For about 18 months, from roughly Q3 2023 through Q1 2025, the dominant aesthetic for SaaS marketing sites was the bento grid. The format: a hero section, then a dense arrangement of rounded-corner cards in an asymmetric grid, each card containing a feature illustration or a UI screenshot, each card at a slightly different size for visual variety. You know this page. You’ve probably built this page. You’ve definitely been on this page a hundred times.
The bento grid moment is effectively over. The teams with the best design taste moved on in 2025 and the laggards are catching up in 2026. This is a retrospective: what drove the format, what it was doing well that its replacements need to match, and what killed it.
Where it came from
The bento grid is a direct derivation of Apple’s product marketing. Specifically, the grid layouts Apple uses on mac.com, on the iPhone “features” pages, and on the iPad product pages: multiple feature callout blocks at different sizes, organized into a coherent composition that creates visual hierarchy without a traditional single focal point.
Apple was doing this with product photography and high-production renders. What happened in 2023 is that design teams started adapting the format for SaaS features using UI screenshots and illustrations. The format democratized. The thing that made Apple’s version work (world-class photography, physical products with visual appeal, a massive design team to compose the grid) was mostly absent from the SaaS adaptations. But the visual pattern still read as “sophisticated and modern” to buyers who’d absorbed Apple’s aesthetic without necessarily analyzing it.
The specific trigger for the wave was a Figma template and several high-profile case studies. When teams saw that Notion, Loom, and Linear were using variations of the bento format, and then downloaded the Figma community file that codified it into a template, the adoption accelerated rapidly. By Q1 2024, the bento grid was the visual dialect of the category: not a choice, but a default.
What it was actually doing well
Before writing the bento grid off entirely, it’s worth being fair about what the format did well, because its successors need to replicate these properties.
It organized multiple features without hierarchy fights. The traditional marketing page approach to pitching multiple features is a vertical list: feature 1, feature 2, feature 3. The list creates a hierarchy where feature 1 reads as most important by virtue of coming first. The bento grid flattened this by giving every feature its own card at roughly equal visual weight. For products with many parallel capabilities, this was genuinely better than the alternative.
It was forgiving of uneven content quality. Not every feature in a SaaS product has an equally compelling visual. The bento grid allowed teams to compose around their weakest visual by making its card smaller and positioning their strongest visual in the most prominent card position. The variable sizing was a compositional affordance.
It was fast to assemble. A team with a decent designer and a Figma template could put together a credible bento-grid marketing section in a day. The format abstracted out a lot of compositional decisions. This is part of why it spread so fast and part of why it got boring so fast.
It was mobile-legible. The card format collapsed to a single column on mobile without losing much. Each card was a self-contained unit. The format didn’t require custom mobile layout design the way more complex page structures do.
What killed it
Three forces converged.
Template entropy. When a design format becomes a template that thousands of teams use, the format stops being a signal of taste and starts being a tell of “we didn’t make a choice.” By the time a pattern has been in Figma Community as a free template for 18 months, using it signals that you’ve downloaded something, not that you’ve designed something. The bento grid hit this point in 2024 and became harder to escape from.
Content credibility inversion. The bento card format assumed that the features inside the cards were differentiated enough to merit individual attention. By 2024, enough SaaS products had feature parity in their grid compositions that the format was doing the opposite of its job. When every product’s 12-card bento grid shows the same five categories of features with slightly different UI screenshots, the grid is actively communicating “we are the same as everyone else.”
The interactive demo raised the stakes. The emergence of the demo-as-hero pattern changed what the “best” marketing page looked like. Granola, Cursor, and Vercel (and before them, Figma’s own homepage) demonstrated that showing the product working was more persuasive than showing cards about the product. Once enough buyers had experienced demo-as-hero, the bento grid’s “feature illustrations” started reading as avoidance.
What comes next
The three patterns replacing the bento grid (editorial long-form, comparison columns, interactive demos) each require something the bento grid didn’t: creative depth, brand specificity, or engineering resources. None of them template as cleanly.
This is probably healthy. The best marketing pages of the next two years will be the ones that couldn’t have come from a Figma Community template: pages that required an editorial voice, a specific brand argument, or a product that’s worth embedding. The floor of “acceptable” has been raised.
The bento grid will persist for several years in the designs of teams that are following the category with a lag. It will become the tell of “this was made in 2024 or by a team that was following 2024 patterns in 2026.” That’s a normal part of how design movements work.
But for teams making marketing decisions now: the bento grid window has closed. The cost of shipping one is the perception of being late rather than the benefit of being credible. The question is which of the replacements your team has the depth to execute at quality.