I love this pretentious design the Ai people use on their websites, its pleasing to the eye
I think it's interesting how the superstars of a space dominate the design signal in it. Other parties trying to associate with the space are then forced to participate. The AI lab being a beige background with serif fonts and an abstract image collage with illustrations being a grungy version of Corporate Memphis is 100% downstream of Anthropic dominating the current conversation in the space and therefore Geist design being the dominant design language https://geist.co/work/anthropic
Compare the Open AI and Deepmind pages:
* https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-system-card/
* https://deepmind.google/blog/announcing-google-deepmind/
This is a topic I really enjoy thinking about and I wonder if someone has explored it. It was just before the pandemic when Balenciaga rebranded where it struck me that something crazy had happened. The top fashion houses were taking their brand inspiration from Apple! I was looking at a Rimowa and it looks like an Apple mark. And Balenciaga, and Burberry (before their most recent rebrand)
The flat geometric sans wordmark and product marks wasn't an Apple original but it is definitely given full high-quality luxury status through Apple's adoption. It could just have been an idea whose time had come (Microsoft's Metro etc. existed) but if you look at the iPhone, they were already using the flat sans Myriad font at the time.
Someone more acquainted with design and art will have to tell me if this is real because when I saw it I swear it was like everyone was trying to associate with this language that was popularized by Apple. But maybe they were just copying tech because tech were the top dogs of the age. And now perhaps everyone will copy AI labs which will all copy Anthropic because Anthropic are the big dogs of this age.
Look at it, though! It's striking how much everything looks like it descended from iPhone. People were saying the Balenciaga logo looks like a phone contact!
> its pleasing to the eye
Which is precisely why I've preferred the Solarized Light Theme for years now.
It looks to me very similar to pi - Suleyman's last venture
Copycats copy it, then it gets associated with subpar quality then the frontier guys adopt something fresh (or something deliberately currently-very-janky or retro/outdated associated) and the barber's pole of fashion rotates once more.
I really hate the constant use of bold+underlined text in places that are not links. Other underlined text are links, but bold+underlined is just emphasis. Feels like terrible UX, especially since they use it on claims that I would love to see the source of.
The whole cycle of aesthetics is about signaling and countersignaling. This whole "look" is also about what it _isn't_ (bright, sterile, sans-serifs, weird corporate memphis purple squiggly people). It's part of the reason all the tech bros won't shut up about "taste" now and Palantir has a storefront with a chore coat drop (someone thought they cooked lol). I don't know how you'd even begin to turn the understanding around contextualizing why something that used to be "in" is "out" or why things like tension/juxtaposition/irony/nostalgia work into something an LLM can grasp. The irony here is that by pushing LLMs in this direction they're just more rigidily codifying the whole aesthetic and giving it a stronger, rancid AI stink which will only bring about the new thing sooner once people see this whole look as the visual equivalent of the em-dash.
Not sure if you're being serious, but it's high time we stop using black text on white backgrounds. Dark mode seems to be solved with charcoal backgrounds instead of flat black. But I'm tired of light mode being black on white. This has got to end and if AI ends it, fine by me.
I've been noticing the uptick of beige + serif fonts + art with rough textures in this space. It feels like an attempt to humanize the technology and make it more palatable to people. Anthropic is the biggest example of this language with its ads and promotions.
Edit: I'm enjoying seeing all the other examples linked in the responses. I decided to make a public Semble collection (https://semble.so/profile/vadhub.bsky.social/collections/3mr...) to track more, feel free to add to this!