WHY DOES EVERYTHING LOOK THE SAME?

ARCHIVEB JOURNAL - 001

WORDS BY ISABELLA BRAWLEY

I miss ugly websites.

Not ugly-cool. Not brutalist websites that were carefully designed by someone with an expensive design degree to look like they were made in Microsoft Paint.

I mean actually ugly.

Hot-pink hyperlinks. Glitter GIFs. A completely unnecessary cursor trail. Seventeen different fonts. Blurry pictures stretched way too big. Buttons that looked like buttons. Random music playing that you could not figure out how to turn off.

Websites dedicated to one person's extremely specific obsession.

You'd click something and genuinely have no fucking idea where you were about to end up.

I remember the internet like this.

I grew up in the early 2000s, when going online still felt like going somewhere.

I remember computer rooms. I remember sitting way too close to a giant monitor. I remember Webkinz and dress-up games and random websites I found once and then could never find again. I remember customizing things for absolutely no reason other than I wanted it to look like mine.

Nothing matched.

Nothing needed to.

The internet felt like opening somebody else's bedroom door.

Now it feels like walking through an airport.

A beautiful airport, obviously.

Cream walls. Nice typography. Good lighting.

Everything smells faintly like Le Labo.

01 / WHY DOES EVERYTHING LOOK THE SAME?

Open Pinterest.

Don't even search anything.

Scroll.

There she is.

The Girl.

You know her.

She lives in an apartment with suspiciously good natural light. There is a chrome lamp somewhere. Her sheets are white. Her bedside table contains a book she's halfway through, a tiny dish containing two rings, and absolutely no charging cables.

She owns ballet flats.

She drinks something green.

She has somehow acquired the exact same vintage digital camera as every other girl despite it being discontinued in 2007.

Her life is simultaneously Danish, French, 1990s New York and photographed on a Canon PowerShot.

I love her.

I also think she may be ruining our lives.

Because lately I've noticed something weird:

Everything is beautiful.

And everything is exactly the fucking same.

The coffee shop.

The skincare company.

The girl's apartment.

The hotel.

The portfolio.

The clothing brand.

The wedding.

The restaurant.

The Instagram feed.

The other coffee shop.

Serif font. Lowercase logo. Flash photography. Stainless steel. Matcha. A blurry photo of somebody walking away. Tiny sunglasses. One strangely shaped chair.

We've somehow achieved global aesthetic peace.

You can go anywhere in the world and drink a $9 beverage underneath the same pendant light.

Maybe this is what humanity wanted.

02 / DO I ACTUALLY LIKE THIS?

This question has started haunting me.

Not in a serious existential way.

Mostly when I'm online shopping.

I'll see something and think:

Oh my god. I love that.

And then another part of my brain goes:

Do you?

Or did you see it on Pinterest Tuesday?

Then TikTok Wednesday?

Then on a girl with really good hair Thursday?

And now congratulations, it's Friday and you've developed a deeply personal lifelong connection to a pair of shoes you learned existed 72 hours ago.

This is the strange thing about having an algorithm that knows your taste.

Eventually, it starts creating it.

The algorithm watches what you like.

Then it gives you more of it.

You like that too.

So it gives you more.

And more.

And more.

Until eventually your entire visual universe is constructed from increasingly specific variations of things you've already agreed to like.

It's a hall of mirrors.

Except every mirror has really good branding.

03 / THE DEATH OF THE WEIRD INTERNET

The internet I remember wasn't particularly elegant.

But it had places.

There were websites that served absolutely no purpose.

This is important.

Somebody would spend three weeks figuring out HTML because they desperately needed the world to see their collection of Twilight graphics.

There were blogs maintained by one anonymous woman who apparently had infinite free time and extremely strong opinions about perfume.

Tumblr pages existed exclusively for photographs of motel signs.

Forums had seventeen people in them.

Fan pages had visitor counters.

MySpace profiles had songs.

You could change backgrounds and fonts and layouts. You could make things objectively worse because you thought they looked better.

And as a kid, I didn't think of any of this as design.

I certainly wasn't thinking about branding.

I just knew that things online could look different depending on who made them.

That's the part I miss.

You could find somebody's little corner of the internet and immediately understand:

Oh. A freak lives here.

I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

People weren't necessarily building audiences.

They were building places.

Little rooms.

Shrines.

Collections.

Digital evidence that some person, somewhere, cared about something far more than was reasonable.

The old internet wasn't good because it was ugly.

It was good because it was specific.

04 / EVERYTHING BECAME CONTENT

Somewhere along the way, we stopped making things online and started producing content.

Which is possibly the least sexy phrase ever invented.

A painting is content.

A vacation is content.

Getting dressed is content.

Your bedroom is content.

Your breakfast is content.

Your relationship is content.

Your breakup is excellent content.

Even hobbies have somehow become suspicious if they don't produce anything.

You don't just read.

You track the books and photograph the books and rank the books and arrange the books next to a coffee.

You don't just paint.

You film yourself painting so the making of the painting can become another thing entirely.

You don't just go somewhere beautiful.

You start looking at the place and simultaneously imagining how the place will look later, on a screen.

And obviously, I am saying all of this as someone with an Instagram, a portfolio, a blog and an entire website dedicated to things I make.

Clearly I am not living off-grid in protest.

I love the internet.

That's why I care about what happened to it.

