The beige internet: are we designing the personality out of digital?

There’s a feeling many of us have when we land on a new website.

We recognise it instantly.

The layout feels familiar. The typography is tasteful but anonymous. The copy is polite, competent and reassuring but strangely empty. The interactions are smooth, the accessibility boxes are ticked and the experience is perfectly fine.

And yet, five minutes later, you couldn’t tell that website apart from half a dozen others you visited that week.

This isn’t bad design. In fact, it’s often very good design.

But it is beige.

Over the last decade, the internet has become calmer, cleaner and more consistent. We’ve eliminated many of the horrors of early web design - flashing banners, unreadable text, broken layouts and unpredictable navigation. In their place, we’ve built a web that is safe, usable, scalable and increasingly indistinguishable.

The question isn’t whether this happened for good reasons. It did.

The question is whether, in smoothing off all the rough edges, we’ve also smoothed away something essential - character.

If your online experience is your brand or at least one of the most important expressions of it, what does it mean when that experience looks and feels like everyone else’s?

And as we look towards 2026, is the rise of the beige internet something to embrace or something to actively resist?

How the web became so beige

The sameness we see today didn’t appear overnight. It’s the cumulative effect of several sensible decisions made repeatedly across thousands of organisations.

Design systems became default

Design systems solved real problems.

They brought consistency across large teams. They improved accessibility. They reduced design debt. They made products easier to maintain and scale. For organisations operating across multiple platforms and touchpoints, they were transformative.

But they also encouraged convergence.

When many teams draw from the same patterns, the same component libraries and the same interaction models, visual and behavioural diversity naturally shrinks. Over time, best practice hardens into convention and convention quietly becomes law.

SaaS tools optimised for safety not distinction

Website builders, CMSs, no-code platforms and portal tools are designed to work for as many organisations as possible. That means defaults matter.

Defaults favour:

  • Clear hierarchies

  • Neutral tones

  • Inoffensive language

  • Predictable flows

Again, none of this is wrong. But when most organisations stay close to the defaults and many do, the results converge.

The internet begins to look like it was designed by one very competent, very cautious committee.

AI accelerated the average

AI has made it easier than ever to generate copy, layouts and even entire experiences.

It’s fast. It’s fluent. It’s coherent.

But it is also inherently averaging.

Large language models are brilliant at producing content that sounds right. They are much less good at producing content that sounds specific. Left unchecked, AI tends to reinforce prevailing norms rather than challenge them.

If you ask AI to write your onboarding copy, your help content or your landing page and don’t apply strong editorial judgement, you are likely to get something perfectly acceptable and instantly forgettable.

UX maturity turned into rigidity

We’ve learned a lot about usability over the last twenty years. Patterns exist for a reason.

Users expect navigation in certain places. They expect forms to behave in certain ways. They expect confirmation messages, error handling and account areas to follow familiar logic.

But familiarity can quietly turn into fear.

Fear of confusing users.
Fear of stakeholders pushing back.
Fear of deviating from what works.

Over time, the discipline of UX can drift into dogma - and dogma is rarely friendly to distinctive brands.

Why this isn’t all bad and why beige won

Before we get too misty-eyed about lost personality, it’s worth acknowledging an uncomfortable truth.

The beige internet often works very well.

Consistency reduces cognitive load

When users don’t have to relearn how things work, they can focus on what they came to do. Familiar patterns reduce friction and increase completion rates.

This matters enormously for:

  • Payments

  • Account management

  • Forms

  • Self-service journeys

Nobody wants a delightfully unexpected tax return.

Predictability builds trust

Especially in regulated or sensitive contexts, familiarity signals legitimacy. A website that looks too unusual can feel risky.

Banks, healthcare providers, utilities and membership organisations all benefit from signalling stability and reliability.

Scale demands discipline

As organisations grow, individuality often gives way to operability. Systems need to be governed. Experiences need to be reproducible. Teams need rules.

The internet didn’t become beige because everyone suddenly lost imagination. It became beige because beige is easier to manage at scale.

And in many contexts, that trade-off makes sense.

Where beige becomes a serious problem

The problem starts when sameness stops being a tactical choice and becomes an unexamined default.

