Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. So does that mean even something ugly can be beautiful? Absolutely—in fact, we’re seeing a weird rebellion in the world of typography, social media, and web design.
The contemporary focus on the sleekness of minimalism, the curated Instagram feeds, the hyper-optimized user interfaces—some people now see it as boring. Sanitized. Soulless.
Instead, they prefer something brash, chaotic, and maybe even downright “ugly.” Things like clashing colors, unreadable fonts, or 90s-style digital design. The rise of this aesthetic sensibility is called anti-design.
The movement is all about challenging conventional design principles and embracing what most designers and artists have been taught to avoid.
But anti-design isn’t just about being ugly for the sake of it. It’s a charged, willful reaction against the sterility of modern digital spaces we’ve grown used to. Let’s take a deeper look at it.
Origins in Rebellion
Anti-design has always been rebellious, and it isn’t exactly new. Its roots stretch back to postmodernism, Dadaism (the “anti-art” movement), and the punk culture of the ’70s and ’80s.
The dominant attitude towards aesthetics during these eras was all about rejecting order and logic—or that art had a formula. Rather, spontaneity, absurdity, and emotional rawness were prized.
These sentiments manifested in DIY flyers, ransom-note typography, and low-res collages held together with duct tape and attitude.
It had a digital resurgence in the 2010s with the rise of the brutalist web design movement. These designers were building websites that looked like they came from 1997 all on purpose. Harsh grids, jarring colors, and intentionally “bad” UX—ugly or not, they definitely grabbed attention in a web filled with cookie-cutter templates.
It has since evolved into anti-design, taking it a step further by actively disrupting user experience and further subverting aesthetic expectations.
What Does Anti-Design Look Like?
So what does anti-design even look like? Truth be told, anti-design is defined less by what it is and more by what it refuses to be, which are modern design trends all about being clean and sleek.
In comparison, the look of something anti-design is deliberately abrasive:
- Clashing fonts
Helvetica next to Comic Sans? Yes. Throw in some pixelated bitmap text and you’re getting warmer.
- Jarring color schemes
Make the text above yellow, then put it against an orange backdrop. Who said it was meant to be readable anyway?
Other common colors include neon green backgrounds, cyan text, and harsh red borders. It’s meant to be an overload that’s hard to ignore.
- Broken layouts
Expect floating elements, asymmetry, and just a general lack of flow and logic. In web design, it might come in the form of scroll-breaking animations that make navigation intentionally weird (or fun, if you’re an anti-design person!)
- Retro-tech aesthetics
Reject modernity, embrace tradition, am I right? Y2K graphics, Windows 95 nostalgia, skeuomorphism, and early web design are all common references.
It’s meant to be extreme and disruptive. You want to make the viewer uncomfortable because when you make them uncomfortable, you know you’ve touched them.
Why Ugly Is Now Cool
But why would anyone want to make things look bad intentionally?
You see, anti-design derives its beauty not just in its form but also in its ethos. And anti-design’s ethos is honest, unapologetically so.
It calls attention to the artificiality of “good design”—and even mocks it—and challenges the idea that beauty has to be smooth, functional, and sterile.
The form of anti-design is a form of protest. Rooted in anti-capitalist ideas of perfection and efficiency, speaking instead to raw human experience, which is, after all, often ugly and imperfect.
More broadly, one can even see it as a middle finger to digital culture as a whole. The fakness and transactionality, with social media taking over our social lives and corporations invading our privacy, leading people to search for the Incogni price.
So when a designer rejects polish and embraces mess, they do so because mess feels real. It feels human. There’s beauty in the breakdown, and anti-design is where it lives.
Anti-Design and the Y2K Revival
But goes beyond digital aesthetics as well. It’s no surprise that anti-design coincides with the Y2K revival taking over advertising, fashion, and music.
This aesthetic of the early web—think Myspace pages, Geocities sites, pop-up ads—is a rich source of inspiration for today’s anti-designers. It is old enough to be mythologized by now in the 2020s, but it is still recent enough to be remembered concretely.
The era’s low-res graphics, blobby 3D buttons, and glitchy animations feel raw and authentic in comparison to today’s algorithmic precision.
Critics can say whatever they want about anti-design. But no one can deny that nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
But Is It Practical?
Of course, anti-design, like any artistic school of thought, has its critics. They argue and emphasize that it often prioritizes aesthetics over usability, sometimes to the point of frustration or even unreadability or unusability.
This alienates, for example, people with visual impairments. This goes against the progressiveness of the punk culture, which functions as one of its roots.
That said, anti-design, as it is practiced in the real world, doesn’t exactly aim to replace conventional design. There are no banks, medical establishments, or government institutions using anti-design. (Well, not yet, at least. After all, some would say anti-design is meant to be disruptive.
It’s mainly used for personal art projects, music promotion, and fashion, and usually in subculture communities. To people in these spaces, anti-design feels far more expressive and authentic.
The key, as it always is—at least from a marketing standpoint—is intentionality. When executed thoughtfully, in the right context, and to the appropriate audience, anti-design can communicate mood, attitude, and identity in infinitely more visceral ways than a thousand neutral layouts ever could.
Where Is It Going Next?
Anti-design will most likely never replace traditional design. It’ll probably co-exist with it. After all, anti-design defines itself by being its opposite.
We might see it even become more mainstream as the young creatives of Gen Z—a generation valuing authenticity above all—get more freedom to break rules and design what they want. (Because rules were meant to be broken, weren’t they?)
Anti-design reminds us that what is perfect and optimized isn’t always beautiful or meaningful. Sometimes, the weirdest, ugliest, loudest thing on the page is the most human thing there.
And that’s the point.