Frontend Horse

The Linear Look

There’s one style that seems to be taking over the tech SaaS world, and it’s the one popularized by Linear’s homepage.

Linear's sleek dark mode homepage

Dozens of sites have put their own spin on it and now it’s a certified trend.

This post is my attempt to identify the main ingredients for this dish as well as catalogue the companies who have cooked up their own versions. I’ll also share my list of sites I’ve found that follow the trend.

The Ingredients

These are the elements that appeared on enough examples to become part of the trend.

Dark backgrounds

Just about all of these examples have a dark background so that the lighting effects really stand out.

Hero with dark background from Authkit AuthKit

Hero with dark background from Resend Resend

Hero with dark background from Gitness Gitness

Hero with dark background from terzo Terzo

Colorful blurry glows

To add a bit of interest, these sites have little spills of color everywhere.

Gitbook CTA component Gitbook

Raycast homepage hero element Raycast

Bento box grids

This one started on Apple’s marketing pages a few years ago, and it’s become a staple of the Linear Look.

Bento box from Linear Linear

Bento box from Particl Particl

Bento box from Supabase Supabase

Screenshots instead of photos

You’d be hard-pressed to find a stock photograph or flat illustration of a person on any of these sites.

Instead we see stylized product UIs, code snippets, and gorgeous vector illustrations.

A screenshot of the Whop dashboard with a sales chart Whop

A screenshot of a UI as well as an abstract illustration of a lock Gitness

Super thin lines

This style has a lot of SVG lines and borders on divs, and they’re all super thin and sleek.

Thin lines on an illustration with a lock in the center Gitness

A screenshot of the Authkit UI with very thin lines on the card borders. AuthKit

Circuitry style graphics

While sites like AuthKit create entire circut boards on their site, they’re not the only site to feature circuit-style lines.

Circuits labeled things like User Management and Your Application AuthKit

Lines going out from the Gitness logo to other service logos Gitness

Converging lines to the Particl logo Particl

Lines with dots going towards a chip labeled SDK Whop

Grid background patterns

Grid patterns add a sense of structure and order to the designs, and I like sites like Raycast use them subtly.

Large lined grid pattern Gitbook

Dotted grid pattern Particl

Dashed line grid pattern Raycast

A dotted grid pattern Resend

A lined grid pattern AuthKit

Border highlights

A lot of these have specular highlights on one part of the border some of these are animated.

Animated border highlight from Gitness Gitness

Animated border highlight from Linear Linear

Glassmorphism

You see this all over MacOS now, so it makes sense that it’s spreading to web design. Some surfaces aren’t just transparent, but they blur the objects behind them, too.

Glassmorphism from Linear Linear

Glassmorphism from Raycast Raycast

Glassmorphism from AuthKit AuthKit

You can do this yourself with the backdrop-filter property:

.frosty-glass {
  backdrop-filter: blur(6px);
}

Subtle gradient headings

Some of these gradients are so subtle I needed to use the eyedropper just to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.

AuthKit

Gitness

Linear

Resend

Sans-serif fonts

Every single one of these sites uses a sans-serif font. While this is a super common choice for websites, it seems to be an absolute law for this style. See above for examples.

The Full Site List

Here’s my list of gorgeous sites that seem to fall into this style:

Dear time traveler: If you’re reading this after February of 2024, there’s a chance some of these sites no longer fit this particular aesthetic. Use the Wayback Machine to travel back and see the site in (most of) its glory. Also, how do I look in the future? Did I age well, or was the face cream a waste of money?

Did I miss anything?

I’m just an observer here, so if I’m missing some secret sauce or if there’s a great site following this style, please let me know!