Let’s be actual: the design trade loves pretending issues are model new.

Yearly, the blogs and convention slideshows inform us what’s “in,” and yearly designers rush to include it into their portfolios and shopper work. The advertising and marketing? “Modern.” The fact? It’s normally a revival of one thing that’s been sitting within the attic of design historical past for many years.

Design doesn’t spring out of nowhere—it’s a remix machine. We’ve at all times borrowed, sampled, and reinterpreted. However recently, the recycling loop feels shorter. We’re repackaging 40-year-old kinds like they’re the following moon touchdown.

Stealing in design is ok—in truth, it’s important to development. However the finest theft transforms the supply. The worst type simply resells it with a brand new font. Proper now, we’re doing a variety of the latter.

So, for the sake of artistic honesty (and possibly a bit of wholesome embarrassment), listed here are 10 of right this moment’s most hyped design tendencies—and the locations we blatantly lifted them from.

1. Glassmorphism: The iMac You Grew Up With

If you happen to’ve spent any time on Dribbble in the previous couple of years, you’ve seen it: dreamy, blurred backgrounds, floating panels, smooth shadows, and a way of “depth” with out precise 3D rendering. It’s bought as a modern, futuristic interface selection.

However we’ve been right here earlier than. Glassmorphism is principally frosted glass UI from iOS 7 with a couple of tweaks to make it extra CSS-friendly. And that iOS 7 look? Lifted from 80s and 90s industrial product design. Keep in mind the translucent Sport Boy Coloration? The Bondi Blue iMac G3?

And even the see-through cordless telephones that had been all the trend within the mid-90s? These merchandise had been glassmorphism in bodily kind—layered translucency that made on a regular basis tech really feel prefer it got here from the longer term.

The distinction? Again then, it was revolutionary. At the moment, it’s aesthetic nostalgia disguised as innovation.

2. Brutalism: Soviet Posters in Disguise

Uncooked typography. Damaged grids. Clashing colours. Brutalist internet design likes to shout “I reject your conventions” whereas secretly… following a really previous playbook.

The net model of brutalism attracts closely from Soviet propaganda posters and mid-century brutalist structure. The structure was about honesty in supplies—uncovered concrete, heavy geometric shapes. The posters had been about daring, in-your-face messaging designed to be understood at a look.

When a contemporary internet company makes use of brutalism, it’s much less about political urgency and extra about portfolio peacocking. The unique brutalism needed to alter the world. Ours simply desires to alter your notion of a model.

3. Gradient Overload: Disco By no means Died

Gradients are again, and so they’re all over the place—hero sections, logos, buttons, illustrations. Designers name them “dynamic” and “recent.” However gradients have been round because the Seventies, the place they drenched every thing from disco album covers to sci-fi film posters to arcade cupboard artwork.

They resurfaced within the skeuomorphic 90s as shiny buttons and bevelled UI components. Then we “killed” them in the course of the flat design period within the early 2010s… solely to resurrect them within the late 2010s as a result of, apparently, flat was too flat.

The humorous half? Even in 2025, we’re utilizing the very same coloration tales because the 70s—neon purples, sizzling pinks, sundown oranges—simply utilized with higher-res mixing modes.

4. Outsized Serif Headlines: Mad Males’s Favourite Trick

Minimal touchdown web page, huge serif headline, in all probability in all caps—instantaneous “premium” really feel. But it surely’s not a contemporary invention. Sixties print promoting was already doing this with cigarette advertisements, whiskey spreads, and luxurious automobiles.

The precept was easy: massive kind will get observed first. Madison Avenue advert businesses weaponized typography to manage the reader’s eye. At the moment’s internet designers use the identical trick, solely now we’re utilizing variable fonts and responsive items as a substitute of metallic kind and magnifying glasses.

Once we name this “trendy luxurious design,” we’re actually simply channeling Don Draper with a CSS stylesheet.

