The web is a magical place. It started out as a way to link documents like research papers across the internet, but has evolved into the representation of the internet and the place where we get information and get things done. Writer Will Leitch on Medium:

It is difficult to describe, to a younger person or, really, anyone who wasn’t there, what the emergence of the Internet — this thing that had not been there your entire life, that you had no idea existed, that was suddenly just everywhere — meant to someone who wanted to write. When I graduated college in 1997, the expectation for me, and most wanna-be writers, was that we had two options: Start on the bottom rung of a print publication and toil away for years, hoping that enough people with jobs above you would retire or die in time for you to get a real byline by the time you were 40, or write a brilliant novel or memoir that turned you into Dave Eggers or Elizabeth Wurtzel. That was pretty much it! Then, suddenly, from the sky, there was this place where you could:

• Write whatever you wanted.
• Write as long as you wanted.
• Have your work available to read by anyone, anywhere on the entire freaking planet.

This was — and still is — magical.

The core argument of what Leitch write is that while the business and traffic models that fueled web publishing are collapsing—due to changing priorities of platforms like Google and the dominance of video on social media (i.e., TikTok and Reels), the essential, original magic of publishing on the web isn’t dead.

But that does not mean that Web publishing — that writing on the Internet, the pure pleasure of putting something out in the world and having it be yours, of discovering other people who are doing the same thing — itself is somehow dead, or any less magical than it was in the first place. Because it is magical. It still is. It always was.

Noah Davis writing in Web Designer Depot, says aloud what I’d thought—but never wrote down—before AI, templates started to kill creativity in web design.

If you’re wondering why the web feels dead, lifeless, or like you’re stuck in a scrolling Groundhog Day of “hero image, tagline, three icons, CTA,” it’s not because AI hallucinated its way into the design department.

It’s because we templatified creativity into submission!

We used to design websites like we were crafting digital homes—custom woodwork, strange hallways, surprise color choices, even weird sound effects if you dared. Each one had quirks. A personality. A soul.

When I was coming up as a designer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of my favorite projects was designing Pixar.com. The animation studio’s soul—and by extension the soul I’d imbue into the website—was story. The way this manifest was a linear approach to the site, similar to a slideshow, to tell the story of each of their films.

And as the web design industry grew, and everyone needed and wanted a website, from Fortune 500s to the local barber shop, access to well-designed websites was made possible via templates.

Let’s be real: clients aren’t asking for design anymore. They’re asking for “a site like this.” You know the one. It looks clean. It has animations. It scrolls smoothly. It’s “modern.” Which, in 2025, is just a euphemism for “I want what everyone else has so I don’t have to think.”

Templates didn’t just streamline web development. They rewired what people expect a website to be.

Why hire a designer when you can drop your brand colors into a no-code template, plug in some Lottie files, and call it a day? The end result isn’t bad. It’s worse than bad. It’s forgettable.

Davis ends his rant with a call to action: “If you want design to live, stop feeding the template machine. Build weird stuff. Ugly stuff. Confusing stuff. Human stuff.”

I will admit that I’d not heard of this website until I came across this article. Playing around with Perfectly Imperfect myself, I find it to be the strange web Brutalist manifestation of MySpace for the Gen Z generation.

Sudi Jama, writing for It’s Nice That:

Talking about the design for Perfectly Imperfect’s social site pi.fyi, on the other hand, Tyler says: “The design calls back to an era where algorithms didn’t dominate your day-to-day experience on the internet.” Tyler rejects the homogenisation of web design and decided to swerve Perfectly Imperfect into a lane of its own, inspired by the early internet aesthetics of “solid but saturated colours, lack of texture, MS Paint-style airbrushing, and a singular broadcast-style aesthetic”, Brent David Freaney tells us. Brent’s studio Special Offer collaborated with Tyler to bring the best parts of early internet’s visuality, whilst still creating something that belongs in 2025. Some fun facts: Pi.fyi’s colour system was modelled from 1990s McDonald’s brand and style guidelines, and the spray paint logo was inspired by an old Teenage Fanclub band t-shirt Tyler got on eBay.

The platform thrives in the chaos, all born from its visible human touch. “A lot of the core pages that users spend time on (the home page, profiles, etc) are designed to look more like a magazine than a social site.” The visuals are deliberately flat, featuring few animations, in order to let the design cut through. The mixture of a home page presented as acting front page, with editorial content, user posts, profiles adorned in large image paired with bold bordered text, and written content pouring from the right side of the screen. Tyler says: “It’s this approach that’s led us to calling Perfectly Imperfect a ‘social magazine’.” Tyler is inspired by the likes of Index Mag, MySpace, and i-D, among others – all boundary-pushing platforms which hold a cultural authority.

I think these guidelines from Vercel are great. It’s a one-pager and very clearly written for both humans and AI. It reminds me of the old school MailChimp brand voice guidelines and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines which have become reference standards.

