Signs From The Near Future

Fernando Barbella created a Tumblr of signs from the near future—photographs of billboards and warnings that don’t exist yet, but feel like they absolutely should. Driverless taxi lanes. Synthetic burger restaurants. Addiction support hotlines for social media. The future according to these signs isn’t nuclear wars or robot uprisings. It’s just… normal, but slightly wrong. Exhausted. A little sad.

There’s something weirdly funny about designing the banality of the future. Not dystopia, just the mundane bureaucratic reality of the next ten years. These are the signs we’ll ignore while we walk past them. The warnings we won’t take seriously until it’s too late. They’re printed in clean sans-serif typefaces, in that reassuring official style—the style that makes you trust something even when you shouldn’t.

What gets me is the precision of the predictions. Barbella isn’t fantasizing about flying cars or colonies on Mars. He’s imagining the exact form that technological resignation will take. The infrastructure of acceptance. The signs we’ll see every day and stop noticing, the way you stop noticing the warning labels on cigarettes.

I’ve been looking at these photos for a while now, and they’re stuck in my head in a way that isn’t comfortable. Not because they’re scary, but because they’re so plausible. Because I can almost see them already, half-glimpsed in the near distance.