This is going to be the design conversation of late 2026 and early 2027. The pendulum swung from custom to template back to custom, and now it is swinging from polished bento to deliberately raw brutalism. Watch which agencies pick which side.
What to optimize for in H2 2026
If you have a redesign in flight, the priority list looks different than it did in January.
Start with AI readability. This is non-negotiable. Schema markup, llms.txt, agents.json, structured FAQ blocks. Without these your site is invisible in AI-mediated discovery, which is now a meaningful slice of B2B traffic. Test by asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Bing Copilot about your brand. If they cannot quote you specifically, your readability layer is missing or broken.
Then commit to the structural trends that held up: bento grids for content layout, dark mode as a first-class theme, design systems as the foundation everything else builds on. These are not flashy. They compound.
Be conservative with the polish trends. Kinetic typography on hero only. Glassmorphism on navigation and modals only. WebGL only when the brand justifies the performance cost. Treat each as an enhancement, not a foundation.
Watch the brutalism trend. If your competitors are all converging on the same Apple-esque aesthetic, the counter-position becomes valuable. We have not committed to brutalism in our own work yet, but we have prototyped it for two clients in tech-heavy verticals where the audience reads HN and rewards positioning over polish.
What we built around this
For full disclosure: every project we ship at StudioMeyer carries the AI readability layer by default. llms.txt, agents.json, agent-card.json, schema markup, JSON-LD across pages. Every project uses a token-based design system, dark mode as a first-class theme, and bento grids for content layouts when the content has natural hierarchy. We are conservative with WebGL and kinetic typography. We have not built anything brutalist yet.
The result is that our portfolio sites get cited by AI, score well on Core Web Vitals, and survive client redesigns better than templates do. None of that is one trend. All of it is the same thing: optimize for what compounds, skip what is decorative.
If you want a redesign that takes this list seriously, we are here. The first audit is free and includes an AI readability check, a Core Web Vitals run and a design system review.
Originally published on studiomeyer.io. StudioMeyer is an AI-first digital studio building premium websites and intelligent automation for businesses.