Let’s be real: the design industry loves pretending things are brand new.
Every year, the blogs and conference slideshows tell us what’s “in,” and every year designers rush to incorporate it into their portfolios and client work. The marketing? “Innovative.” The reality? It’s usually a revival of something that’s been sitting in the attic of design history for decades.
Design doesn’t spring out of nowhere—it’s a remix machine. We’ve always borrowed, sampled, and reinterpreted. But lately, the recycling loop feels shorter. We’re repackaging 40-year-old styles like they’re the next moon landing.
Stealing in design is fine—in fact, it’s essential to growth. But the best theft transforms the source. The worst kind just resells it with a new font. Right now, we’re doing a lot of the latter.
So, for the sake of creative honesty (and maybe a little healthy embarrassment), here are 10 of today’s most hyped design trends—and the places we blatantly lifted them from.
1. Glassmorphism: The iMac You Grew Up With
If you’ve spent any time on Dribbble in the last few years, you’ve seen it: dreamy, blurred backgrounds, floating panels, soft shadows, and a sense of “depth” without actual 3D rendering. It’s sold as a sleek, futuristic interface choice.
But we’ve been here before. Glassmorphism is basically frosted glass UI from iOS 7 with a few tweaks to make it more CSS-friendly. And that iOS 7 look? Lifted from 80s and 90s industrial product design. Remember the translucent Game Boy Color? The Bondi Blue iMac G3?
Or even the see-through cordless phones that were all the rage in the mid-90s? Those products were glassmorphism in physical form—layered translucency that made everyday tech feel like it came from the future.
The difference? Back then, it was revolutionary. Today, it’s aesthetic nostalgia disguised as innovation.
2. Brutalism: Soviet Posters in Disguise
Raw typography. Broken grids. Clashing colors. Brutalist web design loves to shout “I reject your conventions” while secretly… following a very old playbook.
The web version of brutalism draws heavily from Soviet propaganda posters and mid-century brutalist architecture. The architecture was about honesty in materials—exposed concrete, heavy geometric shapes. The posters were about bold, in-your-face messaging designed to be understood at a glance.
When a modern web agency uses brutalism, it’s less about political urgency and more about portfolio peacocking. The original brutalism wanted to change the world. Ours just wants to change your perception of a brand.
3. Gradient Overload: Disco Never Died
Gradients are back, and they’re everywhere—hero sections, logos, buttons, illustrations. Designers call them “dynamic” and “fresh.” But gradients have been around since the 1970s, where they drenched everything from disco album covers to sci-fi movie posters to arcade cabinet art.
They resurfaced in the skeuomorphic 90s as shiny buttons and bevelled UI elements. Then we “killed” them during the flat design era in the early 2010s… only to resurrect them in the late 2010s because, apparently, flat was too flat.
The funny part? Even in 2025, we’re using the exact same color stories as the 70s—neon purples, hot pinks, sunset oranges—just applied with higher-res blending modes.
4. Oversized Serif Headlines: Mad Men’s Favorite Trick
Minimal landing page, massive serif headline, probably in all caps—instant “premium” feel. But it’s not a modern invention. 1960s print advertising was already doing this with cigarette ads, whiskey spreads, and luxury cars.
The principle was simple: big type gets noticed first. Madison Avenue ad agencies weaponized typography to control the reader’s eye. Today’s web designers use the same trick, only now we’re using variable fonts and responsive units instead of metal type and magnifying glasses.
When we call this “modern luxury design,” we’re really just channeling Don Draper with a CSS stylesheet.
5. Monochrome Minimalism: IKEA Without the Meatballs
The one-color palette. The surgically precise type. The obscene amount of white space. It’s marketed today as Scandinavian chic. But this isn’t “new minimalism”—it’s Bauhaus filtered through IKEA catalogs.
Bauhaus designers in the 1920s championed simplicity, clarity, and functional beauty. IKEA took those principles, added a dash of Swedish domesticity, and sold it to the masses. Modern web designers took that and applied it to SaaS branding.
The result? A style that says “premium” but is so overused it’s become the visual equivalent of an oat milk latte: pleasant, predictable, and completely safe.
6. Neumorphism: Skeuomorphism’s Awkward Cousin
For a brief moment around 2020, every UI shot on Dribbble seemed to have those pillowy, soft-shaded buttons and input fields. Neumorphism looked tactile, inviting… until designers realized it was a nightmare for accessibility.
Its DNA is pure skeuomorphism without textures—a watered-down descendant of the early iPhone days, when every app icon tried to mimic a real-world object. And skeuomorphism? Just a digital echo of physical controls from 80s and 90s consumer tech.
Neumorphism wasn’t the “next big thing” in UI—it was a highly polished dead end.
7. Retro Pixel Art: 8-Bit Cosplay
Pixelated illustrations are everywhere in 2025, from indie game sites to tech blogs trying to look “quirky.” But pixel art isn’t a design invention—it’s a hardware limitation from the 1980s that’s been romanticized into an aesthetic.
Back then, pixelation wasn’t a choice—it was the only way to render graphics with the processing power available. Today, it’s a deliberate style choice, a kind of aesthetic cosplay for a past we’ve decided is cool again.
8. Cyberpunk Neon: Blade Runner With a CSS Glow Filter
Deep purples, electric blues, glitch overlays—sold as “futuristic,” but they’re actually direct descendants of Blade Runner’s 1982 art direction. That film’s dystopian vision set the template for every cyberpunk palette since: neon against darkness, rain-soaked surfaces reflecting light, tech and decay in the same frame.
Modern designers aren’t inventing a new future—they’re remixing a specific retro-future from a 40-year-old movie.
9. The Grid Renaissance: The Swiss Did It First
Designers get excited about “discovering” asymmetrical grids, pushing type to the edge, and breaking alignment rules. But Swiss Style (International Typographic Style) perfected grid systems in the 1950s—both the rules and the ways to break them.
The Swiss didn’t just use grids—they built a philosophy around them, grounded in clarity, order, and functionality. Modern “experimental” grids? They’re just playing with the skeletons the Swiss left behind.
10. Memphis Patterns: The 80s Are Back… Again
Squiggles. Zig-zags. Clashing colors. If you’ve seen a “quirky” brand design lately, you’ve seen Memphis Group patterns. The movement started in 1981 as a rejection of modernist restraint—bright, chaotic, and unapologetically decorative.
When web designers revive it now, it’s usually for brands that want to look “fun” and “different.” The irony? Memphis was radical in the 80s. In 2025, it’s as safe as putting “We’re disruptive” in your About page copy.
The Uncomfortable Truth
We’re not the pioneers we like to think we are. We’re archivists, remixers, and sometimes outright cover bands. And that’s not inherently bad—if we acknowledge it. The problem is when we pass recycled ideas off as brand-new inventions.
The best designers don’t just copy—they transform. They mutate the DNA of old ideas until the origin is barely visible. They push the conversation forward.
So by all means, steal from the past—but do it with intent. Study the lineage. Add something that wasn’t there before. Because if you’re not evolving the work, you’re just DJing the same track… and your audience will eventually realize they’ve heard it before.