Because while beige may be efficient, it is rarely memorable.

Brand erosion happens quietly

Brands don’t usually fail because of one bad decision. They fade through a thousand small acts of caution.

When your website, portal or app looks like everyone else’s:

  • Your brand becomes a logo applied to a template

  • Your tone of voice flattens

  • Your point of view disappears

Over time, users remember what they did on your site but not who they did it with.

Differentiation collapses into price and features

If your digital experience feels interchangeable with your competitors’, then your value proposition becomes harder to defend.

Conversations drift towards:

  • It’s basically the same but cheaper

  • They offer one extra feature

  • We’ll switch, it won’t make much difference

That’s not a position most organisations want to be in.

Emotional engagement drops away

People don’t form relationships with systems. They form relationships with brands that feel human, intentional and distinct.

When digital experiences become purely functional, they may still perform but they stop connecting.

And connection is what drives loyalty, advocacy and forgiveness when things go wrong.

If your digital experience is your brand

For many organisations, the website or platform is no longer a supporting channel. It is the primary interface with the world.

This is especially true for:

  • SaaS products

  • Membership organisations

  • Cultural venues

  • Service businesses without a physical footprint

  • Platforms built around self-service

In these contexts, digital isn’t just how people transact. It’s how they perceive you.

Your values.
Your confidence.
Your attitude to users.
Your sense of humour or lack of it.

When everything becomes beige, those signals are lost.

And once lost, they are hard to recover.

The mistake organisations make when reacting to beige

At this point, some organisations panic and panic badly.

They decide they need to stand out.

Suddenly:

  • Colours get louder

  • Animations get busier

  • Copy gets quirkier

  • Interactions get clever for the sake of it

This rarely ends well.

The opposite of beige is not chaos.

The goal isn’t to be distinctive everywhere. It’s to be distinctive where it matters.

A more mature strategy for 2026

The most effective digital brands in the coming years won’t reject systems, AI or best practice. They’ll use them deliberately.

Here’s what that looks like.

Treat systems as foundations not cages

Design systems should enable speed and consistency but they should also contain intentional flexibility.

That means:

  • Clear rules about what must be consistent

  • Explicit permission to break patterns in defined places

  • A shared understanding of where brand expression lives

Without this, teams default to safety.

Decide where brand expression actually counts

Not every screen needs personality.

But some moments matter more than others:

  • First impressions

  • Onboarding

  • Key decision points

  • Moments of friction or failure

  • Communication during change

These are the places where brand character earns its keep.

Everything else can be calm, familiar and efficient.

Build brand into language not just visuals

Visual differentiation is expensive and fragile. Language is cheaper and more resilient.

Tone of voice:

  • Can be distinctive without harming usability

  • Scales across platforms

  • Survives redesigns

Many beige experiences sound beige long before they look it.

Use AI as a multiplier not a creative director

AI should accelerate your thinking not replace it.

That means:

  • Strong briefs

  • Clear brand voice guidelines

  • Human editorial judgement

Without those, AI will happily flatten your brand into the statistical mean.

Design for memorability not novelty

Being memorable doesn’t require being strange.

It requires being intentional.

Users should come away with a sense that:

This felt like them.

Not:

That was different but I’m not sure why.

What to ask yourself heading into 2026

If you’re reviewing your digital experience over the next year, a few uncomfortable questions are worth asking:

  • Where have we defaulted to safe without really deciding to?

  • If our logo were removed, would our experience still feel recognisably ours?

  • Where have we optimised for efficiency at the expense of connection?

  • What do users remember about interacting with us - if anything?

These aren’t design questions. They’re brand questions.

And they deserve answers at board level not just in Figma files.

The beige internet isn’t inevitable

The future of digital doesn’t have to be loud, chaotic or exhausting.

But it also doesn’t have to be forgettable.

The organisations that thrive won’t be the ones that reject modern tools, systems or AI. They’ll be the ones that use those tools with taste, confidence and restraint.

They’ll understand that consistency is valuable but character is priceless.

And they’ll remember that while usability gets you through the door, it’s personality that makes people want to come back.