are you really saying that website you linked is a gen z design? looks like something out of 2004, looks horrible... or maybe it's not loading well on my phone. but that's not....
The website I linked is a list of members of a webring, because such a survey presents more examples than a single page can. The creators of the pages in the webring are predominantly gen z. The argument it is supporting is about which people want which strains of 90s web design to come back. If you look at a few pages in the webring you will see which strains these young people, at least, want. That's what I'm saying. Whether you consider it horrible is immaterial.
So that site is interesting to me because it comes across as retro more than anything else.
It's almost like a charicature of 90s web design rather than actual 90's web design.
To be clear, I'm not saying they have bad taste. What I'm saying is that there's always design subcommunities who want retro this or edgy that, and they're kinda ridiculed or marveled at or admired for their distinction, or whatever, and then the majority of users look for something else for daily life.
It's a kind of design sampling bias or something. The huge swaths of genz who don't care or who like the minimalist stuff, or who say that webring is too much are off on TikTok or some other platform not bothering.
It's certainly self-aware pastiche, not the 90s original, for sure. But I guess what I'm saying is that the idea that "the majority of users" want XYZ or are even looking for design styles actively isn't actually something substantiated by data in any of these claims, and there's enough interesting counterpoints that none of us should be confident our preferences are shared by the masses. Design sampling bias and mindless imitation certainly brought us a lot of the cookie cutter whitespace affairs we see also.
