A pessimistic note after Google I/O 2026

I love design, typography, the visual art of layout and building design systems for publishing. I also like to code, to tinker, and to find novel solutions to challenges in design by developing my own software. For me, web-design, for the longest time, felt like the perfect fit, I loved the opportunities for innovation in visual design, and the challenge to make it all work on a wide variety of hardware. Today, I look at AI chatbots synthesizing half-true answers using stolen content into sterile and lifeless chat interfaces, and the drive to build and the energy to design evaporate inside me.

I’ve had a refreshed design for this blog ready for implementation for months now, I even started to write some code for it, but I’m struggling to answer the simplest of questions: “Why bother?”. The constant onslaught of bad news, especially in the form of AI companies harvesting the web, no, actually a more fitting analogy would be overfishing it to a point where there aren’t enough websites left to sustain the ecosystem, as well as world-billionaire-politics, have really knocked the stuffing out of me.

Today, I’m permitting myself to publish a post that has no silver lining, no upside. It would honestly be too much to ask to come up with a positive aspect to what feels like the death of the open web during the beginnings of world war three. And it seems I’m not alone in how I feel, as Kevin posted: “Google might have just killed websites”, on his second YouTube channel just yesterday.

I do feel like sharing the new design for this blog though, so here is what I envision it to look like, once I’ve recovered from this latest blow by Google: Mockup of the Stairjoke.Ninja redesign, image. Caption: A website designed inspired by the original Macintosh and System 9, as well as some modern elements like colour-coded chips to show tags.