Style catalogue
Name the look, brief the agent
Nineteen named aesthetics across eighteen entries, documented the way an architecture guide documents eras: where each came from, the visual tells that identify it on sight, when it fits, and the exact prompt vocabulary that evokes it. Every card below is drawn in the style it names – one card component, restyled entirely by its own token set.
Cards keep their own colours in both site themes – a style is an art direction, not a theme. Flip the toggle and watch the page change around them.
Type does the talking
Restraint as a system – hierarchy built from type and space before anything decorative.
Minimalism
Hierarchy built from type size and whitespace alone – a five-colour budget where exactly one element speaks at full volume per screen.
Read the entrySwiss style
The mathematical grid, asymmetric layout and Helvetica that digital minimalism descends from – content recognised and understood by anyone, personality second.
Read the entry
Faking depth
Four visually distinct illusions, four different shadow recipes – same CSS primitives.
Skeuomorphism
Realism via light physics – one consistent light source and a four-layer shadow stack that make pixels read as material you could touch.
Read the entryNeumorphism
One CSS technique – two opposing soft shadows on an element the same colour as its background – and a settled accessibility verdict against it.
Read the entryGlassmorphism
Frosted translucency with exact numbers – 12px blur, 160% saturation, a 1px light border – floating over grounds that stay blurrily visible.
Read the entryClaymorphism
Inflated, not extruded – 20-40px corners and a three-shadow stack that make elements look sculpted from soft clay.
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The two brutalisms
Commonly conflated, technically opposite: one owns a hard 4px offset shadow, the other bans shadows outright.
The nostalgia lineage
A real family tree – 1980s Milano geometry feeds vaporwave; chrome-era optimism returns as Y2K.
Retro / Y2K
Bevelled silver chrome, navy title bars and pixel type – "the future" as imagined circa 1998-2003, back on the standard nostalgia cycle.
Read the entryVaporwave
Purple-pink-blue, marble busts and deliberate glitch – a music microgenre's visual language, constructed to look artificial on purpose.
Read the entryMemphis
Bold asymmetric geometry, Bacterio squiggles and neon-with-pastel – the 1980s movement whose shapes vaporwave still borrows.
Read the entryCorporate Memphis
Flat cartoon figures with elastic limbs and purple skin – the 2017-22 big-tech house style that became a named anti-pattern.
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Layout as identity
Styles where the grid itself is the signature, not the colours on it.
Bento grids
Compartments of deliberately different sizes in one balanced grid – rounded generously, packed densely, readable at a glance.
Read the entryEditorial / magazine
The reading is the product – high-contrast serif display, disciplined columns, pull quotes as rhythm, imagery as pacing.
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Statements
Art directions that pick an audience on purpose – and accept losing everyone else.
Maximalism
Layered texture, exaggerated hierarchy and ornament as a feature – the live counter-movement to minimalism, now pivoting tactile.
Read the entryDark mode as an aesthetic
A single permanent art direction, not a switchable theme – elevation by lighter surfaces, text never pure white, accents desaturated.
Read the entryTerminal / hacker aesthetic
Phosphor green on near-black, monospace without exception, zero decoration – an engineering constraint adopted as identity.
Read the entryAnti-design
Deliberately hard to average – off-balance layout, near-clashing colour, type in open tension. Intention, not randomness.
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