Here’s a fun project from Étienne Fortier-Dubois. It is both a timeline of tech innovations throughout history and a family tree. For example, the invention of the wheel led to chariots, or the ancestors of the bulletin board system were the home computer and the modem. From the about page:

The historical tech tree is a project by Étienne Fortier-Dubois to visualize the entire history of technologies, inventions, and (some) discoveries, from prehistory to today. Unlike other visualizations of the sort, the tree emphasizes the connections between technologies: prerequisites, improvements, inspirations, and so on.

These connections allow viewers to understand how technologies came about, at least to some degree, thus revealing the entire history in more detail than a simple timeline, and with more breadth than most historical narratives. The goal is not to predict future technology, except in the weak sense that knowing history can help form a better model of the world. Rather, the point of the tree is to create an easy way to explore the history of technology, discover unexpected patterns and connections, and generally make the complexity of modern tech feel less daunting.

Jessica Davies reports that new publisher data suggests that some sites are getting 25% less traffic from Google than the previous year.

Writing in Digiday:

Organic search referral traffic from Google is declining broadly, with the majority of DCN member sites — spanning both news and entertainment — experiencing traffic losses from Google search between 1% and 25%. Twelve of the respondent companies were news brands, and seven were non-news.

Jason Kint, CEO of DCN, says that this is a “direct consequence of Google AI Overviews.”

I wrote previously about the changing economics of the web here, here, and here.

And related, Eric Mersch writes in a LinkedIn post that Monday.com’s stock fell 23% because co-CEO Roy Mann said, “We are seeing some softness in the market due to Google algorithm,” during their Q2 earnings call and the analysts just kept hammering him and the CFO about how the algo changes might affect customer acquisition.

Analysts continued to press the issue, which caught company management completely off guard. Matthew Bullock from Bank of America Merrill Lynch asked frankly, “And then help us understand, why call this out now? How did the influence of Google SEO disruption change this quarter versus 1Q, for example?” The CEO could only respond, “So look, I think like we said, we optimize in real-time. We just budget daily,” implying that they were not aware of the problem until they saw Q2 results.

This is the first public sign that the shift from Google to AI-powered searches is having an impact.

Jay Hoffman, writing in his excellent The History of the Web website, reflects on Kevin Kelly’s 2005 Wired piece that celebrated the explosive growth of blogging—50 million blogs, one created every two seconds—and predicted a future powered by open participation and user-created content. Kelly was right about the power of audiences becoming creators, but he missed the crucial detail: 2005 would mark the peak of that open web participation before everyone moved into centralized platforms.

There are still a lot of blogs, 600 million by some accounts. But they have been supplanted over the years by social media networks. Commerce on the web has consolidated among fewer and fewer sites. Open source continues to be a major backbone to web technologies, but it is underfunded and powered almost entirely by the generosity of its contributors. Open API’s barely exist. Forums and comment sections are finding it harder and harder to beat back the spam. Users still participate in the web each and every day, but it increasingly feels like they do so in spite of the largest web platforms and sites, not because of them.

My blog—this website—is a direct response to the consolidation. This site and its content are owned and operated by me and not stuck behind a login or paywall to be monetized by Meta, Medium, Substack, or Elon Musk. That is the open web.

Hoffman goes on to say, “The web was created for participation, by its nature and by its design. It can’t be bottled up long.” He concludes with:

Independent journalists who create unique and authentic connections with their readers are now possible. Open social protocols that experts truly struggle to understand, is being powered by a community that talks to each other.

The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.

Let’s rewind 25 years and remember what websites and web technology used to look like. Kevin Gut:

This website is a trip down memory lane. I’m not trying to tell you to stop modern web development. This website uses technologies not available at the time the content here is about.

I remember the article from 2016 titled “Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Hurt UX Metrics” where the conclusion from NN/g was:

Discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty increases.

Fast forward nearly 10 years later and NN/g says:

Hamburger menus are a more familiar pattern today than 10 years ago, but the same old best practices for hidden navigation still apply.

Kate Kaplan, revisiting her conclusion from nearly a decade ago:

Over the past decade, the hamburger menu — much like its namesake — has become a classic. As mobile-first design took hold, it offered a clean, space-saving solution, and when design leaders like Apple and Amazon adopted it, others followed. Its growing ubiquity helped standardize its meaning: Through repeated exposure, users learned to recognize and interpret the icon with increasing confidence.

I think the hamburger menu grew in popularity despite NN/g’s authoritative finger wagging. As designers, most of the time, we have to balance between the needs of the project and client with known best practices. Many websites, especially e-commerce, don’t have four or fewer main navigation links. We had to put the links somewhere and the hamburger menu made sense.

Crazy. Methinks there’s a non-zero chance that someone at v0 read my article and decided to give us designers the control we want.

Can’t wait to try it out.

