On  February 28 2024, a blurry image went viral on Instagram and TikTok, then set the aesthetic tone for the entire summer.

Weighing in at 600 x 600 pixels, the square was an acid reflux shade of green and featured the word “brat” in fuzzy, stretched-out Arial font. The graphic was posted by the pop singer Charlie XCX on her Instagram to announce her new album, Brat.

At first, people thought it was a rough draft gone wrong.

“We have had to tell printers a thousand times, ‘This is the way it’s supposed to look,’” designer Brent David Freaney told The New York Times.

The designer spent nearly six months developing the infamous Brat graphic with his creative agency, Special Offer. The printers’ response? “This isn’t right! This isn’t right!”

But as Brat’s bright green ethos became a pop culture rallying cry for teens, fashion catwalks (see Prada and Gucci’s use of the color this fall) and even political campaign messaging, it became increasingly clear this design wasn’t an error. It was a purposeful, masterful example of anti-design, a subversive ethos that purposefully keeps things simple and even a little unfinished.

When used correctly, anti-design practices can help keep your digital audience more focused on your key messaging, simplify your site’s transition from desktop to mobile, and set yourself—or your brand—apart with humor and edge. Here’s how to make an anti-design choice that feels like a knowing win as you build your next Wix Studio site.

What is anti-design, exactly?

Developed as a rebellion to the sleek Modernist movement of the early 1960s, anti-design is a philosophy that embraces a little more visual chaos. Think multiple fonts on a page, deliberately blurred graphics, and colors that intentionally clash.

As web design standards—and TikTok filters, and AI graphic generators—continue their algorithmic pursuit of hyper-curated beauty and symmetrical aesthetic harmony, anti-design is deliberately unpolished. A pixelated middle finger to the “perfection” displayed by image generator bots, anti-design embraces friction and emotion, even when it violates the margins of a textbox border.

“Perfection can be quite boring,” says Jenna Goede, an Amsterdam-based graphic designer for brands like Reebok and Amazon. Goede says “sleek and ‘premium’ style” might not always connect with those seeking to create emotion and community in their brands. “In my opinion, design is more intriguing and interesting when it has slight imperfections.”

On the flip side, “flat design” or “neomorphism,” is the hallmark of tech companies like Apple and Google, along with Millennial consumer crushes like Away and Glossier. Using gradient color splashes, uniform sans serif fonts, and bright white spaces to center product, this philosophy once felt ultra-modern but now can seem boring or even conformist.

Anti-design is an antidote to the visual monoculture of “tasteful luxury,” with the added bonus of Y2K design. “You think of those old GeoCities sites,” says Parsons School of Design professor Nika Simovich Fisher. “For a lot of us, that was our first encounter with the internet. So of course we still have an emotional connection to that look.” 

What does anti-design look like?

The Brat album’s blurry font shows anti-design in the wild, but it's not the only example. Some brands you know and love have also tapped into the trend and embraced this subset of weird web design.

McDonalds

When McDonalds wanted to appeal to a younger, cooler crowd of french-fry lovers in the summer of 2024, they recruited designer and former fashion publicist Cynthia Lu. The New York artist is the founder of the underground streetwear brand, Cactus Plant Flea Market, which is beloved by Ariana Grande and Timothee Chalamet, and uses anti-design practices in its branding and its clothing graphics.

For the project, McDonald’s covered its Happy Meals and store walls in chaotic pixel-paint images of hamburgers with googly eyes. McDonald’s also rebooted its logo for the collaboration, blurring the edges of the traditional block Helvetica letters, and also re-rendering its name in bold, italic Arial Narrow. Today, the $3 Happy Meal box created with anti-design principles commands upwards of $100 on eBay.

Superthing Coffee

Superthing Coffee in Austin, Texas has built a cult following around its puffy, blurry lettering, which appears on the beanery’s t-shirts and mugs, and resembles the hazy state of things before the first sip of a morning espresso.

Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitters still embraces the edgy zine aesthetics that made the store a hideout for teens convinced they were the inspiration for 10 Things I Hate About You’s Kat Stratford. To keep their connection to anti-design alive, Urban Outfitters has turned their webpage into a cut-and-paste explosion of clip art, clashing fonts, and an animated logo that changes and morphs into new shapes every second, as if the genie’s first lamp scene from 1992’s Aladdin went corporate.

Tiny Tracks

The addictive synth music app Tiny Tracks manages to blend more colors than a Jelly Belly jumbo pack on its main interface, along with pulsing animation that encourages a joyful clash of colors and shapes that changes every time you click a button. 

Classic internet memes

Perhaps the ultimate example of anti-design IRL? The classic internet memes of the 2010s. With their black Impact font and their questionable symmetry, these visual gags are an aesthetic horror show. They are also perfect.

How to use anti-design without being anti-good

You’ve got to be confident in your design fundamentals before you can flip them upside-down. Here are some ways to start.

Font is the easiest way to dip a toe in anti-design

Feel the need to subtly disrupt your user experience? Try flipping the traditional Helvetica-based fonts used for “heritage media” sites to a slightly more subversive Arial, Impact or even Courier New, which can give a slight surprise to the eye, thanks to their teeny differentiations. (It’s like swapping lime for lemon in your salad dressing recipe and not telling anyone.)

You might also want to play with blurring your existing brand font, a strategy that’s been working for the eco-sportswear brand Thousand Fell.

Try a microsite or newsletter design takeover first

When Adidas wanted to embrace the anti-design ethos without overhauling their established brand identity, the creative agency Monks built a web page for their Yung 1 sneaker that swapped a “sellable” white background for a Magic Eye poster. Clunky 3D-lettering effects and clickable metallic bars added to the bonkers feel of the 2019 site, which is still referenced today as a harbinger of the wider trend.

Mix and match elements

Don’t throw out your “good” taste entirely. By blending the clean lines of a standard layout with the wabi-sabi elements of hand-drawn fonts, cut-and-paste imagery or slightly fuzzy graphics, you’ll keep your site looking disruptive instead of clueless. “You want visitors to feel excited and curious, maybe a bit confused at first,” says Goede, “As if the graphic is something they didn't know was okay to do.”

Keep centering the user experience

At its heart, anti-design is about acknowledging the humanity behind the machines that power our creative output. Take a page from its ethos and acknowledge the real people coming to your website. They can delight in the analog feel of organic textures, asymmetrical letter placement, blurry-edged photos and a jarring color border or two.

But those elements can only happen if your site remains accessible for everyone, which means at the very least, your navigation menu and search bar should be super-clear and easy to use. (In other words: Let them find the stuff you’re trying to sell them!)

Stay anti-design, not anti-social

Which means—all together now—no Comic Sans, please.

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