pernille Christensen, Anders Hansen, and Jochem van der Spek. Their mission was to take cutting edge design from every discipline and bring it to a street level. They invited well known designers and upcoming talent to submit royalty based artwork, then turned those ideas into limited run t-shirts. Each design was capped at three hundred pieces worldwide, screen printed on blanks, and sold through their site and selected retailers.

They focused on the people behind the work. Every designer had a profile on the site with links to their other projects, so you could see what they were working on. Their designs earned royalties, and part of the profits went into the DeRush Fund, which supported creative projects and gave designers a share of the success.

Today you can explore the original site through the web archive at www.derush.net.

Here are some of the T shirt designs created by the artists who worked with Derush. The left and right images are likely interchangeable as the front and back of each shirt. Screen captures taken from 2002.

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Tom Hingston 

Tom Hingston founded his studio in 1997, focusing on identity, publishing, music, film titles, motion, and early web design. One of his first major projects was the art direction for Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, a collaboration that set the tone for his approach to image making and became a defining example of late‑90s music design. 

Through the early 2000s he expanded that work into a wide range of album campaigns, shaping visuals for artists like David Bowie, Grace Jones, Nick Cave, and Robbie Williams. In parallel he developed projects for Dior and contributed to Aesir – Tænker Edition 001, applying the same precise, image‑led sensibility to fashion and editorial design.

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Club ’01 Flash Website (2001) Club ’01 was a Flash 5 microsite created by 2Advanced Studios for One Entertainment, a Los Angeles promoter launching a new Sunset Strip nightclub in 2001. The site used the early‑2000s tech aesthetic with metallic panels, animated navigation, and interactive sections for rooms, and DJs. 

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CD covers from 1996

Mozart, Piano Concertos 9 & 20 - Mikhail Pletnev, Design by Lippa Pearce

Haydn, Piano Sonatas - Mikhail Pletnev, Design by Lippa Pearce

Infiniti Collection: Juan Atkins, Design by Mainartery

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Attik 

Attik was founded in 1986 by James Sommerville and Simon Needham, two young designers who started the studio in the attic of Sommerville’s grandmother’s house in Huddersfield, England. They grew it from a small setup into a globally recognized creative force, reaching a peak of more than two hundred employees across multiple offices and producing work for major clients including Coca‑Cola, Sony PlayStation, Adidas, Toyota, and MTV. They became known for an experimental visual language that mixed texture, type, and early digital tools, and the Noise series documented that process and the ideas behind it. Here are scans from the first few pages of Noise Four, published in 2001.

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Tom Sachs WHITE exhibit (2000–2001)

Tom Sachs’s White exhibition feels like stepping into a quiet room filled with handmade objects stripped down to their essentials, where the texture, cuts, and construction sit front and center. The bright, uniform space makes each piece feel light and almost floating, yet still rooted in his mix of sci‑fi, DIY, and pop‑culture references. The show plays like an experiment in how “white” shifts the mood of an object, letting form and material take over. He pulls you into a small space‑themed world with R2‑D2, suspended rocket fragments, and a model of Villa Savoye reimagined as a McDonald’s drive‑in. Everything is built from Foamcore, paper, thermal adhesive, and ink, giving the work a raw, handmade clarity.

Works included:

H.K.

P.K.S.S.

Villa Savoye

Saturn V Moon Rocket, Scale 1:18

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Prate Computer Channel (2001)

Prate is a browser native project by Jemma Hostetler, launched in 1999 as her personal testbed for digital aesthetics. It lived at prate.com as a calendar, a command line, a vector file dump, and an open directory, part interface experiment and part visual diary. Stripped down and modular, it felt closer to a terminal than a homepage, carrying early web energy into something raw, iterative, and quietly expressive. Prate continues to work as a signal that treats design as an ongoing process rather than a finished product, and you can still explore the archived versions online. Here are some captures from the 2001 version of the site.

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Todd Purgason early 2000s

Todd Purgason was one of the defining creative directors of early 2000s web design. As the co‑founder and Creative Director of Juxt Interactive, which began in 1998, he helped shape a moment when Flash experiences were pushing digital storytelling into new territory. His background in architecture, visual arts, and technology fed directly into Juxt’s layered and cinematic approach to interaction design.

His work during this period earned wide recognition in design and advertising circles. Juxt projects appeared in Communication Arts, I.D. Magazine, HOW, PDN PIX, and other major publications. The studio received honors that included Clio Awards, the HOW International Design Competition, IPPA StudioONE, DesignONE, and Communication Arts Web Site of the Week.

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Microsoft’s Productivity Video (2009) 

Back in 2009, Microsoft’s Office team released the Productivity Vision video also known as the “Office 2019” video because it tried to imagine what everyday technology might look like ten years later. The video moves through a series of scenes that each highlight a different idea about the future.