Because I wonder what happens when we become so aware of being observed that eventually we start experiencing our own lives from the perspective of the observer.

You see the dinner and think about photographing it before tasting it.

You make something strange and then quietly remove the strange part because you're not sure anyone will understand it.

Eventually you don't even need an audience.

You've internalized one.

05 / THE PINTEREST PROBLEM

I have enough saved images to establish a small sovereign nation.

I love Pinterest.

Pinterest has also committed crimes against me.

Inspiration used to be something you stumbled across.

Now you can request it on demand.

Need to design a website?

cool editorial website inspiration.

Need an outfit?

downtown cool girl fall outfit.

Need a bedroom?

eclectic vintage bedroom aesthetic.

Need to become an entirely new woman by Thursday?

There is absolutely a board for that.

The problem isn't necessarily that we're copying individual images.

It's stranger than that.

We're all drinking from the same enormous visual water supply.

So even when nobody intentionally copies anyone, we keep arriving at the same answers.

Same references.

Same fonts.

Same compositions.

Same poses.

Same furniture.

Same microtrends.

Same strangely ubiquitous fish.

Millions of people expressing their individuality with the same objects.

That's objectively hilarious.

Good taste isn't knowing what to like. It's having the nerve to like something before everybody else agrees that it's good.

06 / I WANT THINGS TO BE A LITTLE WRONG

I've started becoming more interested in things that aren't perfect.

A photograph where the flash is too harsh.

A painting where you can still see the first idea underneath the final one.

A badly designed flyer.

Handwriting.

An old website.

Someone's bedroom that clearly evolved over ten years instead of being purchased as an aesthetic.

Clothes that are slightly weird.

Art I don't immediately understand.

Things with evidence of a person inside them.

I want crooked.

I want unnecessary.

I want somebody to use a font that makes me think, Jesus Christ, why did they choose that?

I want websites with secret pages.

I want paintings with ugly parts.

I want outfits that would receive mixed reviews.

I want someone's apartment to contain one object so bizarre that I'm forced to ask about it.

I want things that reveal too much about the person who made them.

Because perfection tells you almost nothing.

Mistakes are incredibly informative.

07 / MAYBE WE NEED TO BE EMBARRASSING AGAIN

I actually think this might be part of the answer.

We need to become slightly more embarrassing.

Because almost everything interesting has a period where other people haven't decided it's cool yet.

And that period is horrifying.

It's safer to wait.

Wait until somebody else wears it.

Wait until the design style gets a name.

Wait until Pinterest assembles the moodboard.

Wait until TikTok announces that the weird object you secretly liked six months ago is now the thing.

Then you can like it safely.

But I don't want safe taste.

I want the thing you bought at a thrift store because it made absolutely no sense and now you've owned it for eight years.

I want the painting you made that doesn't match anything else.

I want the photograph everyone else would've deleted.

I want your bizarre niche obsession.

I want the thing you love so much that explaining it makes you sound slightly insane.

I want more people making their own frogworld.net.

08 / MAYBE WE'RE NOT REALLY TALKING ABOUT WEBSITES

When I think about those early websites I remember from growing up, I don't actually think I miss the glitter GIFs.

I mean, maybe a little.

But I think I miss what they represented.

There was something innocent about making a corner of the internet look exactly how you wanted it to look simply because you were the one who lived there.

Before everything had to become a personal brand.

Before we knew what performed well.

Before we could instantly compare our lives, clothes, bedrooms, faces and work to millions of other people's.

Before we learned to look at ourselves from the outside.

As a kid, I don't remember wondering whether the things I liked were cool.

I just liked them.

That's such a tiny difference.

And maybe an enormous one.

Because I don't think we're actually losing individuality.

I think we're becoming afraid of the moment before individuality is validated.

The embarrassing part.

The uncertain part.

The part where you make something and nobody has told you whether it's good yet.

The part where you have to decide for yourself.

Maybe that's why everything looking the same bothers me so much.

It's not really about beige coffee shops.

It's not even about websites.

It's about how easy it has become to live an entire life surrounded by things that have already been approved for us.

What to wear.

What to want.

What beautiful looks like.

What successful looks like.

What our homes should look like.

What our faces should look like.

Even what kind of person we should become.

And maybe the weird internet disappeared because the internet itself grew up.

But so did we.

Somewhere between decorating virtual bedrooms and building real identities, we learned to be embarrassed by the things that revealed too much.

We got better at editing.

Better at curating.

Better at knowing what other people would like.

And maybe, occasionally, worse at knowing what we like.

I don't think the answer is deleting Pinterest or smashing our phones or pretending algorithms are evil.

I think it's much smaller than that.

Keep the ugly picture.

Wear the thing you're not sure about.

Make something without finding a reference first.

Build the weird website.

Care too much about something stupid.

Let your room look like somebody actually lives there.

Let your work contain evidence that you were there.

Because maybe having taste isn't about assembling the perfect collection of beautiful things.

Maybe it's just leaving enough of yourself in the things you choose that somebody else couldn't have made the exact same choices.

I don't want everything I make to be perfect.

I don't even want everything I make to be good.

I just don't want to look back someday and realize I spent my whole life becoming really, really good at looking like everyone else.

I would rather make something unique enough to remember.

— Isabella

FILED UNDER: INTERNET / DESIGN / CULTURE / THOUGHTS

ARCHIVEB JOURNAL 001 ✦ AUGUST 2026