There are two websites I've worked on with my own hands. The first belongs to a concrete plant: tables of concrete grades with spec numbers, price per cubic meter, mixer truck delivery with and without tax, and a phone number set in a font size you could read off a foreman's screen from across the site. The second belongs to a sports nutrition brand: neon, merch, a ticker with influencer promo codes, tubs of protein in tropical smoothie flavor. Neither would win a design award. And both talk to their visitor exactly right — the foreman sees the numbers and calls, the gym guy sees the vibe and adds to cart.
Now mentally swap them. The concrete plant in neon with promo codes — and a procurement manager with a two-million project quietly closes the tab, because serious people don't look like that. The supplement brand in spec tables — and the entire audience that came for energy and belonging drifts off to wherever that energy actually is. Notice: neither site got a single pixel worse. They just started speaking the wrong language.
That's what this is about.
A technique lives briefly. A language lives long
Every visual decision has two lifespans. The first — short — is while it's still a technique: fresh, rare, nobody's seen this before, wow. The second — long — begins when it becomes a word. A word with a fixed meaning, and that meaning gets assigned not by the designer but by everyone who has used the word before them.
A small phrasebook, some of which you'll recognize:
- Rigid shapes, blue and gray, stock photos of handshakes — "a systems integrator built this around 2006, and we've been fine with it ever since."
- Full-screen colored tiles — Windows Phone and that brief era when everyone believed this was what everything would look like from now on.
- Enormous rounded corners, candy colors, padding you could get lost in — "this is Android," even when it isn't.
- Glass, blur, and iridescent blobs floating in the background — until recently "trendy and expensive," now increasingly "generated in five minutes."
Note that last entry: the meaning flipped right in front of us, in a couple of years flat. The blobs themselves didn't change. What changed is who says them, and how often.
That's the core inconvenience of visual language: the dictionary doesn't ask anyone's permission. The designer picks a shape, a typeface, a material — and the visitor receives, bundled with them, the meaning that thousands of other websites have already written into them. And the meaning is what gets read first. The picture comes later, if at all.
How a word changes its meaning
The textbook case is the leather interfaces of old iPhones. If you were around for it: the Notes app looked like a legal pad with yellow ruled paper, the calendar was upholstered in leather with visible stitching, the virtual newsstand had wooden shelves. This is called skeuomorphism, and back in 2007 it wasn't decoration — it was a bridge. People were poking a finger at glass for the first time in their lives, and the glass had to impersonate familiar things: here's a notepad, here's a shelf, you already know how these work. Leather meant "understandable," and also "expensive," because drawing it convincingly took real craft.
And then everyone crossed the bridge. All of them. In a few years the smartphone went from a curiosity to the thing in everyone's pocket, and a person four years into scrolling a feed with their thumb no longer needs a shelf to explain where the books are. The teaching function ran out — only the decoration remained. On top of that, screens multiplied: phones, tablets, tiny, enormous — and a flat rectangle scales across all of them without tears, while a textured leather panel with shadows needs manual adjustment for every size. In 2013 Apple threw the whole thing out, and the industry threw it out right after, with visible relief. Forbes ran a piece back then with a headline that read, roughly, "well, it was time for skeuomorphism to die" — an obituary for a style that six years earlier had been the gold standard of expensive.
Here's the interesting part. The leather and the ruled paper didn't go anywhere — you can still draw them, pixel for pixel, exactly as before. But they mean something else now. Then: "expensive, understandable, made for humans." Now: "nobody has touched this website since 2012." Same word, meaning flipped to its opposite — because the readers changed. The language, naturally, forgot to ask the designers for permission.
Sit with that for a second, because it's the core of the whole story. The design didn't degrade. Nobody touched it. There was nothing in it to degrade — the world around it shifted, and the same picture started reading differently. Meaning lives in the reader's head, and the designer has no access there.
How a word burns out
A change of readers isn't the only way to kill a meaning. There's a second way, and it works faster.