I’ve been focused a lot on AI for product design recently, but I think it’s just as important to talk about AI for web design. Though I spend my days now leading a product design team and thinking a lot about UX for creating enterprise software, web design is still a large part of the design industry, as evidenced by the big interest in Framer in the recent Design Tools Survey.

Eric Karkovack writing for The WP Minute:

Several companies have released AI-based site generators; WordPress.com is among the latest. Our own Matt Medeiros took it for a spin. He “chatted” with a friendly bot that wanted to know more about his website needs. Within minutes, he had a website powered by WordPress.

These tools aren’t producing top agency-level websites just yet. Maybe they’re a novelty for the time being. But they’ll improve. With that comes the worry of their impact on freelancers. Will our potential clients choose a bot over a seasoned expert?

Karkovack is right. Current AI tools aren’t making well-thought custom websites yet. So as an agency owner or a freelance designer, you have to defend your position of expertise and customer service:

Those tools have a place in the market. However, freelancers and agencies must position themselves as the better alternative. We should emphasize our expertise and attention to detail, and communicate that AI is a helpful tool, not a magic wand.

But Karkovack misses an opportunity to offer sage advice, which I will do here. Take advantage of these tools in your workflow so that you can be more efficient in your delivery. If you’re in the WordPress ecosystem, use AI to generate some layout ideas, write custom JavaScript, make custom plugins, or write some copy. These AI tools are game-changing, so don’t rest on your laurels.

Some fun, free tools for designers, curated by Danil Vladimirov.

Sam Bradley, writing for Digiday:

One year in from the launch of Google’s AI Overviews, adoption of AI-assisted search tools has led to the rise of so-called “zero-click search,” meaning that users terminate their search journeys without clicking a link to a website.

“People don’t search anymore. They’re prompting, they’re gesturing,” said Craig Elimeliah, chief creative officer at Code and Theory.

It’s a deceptively radical change to an area of the web that evolved from the old business of print directories and classified sections — one that may redefine how both web users and marketing practitioners think about search itself.

And I wrote about answer engines, earlier this year in January:

…the fundamental symbiotic economic relationship between search engines and original content websites is changing. Instead of sending traffic to websites, search engines, and AI answer engines are scraping the content directly and providing them within their platforms.

Jay Hoffman, from his excellent The History of the Web site:

1995 is a fascinating year. It’s one of the most turbulent in modern history. 1995 was the web’s single most important inflection point. A fact that becomes most apparent by simply looking at the numbers. At the end of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. 12 months later, there were almost 75,000. By the end of 1995, over 700 new servers were being added to the web every single day.

That was surely a crazy time…

Travis Bumgarner:

The people of Mexico, without asking anybody, chose bright colors to paint their houses. I fell in love. Every time I pass by a colorful house, I feel inspired.

It’s color palettes based on random houses in Mexico.

I love this essay from Baldur Bjarnason, maybe because his stream of consciousness style is so similar to my own. He compares the rapidly changing economics of web and software development to the film, TV, and publishing industries.

Before we get to web dev, let’s look at the film industry, as disrupted by streaming.

Like, Crazy Rich Asians made a ton of money in 2018. Old Hollywood would have churned out at least two sequels by now and it would have inspired at least a couple of imitator films. But if they ever do a sequel it’s now going to be at least seven or even eight years after the fact. That means that, in terms of the cultural zeitgeist, they are effectively starting from scratch and the movie is unlikely to succeed.

He’s not wrong.

Every Predator movie after the first has underperformed, yet they keep making more of them. Completed movies are shelved for tax credits. Entire shows are disappeared [from] streamers and not made available anywhere to save money on residuals, which does not make any sense because the economics of Blu-Ray are still quite good even with lower overall sales and distribution than DVD. If you have a completed series or movie, with existing 4K masters, then you’re unlikely to lose money on a Blu-Ray.

I’ll quibble with him here. Shows and movies disappear from streamers because there’s a finite pot of money from subscriber revenue. So removing content will save them money. Blu-Ray is more sustainable because it’s an additional purchase.

OK, let’s get back to web dev.

He points out that similar to the film and other creative industries, developers fill their spare time with passion projects. But their day jobs are with tech companies and essentially subsidize their side projects.

And now, both the creative industries proper and tech companies have decided that, no, they probably don’t need that many of the “grunts” on the ground doing the actual work. They can use “AI” at a much lower cost because the output of the “AI” is not that much worse than the incredibly shitty degraded products they’ve been destroying their industries with over the past decade or so.

Bjarnason ends with seven suggestions for those in the industry. I’ll just quote one:

Don’t get tied to a single platform for distribution or promotion. Every use of a silo should push those interested to a venue you control such as a newsletter or website.

In other words, whatever you do, own your audience. Don’t farm that out to a platform like X/Twitter, Threads, or TikTok.

Of course, there are a lot of parallels to be drawn between what’s happening in the development and software engineering industries to what’s happening in design.