AHD Artificial Human Design

AHD · Timeline

A decade of web design, in order.

The visible eras between roughly 2017 and 2026. Several overlap; the web is plural. Each panel names the era's tells, the references that anchor it, and how AHD relates — either as an anti-pattern the framework's taxonomy forbids, or as a direction a style token serves.

Desktop: scroll horizontally through the panels. Mobile: stack vertically. The page itself is hand-authored against the swiss-editorial token and passes ahd lint on every deploy.

  1. 20172019 Anti-pattern

    Corporate Memphis / Alegria

    Flat vector illustration, pastel palette, one accent colour, big-headed figures floating through space with no ground plane. Facebook commissioned the Alegria library from Buck; Slack, Shopify and a generation of Series-A landing pages followed. Already a cliché by 2018, still the default in many tech marketing teams years later.

    Tells

    • floating big-head figures
    • noodle limbs
    • pastel + one coral accent
    • props without physics (laptop, plant, mug)
    • diversity by hair colour

    References

    • Facebook (Alegria)
    • Slack 2018
    • Shopify marketing

  2. 20192021 Anti-pattern

    Stripe iridescence

    Iridescent mesh gradients and 3D hero blobs, often an orb or torus rendered in Spline with a subsurface-scatter shader. Stripe earned it with specificity. A thousand subsequent landing pages cargo-culted the blob without the typography or the engineering context to justify it.

    Tells

    • iridescent 3D hero blob
    • mesh gradient backdrops without typographic counterforce
    • Spline default scene

    References

    • Stripe 2020
    • Every Y Combinator Batch 2020–2021

  3. 20202022 Anti-pattern

    Shadcn median

    The shape LLMs still reach for by default. Purple-to-blue hero gradient, rounded-2xl on every surface, three equal feature cards, Lucide icon in a rounded gradient tile, Inter everywhere, fake testimonials with DiceBear avatars, four-column Product / Company / Resources / Legal footer. Once was reasonable. Now is the median, and the median is slop.

    Tells

    • purple → blue hero gradient
    • rounded-2xl on everything
    • three equal cards in a row
    • Inter as display and body
    • Lucide icons in gradient tiles

    References

    • shadcn/ui
    • Tailwind UI
    • most SaaS landing pages 2021–2023

  4. 20222024 Reaction against the median

    Neubrutalism

    A deliberate reaction to the soft-shadcn median. Two-pixel solid black borders, hard offset shadows with zero blur, flat primary colour blocks, no gradients. Gumroad's 2021 redesign put it on the map. Works when it's committed to; fails when it's a Tailwind plugin applied to a shadcn page.

    Tells

    • 2px solid black borders
    • hard-offset shadows, no blur
    • flat yellow / pink / cyan blocks
    • Space Grotesk or ABC Favorit

    References

    • Gumroad 2021
    • Figma plugin marketplace
    • indie dev tools 2022–2023

    AHD serves this. Style token: neubrutalist-gumroad.

  5. 20232026 Current, named

    Editorial neo-modernism

    The current dominant style in premium developer tooling and B2B. Oversized display serifs or tight grotesques, pulled-quote typography, ink-on-warm-paper palettes, photographic heroes over illustration. Müller-Brockmann meets Harper's Bazaar meets a design-system-aware dev team. Linear's 2024 marketing site, Cash App for Business, Manual SF's portfolio.

    Tells

    • display type 96–200px with negative tracking
    • cream paper + deep ink
    • single spot colour used once
    • asymmetric 12-column grid
    • hairline 1px rules between sections

    References

    • Linear
    • Cash App for Business
    • Manual SF
    • Pentagram site designs

    AHD serves this. Style token: swiss-editorial.

  6. 20232026 Current, named

    Post-digital / terminal

    Monospace everything, ASCII diagrams rendered as text, hairline rules, green-on-black or amber-on-black palettes. Are.na made it fashionable outside of CLI tools. The aesthetic is explicitly anti-decorative and pro-textual; when done thoughtfully it reads as confident restraint.

    Tells

    • monospace display and body
    • ASCII diagrams as text, not images
    • 80-character grid
    • no radii, rectangles only
    • muted green on deep green-black

    References

    • Are.na
    • Berg Cloud
    • dev-tool marketing 2023–

    AHD serves this. Style token: post-digital-green.

  7. 20242026 Current, named

    Glossy 3D revival

    Apple Intelligence re-popularised glassy translucent orbs, subsurface-scatter light, deep rich gradients with intentional chroma. Unlike the 2019 Stripe era this wave is comfortable with typography carrying narrative; the 3D is decorative, not structural. Easy to fake badly.

    Tells

    • iridescent translucent orbs
    • subsurface-scatter hero light
    • rich gradient chroma over near-black
    • display type pulled tight

    References

    • Apple Intelligence
    • Vercel 2024 conference site
    • Raycast marketing

  8. 20252026 Current, named

    Y2K / Frutiger Aero

    Glossy early-2000s chrome, teal-orange iridescence, bubble skeuomorphism. Mostly fashion brands, music marketing, youth-facing consumer products. Rare in dev tooling but surfacing in crypto marketing and experimental studio sites.

    Tells

    • teal/orange iridescent chrome
    • bubble-rounded buttons
    • plastic-glass skeuomorph
    • heavy glow and reflection

    References

    • A.P.C. 2025 digital work
    • Nothing product marketing
    • various fashion e-commerce

  9. 20252026 Current, named

    Anti-design / deconstructed zine

    Deliberate ugliness, grid-breaking, collage, tape and staple textures, raw HTML aesthetics. Dev-culture adjacent. Figma Config's recent visual identity, some Vercel conference material, Hacker-News-adjacent publications.

    Tells

    • intercalated type and image
    • broken grid, deliberate collision
    • tape / staple / rip textures
    • mixed display typefaces in clash

    References

    • Figma Config
    • Vercel 2025 conference
    • Experimental Jetset derivatives

The timeline's argument

Corporate Memphis, Stripe's iridescence, and the shadcn median are listed as anti-patterns because they each started as a legitimate response by a specific team to a specific problem and then became the default output of every generator and every junior designer who didn't have a better answer ready. AHD's taxonomy doesn't argue these styles were wrong; it argues that defaulting to them today means defaulting to the least- considered version of the web.

Neubrutalism, editorial neo-modernism, post-digital, glossy 3D, Y2K revival and anti-design are listed as current because they are still being practiced thoughtfully. Several of them collide: a single site can legitimately carry a Swiss editorial chassis and a post-digital docs subsection. The style tokens that ship with AHD are best read as named directions within this space, not as the only valid directions.

Adjacent reading: the taxonomy, why a framework over a prompt, positioning. Every reference named above is a specific, identifiable product or studio; this page does not bundle screenshots in order to respect source rights. Exemplar provenance lives in tokens/exemplars/ in the framework repository.