In the late 2010s an illustration style spread across the internet that you have definitely seen: flat little people with arms bent like vacuum cleaner hoses, tiny heads, and skin in arbitrary colors — lilac, blue, green. They're perpetually doing something joyful: running, dancing, high-fiving around a giant laptop. The style was created for a major social network, and it was called Alegria — Spanish for "joy." The brief was honest: show that behind the enormous tech corporation there are living, friendly humans.
It worked so well that everyone started copying it. All the more since it copied easily — simple shapes, no shading, and before long there were kit-builders where you could assemble a little person from ready-made arms and legs, like dressing a paper doll. And here the language played its usual trick: the more often a word gets said, the faster it wears smooth. Within a few years "joy" traveled all the way to its own opposite — today those bendy-armed people mean "a corporation pretending to be your friend." Writer Claire L. Evans put it in Wired rather mercilessly: the style makes Big Tech companies look friendly, approachable, and concerned with human-level connection — that is, roughly the opposite of what they actually are. The style even earned a sneering nickname — "Corporate Memphis." A good style, by the way. Was.
Notice what exactly killed it. Not ugliness — the little people are as cute as they ever were. What killed it was ease of pronunciation: the simpler a technique is to reproduce, the faster it turns from "oh, interesting" into background noise — like the roar of the freeway outside your window that you stop hearing a week after moving in.
With that in hand, you can look at what's happening today.
A word being fought over right now
Now, about glass — because this is a rare case where the battle for a word's meaning is being broadcast live.
Pulling from one side is Apple: their new glass with refraction and glints is a technically formidable piece of work, growing out of the company's decades-long love affair with translucent materials, and they're pulling it toward "premium, deep, expensive." Pulling from the other side are thousands of generated landing pages, where the same blur with a couple of colored blobs on a dark background gets placed by default, because the tools have learned: this is what a "beautiful website" looks like now. They're pulling the same word toward "template, slop, nobody thought about this."
One material. Two meanings, and they're incompatible. And which one wins is decided not by whose version is prettier or more technically impressive. It's decided by frequency: a language belongs to those who speak it, and the people speaking it with a generator in hand vastly outnumber the people speaking it with a Cupertino engineering team.
I know this one firsthand — my own site used to have glass like that, an elaborate one, with shaders, and I genuinely loved it. Then a visitor looked at it and said: AI slop. I could have taken offense and explained the shaders to him. But if the reader keeps reading something other than what you meant, over and over — the problem isn't the reader. The word already means what it means. The glass had to come down.
An outdated word is a living word
From all of the above it's tempting to conclude that old languages should simply be buried, and only the freshest one spoken. That conclusion is wrong, and here's the catch.
Picture a clothing brand that builds everything around the aesthetics of the early 2000s — the era before smooth gradients: gray window chrome, pixel icons, beveled buttons straight out of old Windows. For that brand, a website styled after that era is a bullseye: the site's language literally echoes the product, the customer arrives precisely for that feeling, and the site greets them at the door in exactly the right words. The industry has long distinguished these two situations with a short formula: a site that looks old on purpose, and a site that just looks old. The first is deliberate speech. The second forgot to update.
The same visuals in a developer's portfolio "for the vibe" are a borrowed suit that doesn't fit: it tells the product nothing, echoes nothing about the audience, and reads at best as a joke, at worst as an inability to tell appropriate from cool. And for a bank, a law firm, or a clinic, retro language is off the table entirely, however fashionable it gets: people come to those places for calm and predictability, and speaking to them in floppy disk is roughly a notary in a Hawaiian shirt. The shirt might be excellent. The shirt is not the issue.
So there are almost no dead languages in design, it turns out. Only misplaced ones.
What to do with all this
Before the usual question — "do I like it or not" — there's another one worth asking, and it matters more: what is this design saying, and does that match what you meant to say. To the concrete plant, a table of spec numbers says "we're serious, we're busy" — and that's correct speech. To the supplement brand, neon says "we're your people, this is where it's at" — also correct. And glass with blobs, today, tells a lot of visitors "generated," no matter how many shaders labor under the hood.
And if your website's language is saying the wrong thing — it doesn't matter how beautiful, fashionable, or technically impressive it is. Beauty is not an argument in a conversation that's about something else. It's time to change it.
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