Web design has mostly been fairly stagnate in the last 5-10 years, as most things have focused on a minimal style that is more app-inspired than anything else. Even outside of forum styles, I haven't really seen that many designs that are necessarily different from any other design recently.
I think CMSes have kind of flattened things, too, since sites are now mostly templates displaying information from a database rather than being built page by page in HTML. Pro designers have a good sense of what works and have standard templates that they just modify for new sites rather doing a whole new design for each site. That is certainly the case for the company where I work. We hired a local design house to redo our site a couple years ago and when I compare to other sites they've done, I can see where there is definitely a "house style" there.
The only actual website I ever designed is long gone. Done c. 2002 and very, very 90s in appearance. However, the site it replaced was basically broken (badly) so anything was an improvement at that point.
xenforo.com
The issue is more that the same color palettes are used, or at similar ones. The same goes for elements like navigation, or node design; most style designers have a set design they stick too, and they do not move outside of that much now.
I dipped back into the 90s quite recently with this:
The little "lights" in the navbar tabs turn off on hover, there's 1x1-pixel cloth looking BG images, radical coloring... But in the end it's still XF threadbit.
Folks like @Russ and TH do this for the economy of it. Not to break much new design ground. Because truly custom one-off work is expensive. You'll be paying in the neighborhood of 6-700 USD and up for that stuff.
Grids on forumhome. Still though, just xF forumhome. But NOT 700 bucks to get.
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I still have a ton of experimental designs I did for xf1, but without the template modification system being able to do per style modifications releasing or supporting any of what I did is just a nightmare.I had an idea to launch these little "Pixel Exit Experiences", it would essentially take one of our styles and heavily customize a XenForo installation diverting far from a traditional forum look using add-ons, custom template edits unique to that site, and custom widgets. One potential problem with that would be countless support items saying "well your PE Experience can do this, why can't this style". Another problem, I just haven't had the time
It would be hard to release such a unique style some might seek to an extent. We can't export template mods, widgets, phrases, and other configurations so it's a little limited. I can code a style to look like anything, but having certain functionality might require an add-on to change how XenForo works. Our framework allows for quite the custom changes to each style to make them all look rather unique from one another. Bolt is a good example: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/sneak-peek-at-some-new-styles.185580/#post-1471383
All that being said, a good majority of my custom jobs are simply recreating old forum designs because owners are happy with them and their users enjoy it. You flip the design from a traditional vb3 look to something like Reddit, you'll more than likely bring out the pitchforks.
Pretty and functional. But too slow for a modern forum.
