The stories that have run.

Almost every website with a form has one: the box you click to pick a country, a size or a delivery date, which drops open into a list. For thirty years it has been the part of the page a designer could not fully control. The browser drew it with the computer’s or phone’s own menu, so a site set in its own typefaces and colors would open onto a list in the system’s type and the system’s colors.

Safari 27, on iPhone, iPad and Mac, lets designers restyle the whole thing: the box, the list that drops open, the small arrow, and the tick beside the chosen item. Each choice in the list can now hold more than a line of text, for example a color swatch or a second line of detail, and the box can show something different once a choice has been made.

Chrome and Edge have allowed this since early 2025. Firefox has the feature built but switched off unless a user turns it on. A browser that does not support it simply shows the ordinary menu, so nothing breaks for anyone.

Apple also changed what the menu looks like before a designer touches it. Switched to the new mode, it arrives with a soft drop shadow, corners rounded by four pixels, rows tall enough for a fingertip, and a ready-made arrow and tick, in light and dark versions. The WebKit team, which builds Safari, wrote that it wanted something better “after 30 years of web developers struggling with form control styling,” and has taken the new design to the CSS Working Group, the body that writes the rules browsers follow, so that every browser can start from the same look.

It is still the real menu underneath. Keyboards, screen readers and the sending of the form all work as they always have, with no extra code. The menus sit on checkout, sign-up and booking pages, and those pages can now carry the same type, color and detail as the rest of the site.

A designed footer was on 5.4% of the older 592 winners. Among the newest 120 it is on 13 of them, 10.8%. That is 2.1 times as common, the largest rise in the record.

Shed, scored 7.64 in February, is one of the 13. It is a studio of brand designers and interior architects, and the page ends with a worked footer rather than a row of small grey links.

The rest of the rising column is quieter and steadier: the whole site on one page is up half again, images altered live is up a third, and pages that walk you through something in order are up a third on 34 sites, which is the broadest base of any movement here.

The falling column reads more dramatically and says less. Video is down from 9.5% to 2.5%, a drop of nearly three quarters. It is also three websites. Horizontal layouts are two, graphic design four, galleries six. At those counts one more entry moves the figure by a fifth, and a headline built on any of them would be a headline about a handful of sites.

A footer costs nothing to do properly. It is the one part of a page that every visitor who finishes reading arrives at, and on award-winning work it is now twice as likely to have been designed as it was a year ago.

Of the 295 older winners whose look has been read, 64 were laid out like a magazine. Of the newest 98, 15 are. That is 22% down to 15%, the largest movement of any visual family in the record.

Depo Luxe, scored 7.62 in May, is what the family looks like when it is done well: sparse serif type, Roman numerals down the side, photographs cropped and cascading diagonally across a dark gradient. It borrows from high-fashion print and from film stills, and it is unmistakably a web page rather than a scanned spread.

No other family absorbed the share. Cinematic realism held at 17%, Swiss modernism at 14%, work built in 3D at 12%. Every one of those sat within half a point of where it was.

The families that gained are small enough that the gain is hard to trust. Seven of the newest winners read as Y2K and glitch, four as product minimalism. At that size a single site moves the figure by a point.

Period revival fell alongside the magazine look, 8% to 5%, on five sites. Five is too few to call a direction.

The magazine look remains the most common single family in the record. It is also the one moving fastest, and a brief written around it today is being written around the thing that is receding.

Read a dozen winning home pages one after another and the sameness is hard to miss. Real human insights. Canada’s heritage of graphic design. Supercharged productivity. The history of jailhouse lawyers. Five words at the middle of the range, no verb doing any work, and nothing in them addressed to the person reading. They are labels, set enormous.

This is the opposite of what everyone is told. Write to somebody. Say you. Make a promise. It is the first instruction in every guide to writing for the web, and four in five of these headlines contain no you, no your, no we and no our at all. Where a pronoun does appear, the split is nearly even — 13% speak to the reader, 11% speak about the company — which is not the gap the advice implies.

There is one place the pattern breaks, and it is the place you would least expect restraint. On a studio’s own site, we shows up on 22% of headlines against 6% of the client work those same studios produce. Given a brief with nobody to approve it, designers write about themselves. It is the only clean division in the whole comparison.

The buttons tell the same story from underneath. Across the winners that serve their words plainly, 1,125 different labels appear on things built to look like a button, and the most common of them turns up on about one site in fourteen. There is no shared vocabulary for a button at all — no equivalent of the red octagon. And the words that get the most emphasis on a winning site are mostly places to go rather than things to do: contact, about, subscribe.

Why would a field this careful abandon the reader? Because on a page like Into the Storm, the picture is doing the promising. A headline set at that size stops being copy and becomes part of the composition — it has to survive being read at a glance and from across a room, and a sentence with a clause in it will not. The words go short because the design took the job.

That is a real trade, and it is worth knowing you are making it. A label works when there is a photograph behind it strong enough to carry the argument. When there is not, a page that names itself and asks nothing has spent its best position on saying very little.