By James Neufeld — September 28, 2025

How understanding trend cycles reveals why mastering HTML & CSS is a career-proof move for designers

In 2012, Garth Von Buchholz mapped “The Cycle of Cool” with prophetic accuracy. He described how trends flow from Hot → Mainstream → Stale → Passé → Abhorrent → Nostalgia → Irony → Parody → Exotica → and back to Cool again.

Fourteen years later, his framework feels more relevant than ever—especially for designers navigating the turbulent waters of digital aesthetics.

The Blob Aesthetic Through Von Buchholz’s Lens

Right now, those dreamy, animated blobs with gritty noise textures sit squarely in Stage 9: Exotica. They’re not quite mainstream, but they’re bubbling up in design-forward circles. The aesthetic feels both nostalgic (remember CRT monitors and VHS static?) and futuristic simultaneously.

hey_scamp_grainy_shapes-8-o.avif

But here’s what Von Buchholz’s cycle reveals about why this matters for your career:

Tools Come and Go, But CSS Endures

While we’ve been busy cycling through design trends, something remarkable has happened: CSS has completed its own cycle of cool.

• Early 2000s: CSS was Hot - the revolutionary alternative to table-based layouts
• 2010s: CSS became Mainstream - everyone used it, frameworks emerged
• Mid-2010s: Some declared CSS Stale - “Just use Bootstrap” became the mantra
• Late 2010s: To many designers, CSS felt Passé - no-code tools promised liberation
• Early 2020s: In some circles, hand-coding CSS became almost Abhorrent - “Why code when Figma exports everything?”

But then something beautiful happened.

The Great Return to Craft

We’ve now reached Stage 6: Nostalgia and Stage 7: Irony with CSS. Designers are rediscovering the joy of:

• Hand-crafted animations instead of pre-built library components