The design establishment has been running a decade-long experiment in restraint. Clean grids. White space. Two-tone palettes. The ghost button. Helvetica Neue, set light. The experiment produced some beautiful work and also the most visually indistinguishable decade of brand design in modern history.
Something is shifting in the consumer brand category. Brands that sell physical products, food, clothing, home goods, and experiences are going loud in a way that hasn’t been mainstream since the late 2000s. The new sites aren’t sloppy; they’re expressive with precision. The difference between maximalism done well and maximalism done badly is whether the volume is intentional or incidental.
The patterns appearing in the strongest recent examples: dense color (not just two colors but palettes with six or eight deliberate hues), type at unexpected sizes and angles (not “big headline” but type that treats the page as a canvas), deliberate collage aesthetics that borrow from editorial design, and navigation that is itself a designed object rather than a functional utility at the top of the screen.
Fishwife, the premium tinned-fish brand, rebuilt their site in late 2025 and it’s the clearest example of the new direction. The background isn’t white or off-white; it’s a warm yellow-ochre. The headline type is set in a heavy slab serif with color fills. Product photography is staged with props and patterns, not on white. The site looks nothing like a direct-to-consumer brand site from 2020.
For design teams: this trend is being driven by brand founders and creative directors, not by the design system teams. It’s harder to execute than restraint (every choice has to be intentional; you can’t fall back on “it’s simple so it’s correct”), and it doesn’t template well. But for brands that have the design depth to execute it, the aesthetic differentiation is immediate.