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Michael C. Place (2002)

Michael C Place is a British graphic designer who started his career in the 1990s and eventually joined The Designers Republic, where he helped create some of the most recognizable pieces of that era. His approach has always been rooted in clarity, structure and a deep love for typography, and you can feel that in the way he builds systems that are both strict and expressive. Even in his early projects, there is this balance between bold visual impact and a kind of quiet precision that makes the work feel timeless. His personal practice often pulls from popular culture and the tension between the natural and the man made worldmichaelcplace.com, which gives his design a grounded and human quality.

In 2001 he founded Studio Build, a studio built on the idea of doing great work with great people. That philosophy shows up in the consistency of the studio’s output and the way his work has continued to evolve without losing its core identity. 

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TOBY YEUNG

Toby Yeung is a Hong Kong multimedia designer active through the mid 2000s and early 2010s. During this period he worked across character design, illustration, apparel, and figure design through his labels CUBEMEN, tobyHK, and Skullove. His output included collaborations with Vans, MINDstyle, Devilrobots, and Giordano, along with recognition from Perspective Magazine’s 40 Under 40. He developed several character series in this era, including CUBEMEN, the Dumb Dummies, and SPUNKY, each built around simple silhouettes and clear personality traits. These projects defined the visual direction of his work and formed the core of the tobyHK identity.

As tobyHK, he focused on character‑driven projects rooted in Hong Kong culture and everyday observation. He produced series such as the ice‑cream figures, the angelhoods, the Dumb Dummies, and SPUNKY, and he participated in workshops and local creative events that supported younger designers. His work from this time centered on accessible forms, direct concepts, and character systems that translated across prints, apparel, and vinyl figures. This period established the visual language and project structure that shaped his presence in the Hong Kong creative community. https://cargocollective.com/tobyhk

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JIM BOTRON portfolio site (2001)

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frog was founded by Hartmut Esslinger in Germany in 1969, and the studio relocated to California in 1983 to work with Apple on the design of its early computers. A year before the move, the company adopted the lowercase name “frog,” stepping away from its founder’s name and signaling a new identity. The partnership with Apple helped establish frog in the United States and pushed the studio from its earlier, expressive “form follows emotion” approach into a more strategic mindset where product design and brand identity worked hand in hand.

One of frog’s key projects from the late 1990s was the Clio, a writing and presentation tablet created for Vadem in 1997. Its design pulled from unexpected references like jewelry, bone structure, and modern sculpture. The defining feature was a die‑cast aluminum arm that rotated 180 degrees, allowing the device to shift between tablet and upright modes. The team saw this flexibility as a response to the human instinct to personalize and adapt the objects we use every day. Around the same time, frog developed the JPS for Moscow‑based Javad, combining Russian GPS technology with a distinctly American sense of optimism and California ease. It was the first device to merge the antenna, processor, batteries, and transmitter into one compact, hand‑friendly tool, giving surveyors a major advantage in the field. frog also redesigned Trimm Technologies’ high‑speed disk drive towers, giving them fluid, minimal facades that visually expressed the movement of data. Across these projects, frog showed how even highly technical products can be approachable, memorable, and strategically tied to a brand’s identity.

VADEM CLIO: Computer, 1997, glass-filled poly carbonate, and magnesium die casting

ULTRA TOWER AND FIBERRACK DISK DRIVES: Computer and digital rendering, 1999, sheet metal, glass-reinforced ABS, ABS, lexan, and cast urethane

JAVAD POSITIONING SYSTEM: Global positioning system, 1997,PC/ABS, elastometric paint, aluminum die castings

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Ed Tsuwaki was born in 1966 in Hiroshima, Japan. A self‑trained artist, he moved to Tokyo after high school and worked as a typographer and art director before turning to painting. He created stage sets, live painting, and body‑painting sessions with music, and held his first exhibition in 1994. His experimentation with painting eventually led him to working digitally, which became the foundation of his career as an illustrator. His style has been described as smooth, elongated figures that are wide‑eyed and knowing, with a touch of the extraterrestrial.

By the late 1990s Tsuwaki’s work was appearing internationally, including a five‑page illustrated story in CitizenK magazine in 1996 and collaborations with Elle, Marie Claire, Wallpaper, and Vogue. One of his standout projects was for Vogue Japan in 1999, where he reimagined how Audrey Hepburn might dress that year. He also created the cover illustration for Chara’s 2001 album Madrigal, capturing the dreamy and feminine energy of her music. Exhibitions such as COWGIRL66 (1998), Millennium LOVER (1999), and FEMME 2000 (2000) marked this period as the height of his influence, with his archive offering a vivid lens into the visual identity of the late 90s and early 2000s.

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Smelly: Promotional poster designed by M. Brunner of Büro Destruct 1996