In the past 5 years or so I’ve noticed something about the web and corporations websites. If your corporation and you’re just doing a brochure site fine getting away with basic helvetica a neutral color scheme and balance paragraphs with clear images is the norm. This is pretty much been the norm since the.com top-level domain came online. However somewhere starting around 2020 there has been this primitive crappy art style popping up everywhere on all these high-end big ticket websites. I think I first noticed it on mailchimp. They went from their well-branded Simeon mascot everywhere to this almost childlike poorly drawn lino cut characters. And I’m seeing it more and more. Well I love Claude AI and Claude code I cannot stand the branding they’re currently using. Open AI same thing it’s almost like they spend billions on development and learning models and then they have some of their kids come into the office and draw up what the website should look like.
Couple of years ago it was the Microsoft beams characters. There has to be some sort of naming convention for this new aesthetic look. The circles and half circles and muted earth tone colors for backgrounds is everywhere.
And I’m not saying that these AI companies are having their LLMS design the pages and graphics for them because if you’ve ever tried to have claudecode or Gemini create a web page you know that you’re going to get purple gradients white backgrounds and block text. This is basically because they have been trained on the look and feel of so many basic boring websites.
John hodgman once said on the daily show in one of his interviews that in the future mankind won’t have a black a white or an Asian race and color but everybody will be the color of soft pumpkin. This applies well to these websites that I’m seeing now.
