Why the Web Is Turning Monochrome
From A/B tests to AI slop, the modern web is bleeding out its colour. Standardized, templated, and overoptimized, it is starting to feel like a digital Levittown — but it does not have to be that way.
The phenomenon is not confined to screens. Last year, a study found that cars are steadily getting less colourful. In the US, around 80% of cars are now black, white, gray, or silver, up from 60% in 2004. The shift has been blamed on cost savings and consumer preferences, but whatever the cause, the outcome is undeniable: a significant slice of daily life has lost much of its vibrancy.
The colourfulness of mass-market goods is hardly the bellwether for how vibrant life is as a whole, yet the study captures a trend many recognise both offline and on. From colour to design to public discourse, life is getting less varied — more grayscale.
The web is caught in the same current. It retains plenty of its founding principles, but its state is not healthy. Between AI slop, shoddy service providers, and enshittification, the digital world faces its own grayscale problem.
The Cost of Optimisation
This is worth discussing. One of life’s great fallacies is that things improve on their own over time. They can, but it is hardly guaranteed. The moral arc of the universe does not bend toward justice by itself; it bends wherever it is dragged, kicking and screaming, by those with the will and means to drag it.
Much of the modern web — and the forces of optimisation and standardisation driving it — bears an uncanny resemblance to the car colour trend. Processes like market research and A/B testing, which compare two options to see which performs better on clickthrough or engagement, have their place. But they do not naturally lead to stimulating design choices, and the spirit of free expression that made the early internet so exciting — GeoCities, personal blogging, and similar — is sliding away.
Promises and Pitfalls of Decentralisation
The ongoing transition to a more decentralised, privacy-aware Web3 holds some promise. Two-thirds of the world’s population now has online access — though that still leaves plenty of work to do — with a wealth of platforms connecting billions of people. The dream of a digital world that is open, connected, and flat endures, but is now tainted.
The Monoculture Squeeze
One of the most disconcerting trends is that while more of us are online than ever before, our activity is funneling through an increasingly narrow set of portals. A 2021 study observed that web activity is concentrating in a handful of dominant sites—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and more recently, ChatGPT. The researchers noted that while the functions, features, and applications offered on the web are still growing, the number of entities providing them is shrinking. The authority and influence of the top 1,000 global websites grows every month, at the expense of all others.
Monopolies naturally reduce variance, both through market domination and an internal preference for consistency. They also have a vested interest in crushing potential upstarts. Dominant players often fall into what can be called Internet Explorer Syndrome: complacency bred by dominance. Why improve quality when you hold 90% market share?
The symptoms are visible in design itself. Many big players look alike, and even personal sites are built on shared templates from a few website builders. On social media, users are reduced to a profile picture and a tagline; the rest is boilerplate. This is not to say sleek, minimalist systems have no place—they do. But the colourful, the kooky, and the unconventional are fading away. It feels like a matter of time before every major logo is a pastel circle.
The rise of AI in everyday digital services has accelerated this homogenisation. Amalgamating—and hallucinating—from content already trending toward a perfect average, AI output is grayscale in its purest form. Mix all the colours together and you get a muddy gray gloop.
This isn’t a rejection of best practices. Conventions often become standard for good reason. But the web is a flexible enough domain that it belongs in the realm of architecture: a city where all buildings look alike has a soul-crushing quality, and so does a web where all sites do.
The web is a flexible enough domain that I think it belongs in the realm of architecture. A city where all buildings look alike has a soul-crushing quality about it. The same is true, I think, of the web.
As Oscar Wilde’s characters quip, the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, while the sentimentalist sees absurd value in everything. The sweet spot is between structure and variety. We shouldn’t wait for the big players to lead; they have the most to lose. But individual web citizens have more power than they realise. The web is a place where what you can imagine, you can often make—at zero material cost, with no shareholders to appease. Such a flexible, limitless domain has no business being boring.
Injecting Colour and Chance
There are practical ways to bring vibrancy back. Start with colour itself: when in doubt, try something audacious. The risk is low—unlike painting a room, a poor palette is fixed by changing hex codes. The same applies to fonts, icons, and other building blocks. One example: a hobby site where each review page’s palette reflects the album artwork being discussed. Whether such pages ‘perform’ better is irrelevant; they are simply nicer to look at. Vibrancy and AA Web Accessibility standards need not be mutually exclusive.
Another technique is a degree of randomisation. Designers like Bruno Simon weave random generation into their work with gorgeous, natural results. This doesn’t require fancy 3D models—lightly rotating images for an informal photo-album feel, or inserting a random link into a recommended list, is enough to shake things up. The broader attitude is simply trying things out: making a custom font, adding a sepia filter, or planting an easter egg. Someone may have done it before, but your way might stumble onto something new.
There is no single prescription for a colourful web. A vibrant community is the sum of its people—individuals trying wacky ideas for expression’s sake, experimentation for its own sake. As users, we can also be adventurous in choosing open source alternatives to software monopolies, and active in sustaining a more collaborative digital world.
We won’t get back to a colourful web by pining for the ’90s or resisting new technology. AI is here; the choice is whether we use it or it uses us. The goal is to carry forward what holds true, drop what doesn’t, and explore new ideas with a spirit of play.
Not All Sites Feel the Squeeze
Broader economic pressures—dwindling ad revenues and AI answers muscling in on search traffic—push large corporate sites toward the safe and proven. But most of the web isn’t beholden to those pressures. From pet projects to wikis to forums to community news outlets, there are countless reasons for sites to exist, and they needn’t take design cues from the handful slugging it out at the top.
Connected to this is the need for digital literacy (PDF): “the confident and critical use of a full range of digital technologies for information, communication and basic problem-solving in all aspects of life.” As long as using third-party platforms is a necessity rather than a choice, the needle will move only so much.
Minecraft became the world’s best-selling game because people are creative; given the tools and opportunity, that creativity manifests in weird and wonderful ways. The web has that same flexibility and more. It is a manifestation of imagination, and imagination trends toward colour, not grayness. Where the internet goes is decided by its citizens. It is ours, and we can keep it technicolor if we choose to.
