All pieces
Twenty entries across six sections. The front page is an edit; this is the whole of it.
Serifs returned as a signal
After a decade of geometric sans everywhere, serifs came back — not because they read better but because they read as a decision. What the move actually signals, why it arrived at display size first, and where it falls apart when it reaches body copy.
Big type is cheap
Setting a headline at 120px is the least expensive way to look designed, which is exactly why so much of the web now does it.
The fifteen-pixel test
A face that is beautiful at 90px and illegible at 15px has failed, because sub-heads, decks and captions all live down there and there are more of them.
Variable weight as a crutch
One family at nine weights solves a licensing problem and creates a hierarchy problem.
Off-white is a decision
Almost nothing ships on pure white any more, and the warm off-white that replaced it has become its own monoculture — a default wearing the costume of a choice.
Two colours far enough apart
A palette needs internal difference to be a palette. Two accents thirty degrees apart in hue read as one colour and a mistake.
The accent that is only a rule
A colour used exclusively on 2px borders is not in the palette. It has to hold area.
Gradients read as depth
Until they are printed, or seen on a panel that bands them.
A break needs a grid
Overlap and offset only read as deliberate against something regular. Without the regularity underneath, a broken grid is indistinguishable from no grid.
The full-bleed habit
Edge-to-edge became the default weight for every band, which flattens the page it was supposed to dramatise.
Asymmetry costs maintenance
Every bespoke placement is a rule somebody has to keep true at four breakpoints.
Scroll became a projector
Scroll used to move the page; now it advances a sequence. The reader has lost a control and gained a timeline they cannot skip.
Transitions that hide latency
The honest use of animation: covering a wait that exists anyway.
Movement nobody asked for
Reduced-motion is a real preference and a large minority hold it.
Dark is a second palette
Inverting the light theme produces glare, muddy accents and vanished shadows. A dark theme needs its own greys, its own accent saturation and its own depth cues.
Pure black is a trap
Maximum contrast is not maximum legibility, and on OLED it smears in motion.
Logos of mixed polarity
Marks drawn for a white page disappear on a dark one, which is a supplied-asset problem rather than a CSS one.
The choices nobody made
Most of what reads as house style is a framework default, a stock component or a starter template that nobody revisited.
The card as universal container
A rounded rectangle with a shadow now holds everything, whatever it is.
Sixteen pixels and a shadow
Two defaults that travelled further than any trend.