We'll start with a major point: Aesthetic preferences are subjective. Some like Baroque, others Bauhaus. I am not here to mandate your visual preferences. What I am interested in is less "does this thing look nice?" (though for most of the Starfleet Stuff I say Yes) and more "do these designs fit into Star Trek?" to which my response is "Hell Yes".
The most obvious point is the Uniforms, the clothes that our heroes wear when they are boldly going, the thing that makes a photograph of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy or Simon Pegg be a picture of Kirk, Spock or Scotty. Here we have the TOS Uniform...
...While the TOS Uniform was made on the cheap, there is a design philosophy behind it. Simple in form (Shirt, Pants, Boots) made with synthetic fabrics, easy and comfortable to wear, color coded for departments, nice and orderly without being overtly militaristic. Ideas that were common enough of sci-fi of that era.
Now compare that to Abrams Trek uniforms.
They're the same basic idea but with better execution. Better tailoring, better textiles and the rough edges dealt with. It's distinctively and iconically Trek.
Same basic principle applies to the Enteprise.
Then there is the the Mac Store vibe that some people felt was really bad. I never got it and frankly felt that it fit in quite well. First of all, all Trek series have been influenced aesthetically by what was conceived of as looking High Tech at the Time as a visual shorthand to tell you that this is more modern. But secondly there are some specifics which come back around. The Apple Aesthetic is based off old school modernist designs, a big part of the modernist movement was imagining a future in which technologies such as mass production had make a better world. That's the Star Trek ethos in design form and moreover there were elements of 1960s Modernism which were incorporated into TOS's designs. Sure both were shaped by the ideas of 1960s and the Obama Administration respectively, but both start from the same basic place as far as design philosophy. Please note that I got this when I first saw the trailers.
And lastly I would like to say "If Not this, then what?" There is probably out there in the lands of the hypothetical a million ways of going about this which would be just as good if not better for this specific franchise, but unless you have a book full of concept art for "My Version of a Star Trek soft Reboot trilogy of Films" lying about it's rather hard to prove that your preferred version is better. That said, recreating the look of the Original Series bolt for bolt would have been on par with making everyone wear Mayopants, pants made of mayonnaise. It worked reasonably well in the shows as a throwback but frankly you're kidding yourself if you'd think that anyone but the hardest of hardcore oldschool trekkies would have thought that recreating the TOS Bridge for Abramstrek would have been a good idea.
In summery as far as aesthetics go, Abramstrek did a damn fine job. The worst you can say is that it was a product of it's time and even then it holds up pretty well.
Zor
