On 3 November 2025, we published twelve web design trends for 2026. This review, first published on 8 May 2026, considers which approaches serve concrete projects. It is an editorial assessment, not a representative market study. Bento grids, dark mode and design systems remain useful options; animation, 3D and personalisation need a clear purpose and technical budget.
Our historical analysis reported 347 citations across the original article’s three languages in Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance. This article-level observation covers Microsoft Copilot, AI answers in Bing and selected partners. It is neither a current domain total nor evidence of an individual design trend’s effect.
Half the original list is doing exactly what I expected. A quarter overpromised. A quarter underdelivered. And two new trends emerged from the side that nobody on my list predicted in the original article.
What held up: bento grids, dark mode, design systems#
The three calls I made in the original article that aged well are the structural ones. None of them are flashy. All of them ship in real projects.
Bento grids: Different tile sizes can prioritise content. A simpler grid often fits equal products or long text better. Our originally reported 23 percent greater scroll depth was a project-specific observation, not controlled evidence of a market rule. Plan content and mobile reading order first.
Dark mode: A theme should fit usage and brand. Check every state, especially forms, messages and contrast. Our originally reported 18 percent longer sessions do not establish a general or causal dark-mode effect. A token system can help make the implementation consistent.
Design systems as foundation matched my prediction exactly. Every serious 2026 project we touched has a token system, component library, automated visual regression and a design-to-code pipeline. The teams that skipped this step in 2024 are paying for it now in fragmented redesigns.
What overpromised: kinetic typography, glassmorphism 2.0, organic shapes#
Three trends I called confidently in the original article turned out to be more polish than substance.
Kinetic typography: Moving headlines can emphasise an introduction. Content must remain readable without animation; splitting text must not turn words into disconnected letters for screen readers or crawlers. Animation does not inherently cause layout shifts. Properties, reserved space and implementation matter.
Glassmorphism: Blur and transparency can convey depth, while affecting readability and paint cost. Limit the area and test target devices. This does not imply a universal FPS loss. In navigation or modals, the effect remains an optional design tool.
Organic blob shapes and asymmetric containers had the strongest gap between trend articles and shipping reality. They show up on landing pages where the brand can afford the playfulness. They almost never ship on B2B SaaS, e-commerce or any conversion-critical flow. The "hero with a giant blob" pattern is a 2024 trend that 2026 articles kept recycling without checking which industries actually use it.
What underdelivered: 3D/WebGL, AI personalization, sustainable web design#
Three calls I made too optimistically.
3D and WebGL: Product viewers and configurators can explain spatial information. They need optimised assets, deliberate loading, a device budget and an accessible fallback. WebGL does not automatically imply a particular runtime size or poor Core Web Vitals. Test the actual scene rather than rejecting the format.
AI personalisation: It needs a relevant goal, reliable data and an appropriate privacy basis. First-party data, server logic and cohorts do not automatically remove privacy duties. First test whether explicit choices or clear variants achieve the benefit more simply.
Sustainable web design got measured but did not get adopted broadly. Tools like Website Carbon Calculator are common in agency presentations. The actual decisions teams make (image weights, JavaScript budgets, hosting choice) still optimize for cost and speed first, sustainability third. The trend is real but it has not yet become a primary buying criterion for clients. Maybe in 2027.
What we missed: AI readability and the anti-grid counter-movement#
Two trends nobody on my original list predicted have become the actual story of mid-2026.
Technical readability: Important content should be accessible and understandable. Our implementation included structured facts and supplementary files for compatible clients. Our historical Bing measurement in early May 2026 showed 2,300 citations in the three-month window. This establishes citations on the supported Microsoft surfaces, not their cause. Google requires no special AI files or additional schema types for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Check crawl access, delivered HTML and visible facts. A missing mention in an AI answer does not prove a technical defect. Separate technical checks, repeated open search tests and actual citation data. Llms.txt can supplement, but does not replace good content or indexing.
Anti-grid brutalism as a counter-movement. This one nobody on my list saw coming. As bento layouts became ubiquitous, a counter-trend emerged: deliberately broken layouts, raw HTML aesthetics, brutalist typography, monospace everything. Sites like The Browser Company's marketing pages, the v0.dev landing page, and most of the indie-hacker SaaS launches in 2026 lean into this aesthetic. It is not retro nostalgia. It is positioning. When everyone else looks like Apple, looking different becomes the differentiator.
This is going to be the design conversation of late 2026 and early 2027. The pendulum swung from custom to template back to custom, and now it is swinging from polished bento to deliberately raw brutalism. Watch which agencies pick which side.
What to optimize for in H2 2026#
If you have a redesign in flight, the priority list looks different than it did in the original article.
Check crawl access, delivered HTML and visible facts. A missing mention in an AI answer does not prove a technical defect. Separate technical checks, repeated open search tests and actual citation data. Llms.txt can supplement, but does not replace good content or indexing.
Then commit to the structural trends that held up: bento grids for content layout, dark mode as a first-class theme, design systems as the foundation everything else builds on. These are not flashy. They compound.
Be conservative with the polish trends. Kinetic typography on hero only. Glassmorphism on navigation and modals only. WebGL only when the brand justifies the performance cost. Treat each as an enhancement, not a foundation.
Watch the brutalism trend. If your competitors are all converging on the same Apple-esque aesthetic, the counter-position becomes valuable. We have not committed to brutalism in our own work yet, but we have prototyped it for two clients in tech-heavy verticals where the audience reads HN and rewards positioning over polish.
What we built around this#
For full disclosure: every project we ship at StudioMeyer carries the AI readability layer by default. Llms.txt, agents.json, agent-card.json, schema markup, JSON-LD across pages. Every project uses a token-based design system, dark mode as a first-class theme, and bento grids for content layouts when the content has natural hierarchy. We are conservative with WebGL and kinetic typography. We have not built anything brutalist yet.
The result is that our portfolio sites are easy for AI to read, score well on Core Web Vitals, and survive client redesigns better than templates do. None of that is one trend. All of it is the same thing: optimize for what compounds, skip what is decorative.
If you want a redesign that takes this list seriously, we are here. The first audit is free and includes an AI readability check, a Core Web Vitals run and a design system review.
