Nothing like a soft blanket, cup of hot cocoa and undemanding friendship to dull the pain of life’s harsh realities. This past decade has dealt us plenty of the latter, and the design community gave us the comfort we longed for.

In our age of anxiety, we found ourselves helplessly drawn to shapes and colors that allude to the stuff of childhood. Designers brought back the security of those simpler days with an aesthetic guided by what kids like: Sharp edges were rounded off, colors evoked sugary treats, and textures were softened and smoothed.

Here are some of the elements that we couldn’t help but be comforted by:

Roundness

Every day at my machine, I am greeted with the Twitter logo and the Skype logo side by side, both in variations of baby blue and both inflated with a friendly bubble effect.

Technology has helped designers achieve the comfy look. Google started the trend of rounding box corners and it used to be quite challenging to incorporate rounded corners into a web design. Now CSS styling has caught up with our craving for non-threatening edges.

We find bubblification in other kinds of design as well. When I was a kid, sexy Jaguars looked like this;

Now their sports cars, like the average American, have filled out, and look like this. Not so sexy;

Smoothness

Popular Photoshop actions make real life take on cartoon qualities, plastifying human skin and simplifying things through heightened contrast:

It’s easy to smooth our life’s rough edges in Photoshop. The i-phone “chicklets” will be with us for a while yet, even if some of us are tired of that shiny-button look.

I can almost imagine what it would feel like to suck on one of these. Babies get most of their information through exploring new things by way of their mouths, so infantilizing our interaction with the world will naturally have us revert to this way of experiencing things.

Candy Colors

The mouth, of course is the gateway to nourishment too.  Just as some of us turn to food when we’re stressed, we are all drawn to visual references to food. These food allusions of course, don’t have to refer to anything more elevated than caloric nourishment; the higher the better. Candy and cake come to mind.

These are some Japanese candies. This “Hello Kitty®” look is about as unthreatening as it gets. Friendly, unsophisticated color combinations like these don’t make any demands on our overwhelmed senses. Reassuring colors from the nursery lower the blood pressure, I’m sure.

Here’s some comforting packaging by Capsule http://www.capsule.us/ design:

And confectionery imagery translates well into that other pick-me-up category, beauty:

A few popular color palettes on the colourlover.com site are:

Each one of these colors would look great as butter cream icing. And chocolate brown takes the place of unappetizing black as a grounding color among the pastels and tasty brights.

Are we ready to grow up yet? I’m hoping that we all recover our confidence in the coming year. Meanwhile, I’m not quite prepared to abandon the power a designer has to tug on those emotional strings that soothe our 21^st-century afflictions.

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