How old is this?

My mother-in-law found a pair of Hanes pantyhose at the back of a drawer. I saw the instruction card and echoes of the past came flooding back. The illustration, the typeface, and the type colour all screamed 1970s.

This made me wonder how designers can avoid their work looking dated. (And to me this Hanes piece really looks dated.)

The work that looks contemporary today will seem so dated in a few years. And this situation is even more pronounced in industrial design. The original design of the Compaq computer looked like a sewing machine, and was about as heavy. It was a remarkable piece of industrial design and offered an unimaginable level of power in a relatively portable package. Today when we look at shape and more importantly that ugly beige, the whole package looks irredeemably early 1980s.

The same thing will happen with things like the iPad and iPhone. In a few years their designs will just seem so 2010. Not necessarily a bad thing, just a reality of our awareness of design.

Yet some designs seem to be timeless. Bang & Olufsen audio equipment, the Gill Sans typeface are some designs that I think are pretty classic. I have a 25-year old B&O receiver that would not look out of place in a show home today. I guess the trick is not to be too trendy. The problem is figuring out what is trendy today. Good luck with that.