Around 2020, I noticed beige website design popping up. And when I started my digital garden in 2023, I chose that direction. My favorite examples of the genre pair up classic / vintage serif fonts with illustrations. I think the idea is simply to evoke old books and human writing.

In the past couple years, led by Anthropic, a handful of LLM-related websites have co-opted the design style. Their branding in general aims to give the machine an implied humanity. Sometimes I wonder if that's how they've tricked me into using Claude more than other models...

Anyhow I've collected some examples of the beige website here and I'll keep adding them as I find them. Admittedly, a couple might lean more gray when I see them in context here.

Examples