The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet

How Anthropic’s new tool, Claude Design, is creating overnight web-design clichés.

Popularity Feedback Constrains Innovation in Cultural Markets

Real-world creative processes ranging from art to science rely on social feedback-loops between selection and creation. Yet, the effects of popularity feedback on collective creativity remain poorly understood. We investigate how popularity ratings influence cultural dynamics in a large-scale online experiment where participants ($N = 1\,008$) iteratively \textit{select} images from evolving markets and \textit{produce} their own modifications. Results show that exposing the popularity of images reduces cultural diversity and slows innovation, delaying aesthetic improvements. Popularity feedback is associated with changes to both selection and creative stages. During selection, popularity information triggers cumulative advantage, with participants preferentially building upon popular images, reducing diversity. During creation, participants make less disruptive changes, and are more likely to expand existing visual patterns. Feedback loops in cultural markets thus not only shape selection, but also, directly or indirectly, the form and direction of cultural innovation.

HAH — social media art experiments

HAH — social media art experiments

Aesthetics Wiki | Fandom

Thank you to the winner of our redesign contest, Ethan Duke! The background and wordmark are both his work. You can check him out on both Instagram and Twitter at @theduke2442! The dark mode was designed by Gwenanenn.

Recent — Design Inspiration

The best design inspiration on the Internet.

Rewilding the Web: my workshop report from Edinburgh

Notes from a wonderfully interdisciplinary Edinburgh workshop on 'Rewilding the Web', ranging coopetition and biological variety through the philosophy of self-organisation, polycrisis governance, protopian science fiction, and moderation seen through the lens of artisanal cheese.

juliet shen likes being online

The first time I built my personal site, I coded it by hand. It was simple and maybe a little ugly, but I made it. The second time I built this site, I used AI so I can celebrate what I loved about the early web using technology born of the new web. It's pretty and I also made it.

marcel.io

Thoughts about design, code, technology and everything in between.

Atomic Design by Brad Frost

Learn how to create and maintain digital design systems, allowing your team to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster than ever before.

Announcing Fanfiction.lol: A Manifesto on Human Creativity and AO3

I deployed my own AO3 fork called fanfiction.lol, an independent fanfiction archive with no invite queue, fandom-agnostic moderation, and expanded content warnings. A manifesto on why fan communities deserve free infrastructure, the history of transformative works from Virgil to AO3, and the challenges of running a volunteer-powered archive at scale.

AI Slop is Killing Online Communities

Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further.

Conscious Engines • Studio on Twitter / X

5. @feynon_ is the founder of Tiles, a privacy-focused AI assistant built around local models and ATProto.At the Mumbai meetup, he will be speaking about building privacy-first AI products using local models and open protocols. pic.twitter.com/x4ZAGyZu24— Conscious Engines • Studio (@cengines_studio) May 18, 2026

A more social IndieWeb | Dominik Hofer

My entry for the IndieWeb Carnival of December 2025 about the IndieWeb in 2030.