a New Retro, NEWTRO Design

Retro, which was mainly a source of creation in fashion and music, has recently been applied to the design fields in Korea and has emerged as an essential design element that meets people’s emotional needs. Following the trend, in the recent 5 years in Korea, many food&beverage companies have started to relaunch their old package designs from the 1970s-80s, arousing nostalgia for the older generation and approaching the younger generation with the freshness of old cultures that they haven’t experienced. This phenomenon is described in a term called Newtro in Korea, which is a hybrid phrase that combines New and Retro. If retro merely longs for the past and arouses nostalgia, Newtro enjoys and consumes the old culture as a new product. In other words, Newtro is a reinterpretation of Retro through the perspective of the younger generation. As a whole my project looks thoroughly at the visual elements inherent in Newtro packages, thus hope that it would develop as a design approach that can be adapted in other fields of design as well.