About this website

This website serves to find the truly new typographical and aesthetic web design trends as of mid-2023.

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The biggest inspiration for this website is the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI). I believe they are doing the most important work not just in cataloguing web design trends, but in understanding the process by which trends live and die in a materialist perspective. The aesthetics of the web, which is increasingly overtaken by large corporations and their platforms, is defined by consumer aesthetics. A consumer aesthetic is “a visual movement unified by overarching attitudes and themes that survived long enough or became popular enough to be appropriated by capital (a bar that is being lowered constantly as our cycles of cultural propagation accelerate),” as CARI's FAQ defines. The internet has no doubt caused this acceleration of cultural propagation, increasing the scale and speed of communication. There are principles and best practices for making web pages more readable, accessible, however the visual design and branding serve a purpose besides functionality. The way corporations want to brand themselves has an impact on the rest of the web through trends, and the counterculture will have an impact on the way corporations want to brand themselves. The evolution of consumer aesthetics is a cyclical dialectical process.

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For finding inspiration, I naturally stay updated with web design trends by exploring design blogs and websites but especially browsing online platforms like Dribbble, Behance, and Awwwards. I utilized sources from these three platforms primarily to find my own  examples of trends, as well as aesthetic trends as outlined by CARI. I do this with a particular focus on the typography. Additionally, I occasionally draw from beyond web design with sources such as video graphics, print design, and album covers, as these tie into the overall branding that can extend to the web.

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All images not already sourced in the text are sourced from Unsplash.

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