Work that looks like tomorrow
Futurism
64 winning sites look futuristic at a glance. Most of them are not selling the future. They sell jewellery, apartments, clothes.
The short version
- 1Treat the picture.
Blur, grain and distortion applied to ordinary photographs are the clearest sign of futuristic work.
- 2Go a little darker.
Futuristic sites use near-black slightly more than other winners, and only slightly.
- 3Take visitors through in order.
Futuristic work tells its story step by step more often than other winners do.
- 4Make exploring part of the point.
Navigation you discover, such as a surface you drag or a space you turn inside, lets visitors operate the future instead of reading about it.
- 5Use it for ordinary products.
Most futuristic-looking winners sell jewelry, apartments and clothes.
The detail
The palette
Futuristic Sites Are Only a Little Darker
Most people picture a futuristic site as dark. It is, slightly more often than other winners.
43% of the colours on futuristic winners are near-black, against 33% on all other winners. A dark background helps, but the difference is small: a third of the colours on every other winner are near-black too. The bigger differences are further down, in what these sites do to their pictures and how you move around them.
The strong colours this work actually uses
The 12 strongest values in use across the 64.
What sets it apart
What Futuristic Sites Do More Often
The 64 winners that look futuristic use much the same colours and layouts as everyone else. Two things set them apart: what they do to their pictures (blur, grain, distortion) and how you get around them, often by exploring. Each row below compares those 64 with all the other winners.
More common in futuristic work
Less common in futuristic work
all other winners· futuristic winners·the gap between the dots is the difference
Filters and Effects is the clearest sign: 17% of futuristic winners use it, against 6% of all others. That means the image altered live — blur, grain, distortion, chromatic edges. It is something done to ordinary pictures. Pull a plain photograph apart and put it back together, and it reads as the future.
Storytelling is 1.4 times as common. Futuristic work tends to walk you through things in a fixed order, one step after another. A future has to be explained before it can be judged.
What it does less: long pages you scroll down, which is 41% less common in futuristic work than across all other winners.
Getting around it
Navigation That Has to Be Learned
Gleec Chat8.01
20 Years of Xbox Museum7.93
Welcome To The Continent7.80
Má Sài Gòn (Space)7.73
Sortie en mer (a trip out to sea)7.71
Winners whose route you have to work out — navigation as argument rather than furniture.
Work about the future leans on navigation you discover rather than navigation you recognise — a surface you drag, a space you turn inside, a route with no bottom to it. 28 of these 64 carry a tag for it.
Worth saying plainly: that is not statistically different from every other kind of winner. Unconventional navigation runs at roughly the same rate everywhere, and the apparent lift here rests on single figures — one site either way moves it two points. What is different is why it is reached for. Elsewhere an unusual route is a flourish. Here it is doing the argument's work: a future you can only be told about is a brochure, and a future you have to operate is a demonstration.
Each of these was tagged for its navigation by the award body. The descriptions are what those tags mean, not a review of the site — go and open them.
Recent work about the future
If you are briefing one
What To Actually Do
The move that actually reads as forward-looking is doing something to the material in front of the viewer — grain, displacement, a live distortion, an image that resolves rather than simply appearing. It is a treatment applied to ordinary photography, not a change of brand.
Then sequence it. 30% of this work is built as a fixed order you are taken through, against 22% elsewhere — so the practical decision is early and structural: one route with a beginning, not a page of entry points to browse.
And do not stop at the dark ground. It is more common in this work than elsewhere, 43% against 33%, but a third of the colours on every other winner are near-black too, so on its own it will not make a page read as forward-looking.
64 of 380 winners with a screenshot, each scored on how strongly its home page reads as futuristic, set against the 316 that scored lower. The scoring looks at the image only — the subject and any readable text are ignored, and a site is not credited for merely being dark or glossy. Traits appearing on fewer than 8 of the cluster are not reported, and tags naming who made a site rather than what it looks like are excluded.
Being argued about now
Designing With the Thing That Writes the Code
Nothing on this page can tell you whether a winning site was built with a model. The credit lists do not say, the shipped code does not say, and the look does not say either — because anyone good enough to win is good enough to escape the defaults their tools hand them. That is a real limit, so instead of a measurement, one read from the people arguing it out this week.
UX Collective · 25 October
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Picked as the newest piece carrying a picture from five feeds on building with a model — Smashing, UX Collective, Latent Space, The New Stack and Simon Willison. An item has to be about design AND about AI to reach this page; on an industry feed the second test is free, so both are applied.