“Honestly, I just saw a picture of a Diskette on the internet and came up with the idea. I just thought ‘Oh, the iCloud of the old days.’ I was using my spare time stuck at home because of COVID-19 to work on new projects and I thought it would be fun to work on something like that! Once I figured out the main concept, I started thinking about all the other elements we used in my younger days and started connecting them with the apps we use today. I spent 3 days thinking about how to name the project, I wanted the name to have a twist of some sort, until I came up with ‘Once Appon a Time.’ So that’s basically how the idea popped into my head!” Luli says to Bored Panda.

In her project, Facebook becomes a long-forgotten photo album, Microsoft Word a retro typewriter, LinkedIn a newspaper’s job listing, and Gmail a physical letter. This series gives good nostalgia for old times when people used to search for jobs in newspapers, go to the nearest post office to send physical letters to one another, and have physical photos that they would keep in photo albums.

When asked how long it took for her to make one illustration, she said: “It depends on the simplicity: the ones that I spent less time on are the simpler ones, like Spotify and Netflix (half an hour). The more complex ones were Linkedin, Pinterest and Gmail, since i had to spend a few hours retouching them (3 hrs).” She says that she enjoyed creating this project as she could dedicate as much time as she wanted. “I enjoyed all of the steps: from thinking about the apps in the old days and linking it to retro elements to retouching all images and looking at the final designs!” she explains.

Luli Kibudi has been working as a graphic designer for almost 10 years now. Her main fields are the marketing and advertising industries. “I studied graphic design and did some marketing and programming courses. I worked in editorial design, marketing, advertising agencies, and brands, so I feel I could learn and experience graphic design from many different approaches.” She has a strong interest in arts and design so her series are extremely detailed and well-done. It’s even hard to tell that these things did not exist in the 1980s!