Lady, EVOLVED 
feel perverse satisfaction in the fact that the actually kind of cool 2020s aesthetic will never get broadly implemented, because every industry has fired their designers and is lead by people with no design sense, and new startups (which would normally be leading the way) are all struggling under the massive weight of existing monopolies, and in all rare cases where the above two points do not hold, ai has taken root and regurgitated something which probably looked cool in about 2008 or so
@Lady Do you have an example of said 2020s aesthetic?
@aschmitz i think Lex (the dating app) is the closest to a mainstream implementation i’ve seen, although they’ve been gradually walking it back over the years i feel like, and to be truly 2020s you have to commit to serifs
@aschmitz there was one indie website i remember, i think it was activist-oriented around the time of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which absolutely nailed it, but of course now i have no idea what it was or if it even still exists
@Lady Huh, alrighty, thanks!
@aschmitz in short, with the advancements in CSS and webfonts and the growing availability of high-DPI screens, i think there's a desire from designers to push for a bit of a new-retro aesthetic from the heydays of magazine culture
but internet design has largely stagnated and people are too worried of shaking the boat (UX best practice of “give people what they know”)
it’s unfortunate, because again, there’s lots of cool things you can do with CSS now, but i’m also kind of glad that it’s mostly circulating and being experimented with in underground spaces
i’m talking condensed, weighty serifs, maybe leaning didone, as a treat; ample margins with rules; crosses as a visual ornament; faded pastels reminiscent of highlighter or cardstock; decorative bolds and italics; grid-based and columnar design