Why the Cycle of Cool Makes CSS Your Most Valuable Design Skill

How understanding trend cycles reveals why mastering HTML & CSS is a career-proof move for designers

In 2012, Garth Von Buchholz mapped “The Cycle of Cool” with prophetic accuracy. He described how trends flow from Hot → Mainstream → Stale → Passé → Abhorrent → Nostalgia → Irony → Parody → Exotica → and back to Cool again.

Fourteen years later, his framework feels more relevant than ever—especially for designers navigating the turbulent waters of digital aesthetics.

The Blob Aesthetic Through Von Buchholz’s Lens

Right now, those dreamy, animated blobs with gritty noise textures sit squarely in Stage 9: Exotica. They’re not quite mainstream, but they’re bubbling up in design-forward circles. The aesthetic feels both nostalgic (remember CRT monitors and VHS static?) and futuristic simultaneously.

But here’s what Von Buchholz’s cycle reveals about why this matters for your career:

Tools Come and Go, But CSS Endures

While we’ve been busy cycling through design trends, something remarkable has happened: CSS has completed its own cycle of cool.

Early 2000s: CSS was Hot – the revolutionary alternative to table-based layouts
2010s: CSS became Mainstream – everyone used it, frameworks emerged
Mid-2010s: Some declared CSS Stale – “Just use Bootstrap” became the mantra
Late 2010s: To many designers, CSS felt Passé – no-code tools promised liberation
Early 2020s: In some circles, hand-coding CSS became almost Abhorrent – “Why code when Figma exports everything?”

But then something beautiful happened.

The Great Return to Craft

We’ve now reached Stage 6: Nostalgia and Stage 7: Irony with CSS. Designers are rediscovering the joy of:

Hand-crafted animations instead of pre-built library components
Organic, imperfect shapes instead of rigid design systems
Grainy, textured backgrounds instead of sterile, corporate gradients

This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s a recognition that true creative control never goes out of style. The data confirms this shift. The 2025 State of CSS survey shows :has() as both the most-used (80.4%) and most-loved feature—a selector that gives designers unprecedented control over layout logic. Meanwhile, features enabling organic design like aspect-ratio (76.2% usage) and backdrop-filter are seeing massive adoption. Designers aren’t just rediscovering CSS; they’re leveraging its modern capabilities to build the very aesthetics that define today’s digital craft.

A Lesson from My Own Cycle

I’ve lived through several of these cycles myself. I saw the rise of WordPress, a tool that democratized web publishing and fundamentally changed how I built websites. It was a revolution, a Hot new platform that made complex, database-driven sites accessible.

But then, as WordPress became Mainstream, a new wave of designers emerged who only knew how to work within its templates and plugins. The tool became a cage. I watched as the specific skills of “WordPress theming” cycled from essential to commoditized. I had to adapt, not by chasing the next platform, but by returning to the fundamentals that the platform was built upon: HTML, PHP, and, crucially, CSS.

This pattern repeats everywhere. Look at Billie Eilish: She exploded with a signature aesthetic—baggy silhouettes, electric-blue roots and black tears, a whisper-to-a-scream vocal style—that felt radically new. It was Hot. It immediately spawned imitators and defined the “sad girl” pop era, pushing it into the Mainstream. But as the trend saturated TikTok, the specific look began to feel Stale to early adopters. Eilish herself consciously cycled through a glamorous Hollywood phase—a temporary departure that only highlighted her core aesthetic’s enduring power. Now she’s returned to oversized skater wear, proving that while specific expressions cycle, authentic personal style is the constant. She understood that her core skill was sonic storytelling and emotional rawness, not any single visual phase. The aesthetics were cycles; the craft was her career.

The definitive visual of the aesthetic at its peak—a perfect time capsule of the trend.

Why This Cycle Matters for Your Career

Von Buchholz’s framework reveals a crucial truth: Tools find their level in the ecosystem, but fundamental skills remain your foundation.

This is the natural evolution from building your own magic to understanding why that magic endures.

We saw this play out perfectly in 2024 when Webflow acquired GSAP, the powerhouse JavaScript animation library. This wasn’t just a business deal—it was a live demonstration of the hierarchy in action. A specialized tool was absorbed by a platform, proving that specific APIs come and go, but the fundamental principles of animation endure.

Figma plugins will cycle through Stages 1-3 as new ones emerge and fade
No-code platforms like Webflow and Framer will find their sustainable niches
AI design assistants will move from revolutionary promise to integrated utility

But CSS? CSS is the constant. It’s the medium itself—the creative clay that all these tools ultimately manipulate.

The most powerful designers understand this hierarchy:

Tools come and go, finding their place in the workflow (like GSAP did, like the next plugin will)
Platforms rise and stabilize, serving specific needs (like WordPress did, like Webflow does)
Fundamentals remain the bedrock of creative expression

As I wrote in ”The Future Belongs to Designers Who Can Build Their Own Magic,” the most powerful position you can occupy is understanding the fundamentals while strategically leveraging the tools.

The Designer’s Advantage in the Cycle

When you understand CSS, you’re not just learning a tool—you’re learning to speak the language of the medium. This gives you:

1. Trend Anticipation – You can spot when something is moving from Exotica to Cool. You understand why baggy jeans cycle out and skinny jeans cycle back in, because you see the same patterns in layout density and white space. This is where technical knowledge becomes cultural power: when new CSS features like :has() or scroll-driven-animations gain browser support, it’s the designers who understand the code that first implement them—defining what feels fresh and innovative before these aesthetics trickle down to template libraries and no-code tools.

2. Creative Independence – You’re not waiting for a plugin to support @container queries, just as Billie Eilish didn’t wait for a brand to give her a style—she built her own iconic, baggy-silhouette aesthetic from the fundamentals of self-expression.

3. Career Longevity – While tools cycle, the web’s fundamental technologies endure.

4. Emotional Resonance – You understand why certain aesthetics feel “right” at certain moments, because you’ve seen the cycle before.

Beyond the Blobs

The blob aesthetic we’re exploring today will inevitably cycle through Von Buchholz’s stages. But the CSS skills that create it? Those are cycle-proof.

When the blobs move from Exotica to Cool to Mainstream (and eventually to Nostalgia), you’ll have the foundational skills to:

Understand why they resonated
Create the next aesthetic that emerges
Build work that feels timely and authentic

“Be cool with the cycles, but build on the constants.”

The Timeless Lesson

Von Buchholz ended his article asking: “Are we cool with that?”

Here’s my answer: Be cool with the cycles, but build on the constants.

The blobs, the heavy grain, the black tears, the baggy jeans—these are the current expressions of their respective crafts. They are the trends. But the ability to write CSS, to write a song, to develop a personal style? That’s the constant that carries you through every trend cycle to come.

As the tools and aesthetics continue their endless dance from Hot to Nostalgia and back again, your CSS skills remain the one investment that never goes out of style.

Because the future doesn’t belong to designers who chase cool—it belongs to designers who can **build their own magic,** regardless of where we are in the cycle.

This is the evolution from building magic to understanding why it endures. But what happens when people dismiss that building as “not real design”?

For decades, I was told that hand-coding websites made me “more of a builder than a designer.” It took a 2006 article claiming “Web Design is 95% Typography” to articulate why they were wrong.

In my next piece, “The Designer’s Hand: Why Craft in Code Is Your Strongest Design Argument,” I explore how every line of code contains invisible design decisions—and why the ability to make them is the ultimate proof of your design thinking.

James has been teaching digital design since 1995 and believes that understanding both aesthetic cycles and technical fundamentals is the key to lasting creative relevance. He currently helps design students discover that while trends come and go, true craft endures.