UXdesignopinionanalogskeuomorphismemotional-design

Designed to Be Forgotten

Steve Glen•

I opened ten SaaS dashboards last week and honestly could not tell you which was which. Ten ecommerce stores and ten portfolio sites went the same way. The same rounded sans-serif type, the same airy whitespace, the same pastel gradients doing nothing in particular. All of it clean, all of it polished, and all of it optimized into a frictionless void where nothing feels like anything.

Analog-inspired design is the corrective, and I don’t expect it to fade in 2026-2027.

What Analog-Inspired Design Actually Is

Analog-inspired design borrows the visual language of pre-digital media: film grain, textured paper, mechanical dials, hand-set type. It brings them into digital interfaces not as decoration but as a signal: a human made this, and it was made with intention. (Although often badly-faked!!)

Sara Mote, creative director at Barkas, captures it well: “There’s that warm nostalgia moment, like the crackle you get with records and cassette tapes.” Her work on the fragrance brand LORE uses film-inspired textures and soft gradients. A brand-new company ends up feeling like it’s been around for decades. “Returning to something that feels a bit more analog is a wonderful way to bridge an emotional connection.”

The craft is selective. Weight, texture, and mechanical feedback go where they make a digital interaction legible and emotionally grounded, and nowhere else.

Why It Works

When flat design won in the mid-2010s, it solved a real problem. Early skeuomorphism was heavy, inconsistent, and patronizing. But flat design’s victory was too complete. Designers stripped away every affordance, every texture, every signal that told users “this is something you can grab, press, or turn.”

The result is what I’d call interface amnesia — you use a product, close the tab, and can’t recall a single distinctive thing about how it looked or felt.

Analog-inspired design fixes this because it works with how our brains are wired. As UX designer Mageswari writes, nostalgic design elements trigger psychological mechanisms: “Familiar colors, typefaces, and design cues evoke positive memories, creating a subconscious sense of trust.” Combining retro visuals with modern functionality creates “experiences that feel joyful, surprising, and memorable.”

The design industry is arriving at the same conclusion from a different direction. Creative Bloq’s coverage of 2026 design trends identifies a “tactile rebellion”: designers leaving flawless perfection behind in favour of “roughness, and artisanal skill” that feels most human. The common thread is work that reads as made, not generated.

The AI Counterweight

I think something is pushing this trend harder than nostalgia — AI.

When anyone can generate a landing page in one prompt, “polished” stops being a signal of quality. AI is fluent in the generic. It produces clean layouts, balanced spacing, and safe colour palettes effortlessly. What it can’t produce is character. It can’t make design choices that feel deliberate, idiosyncratic, and rooted in a specific brand’s personality. That gap is where analog-inspired design lives.

This isn’t anti-AI. I use AI tools regularly. But when the baseline is “good enough,” the work that feels authored becomes the thing people notice and pay for.

I work at Edify Magazine and Odvod Media (yes, actual magazines, the paper kind), so I’ve watched this from the analog side. People never stopped wanting that tactile, intentional feeling. The marketing industry optimized for clicks because clicks are easy to count. Nobody measured whether anyone remembered the experience. Our gut instinct about genuine media has held up, and it’s why Odvod stays dedicated to the art, the writing, and the human experience. Daley Wilhelm, writing for UX Collective, calls the analog movement “a cure for brainrot”, one that spans “analog technologies like CD and MP3 players, analog experiences like reading a physical magazine, so-called analog mindsets focused on slowness and intentionality.” The appetite for analog is a rejection of the disposable, template-driven digital experience that AI now mass-produces at scale.

Why I Care

I build digital products, and I’ve watched the same pattern repeat: a client or a team starts with a distinctive vision, and somewhere in the design process it gets sanded down into the same safe, interchangeable shell everything else lives in. The reasoning is always the same: “our competitors do it this way,” “we need to look modern,” “just make it clean.”

But convention isn’t clarity. Convention is camouflage.

Analog-inspired design gives you a way out of that trap. Not by being weird for weird’s sake, but by reintroducing the visual and tactile cues that make a product recognizable. A brand-new company can feel established, and a commodity product can feel like something worth lingering over instead of scrolling past.

Some People Will Hate It

Commit to a style and you split the room. Some customers will love what you do with texture and grain, and some will wrinkle their noses and call it dated. It’s tempting to read that as a problem and sand the design back toward neutral. It isn’t a problem — it’s the whole mechanism. The only design nobody complains about is the design nobody remembers.

The research backs this up. In Harvard Business Review, Xueming Luo, Michael Wiles, and Sascha Raithel argue that a brand with genuine haters is often healthier than a bland one, and that companies win by owning what divides people instead of apologizing for it. Their sharpest example is Kraft’s 2011 Miracle Whip campaign, which leaned directly into the love-it-or-hate-it split and produced a 631 per cent surge in social media postings and a 14 per cent increase in sales. Jonah Berger, Alan Sorensen, and Scott Rasmussen found something similar with books, where a negative New York Times review increased sales for titles by lesser-known authors. Attention beats obscurity even when the attention isn’t kind.

An opinionated design costs you some of the room, and boring costs you all of it.

The takeaway is bigger than “add texture to your website” — design that creates feeling is design that gets remembered. In a market where AI can produce competent and forgettable in seconds, being remembered is the whole game.

If your product looks like everything else, it will be treated like everything else: interchangeable, disposable, one tab-close away from forgotten. Analog-inspired design won’t fix a bad product, but it will make a good one unforgettable.

Sources