5. Monochrome Minimalism: IKEA With out the Meatballs

The one-color palette. The surgically exact kind. The obscene quantity of white house. It’s marketed right this moment as Scandinavian stylish. However this isn’t “new minimalism”—it’s Bauhaus filtered via IKEA catalogs.

Bauhaus designers within the Twenties championed simplicity, readability, and useful magnificence. IKEA took these ideas, added a splash of Swedish domesticity, and bought it to the plenty. Fashionable internet designers took that and utilized it to SaaS branding.

The outcome? A method that claims “premium” however is so overused it’s grow to be the visible equal of an oat milk latte: nice, predictable, and fully secure.

6. Neumorphism: Skeuomorphism’s Awkward Cousin

For a quick second round 2020, each UI shot on Dribbble appeared to have these pillowy, soft-shaded buttons and enter fields. Neumorphism regarded tactile, inviting… till designers realized it was a nightmare for accessibility.

Its DNA is pure skeuomorphism with out textures—a watered-down descendant of the early iPhone days, when each app icon tried to imitate a real-world object. And skeuomorphism? Only a digital echo of bodily controls from 80s and 90s client tech.

Neumorphism wasn’t the “subsequent massive factor” in UI—it was a extremely polished lifeless finish.

7. Retro Pixel Artwork: 8-Bit Cosplay

Pixelated illustrations are all over the place in 2025, from indie sport websites to tech blogs attempting to look “quirky.” However pixel artwork isn’t a design invention—it’s a {hardware} limitation from the Nineteen Eighties that’s been romanticized into an aesthetic.

Again then, pixelation wasn’t a selection—it was the one solution to render graphics with the processing energy obtainable. At the moment, it’s a deliberate type selection, a type of aesthetic cosplay for a previous we’ve determined is cool once more.

8. Cyberpunk Neon: Blade Runner With a CSS Glow Filter

Deep purples, electrical blues, glitch overlays—bought as “futuristic,” however they’re truly direct descendants of Blade Runner’s 1982 artwork route. That movie’s dystopian imaginative and prescient set the template for each cyberpunk palette since: neon in opposition to darkness, rain-soaked surfaces reflecting gentle, tech and decay in the identical body.

Fashionable designers aren’t inventing a brand new future—they’re remixing a particular retro-future from a 40-year-old film.

9. The Grid Renaissance: The Swiss Did It First

Designers get enthusiastic about “discovering” asymmetrical grids, pushing kind to the sting, and breaking alignment guidelines. However Swiss Fashion (Worldwide Typographic Fashion) perfected grid methods within the Fifties—each the foundations and the methods to interrupt them.

The Swiss didn’t simply use grids—they constructed a philosophy round them, grounded in readability, order, and performance. Fashionable “experimental” grids? They’re simply taking part in with the skeletons the Swiss left behind.

10. Memphis Patterns: The 80s Are Again… Once more

Squiggles. Zig-zags. Clashing colours. If you happen to’ve seen a “quirky” model design recently, you’ve seen Memphis Group patterns. The motion began in 1981 as a rejection of modernist restraint—brilliant, chaotic, and unapologetically ornamental.

When internet designers revive it now, it’s normally for manufacturers that need to look “enjoyable” and “completely different.” The irony? Memphis was radical within the 80s. In 2025, it’s as secure as placing “We’re disruptive” in your About web page copy.

The Uncomfortable Fact

We’re not the pioneers we prefer to suppose we’re. We’re archivists, remixers, and typically outright cowl bands. And that’s not inherently unhealthy—if we acknowledge it. The issue is once we cross recycled concepts off as brand-new innovations.

The very best designers don’t simply copy—they rework. They mutate the DNA of previous concepts till the origin is barely seen. They push the dialog ahead.

So by all means, steal from the previous—however do it with intent. Research the lineage. Add one thing that wasn’t there earlier than. As a result of when you’re not evolving the work, you’re simply DJing the identical observe… and your viewers will finally notice they’ve heard it earlier than.