7 ms·

I reckon something like this has only been possible to develop because of how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design ever since the glass effect

by ljm 6mo ago

I reckon something like this has only been possible to develop because of how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design ever since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over in Web 2.0 and Twitter Bootstrap entered the scene. You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness of yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic.

quacked 6mo ago
I hate it so much. Ah, your website/app/program is comprised of rounded-corner cards in four colors (color/pale color/white/grey), with a dark theme. Your clickable text isn't visually distinguishable from your non-clickable text. All of your logos are sans-serif SVGs. Your settings and action menus are split across four different primary hidden locations. Your scroll bars disappear even when there's text hidden offscreen. You try to guess what I want to click on by showing a series of competing horizontally-organized pills over the top of the content instead of just giving me a consistent set of action buttons. AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those steps so they're even easier to generate!" I think the same thing is happening in physical construction. Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the windows.
- Maxion 6mo ago
  This aestethic is useful though for SaaS apps and the like that know themselves to be generic.
- rob 6mo ago
  What's great is I can take what you just said now and use it as context when generating my new DESIGN.md system and making sure it doesn't look like any of the other stuff. Thank you! Superpowers will show me all the options in their built-in visual companion when brainstorming. :)
  - quacked 6mo ago
    I don't know, I looked at their demo video and it was tile/cards all over the place. I haven't seen an old-fashioned user interface like the kind we saw before 2020 in ages.
    - ljm 6mo ago
      There was a screenshot of Valve's front page back when Half Life 2 was released in the early 00s[0]. It was well laid out, straight to the point, and had design flourishes that would have been painful to put together at a time where CSS was new and not supported very well. Obviously a product of its time and laid out similar to how it'd be printed in a magazine (the characters slightly overflowing the borders and such like). Accessibility wasn't a thing back then. If a different company did that in 2018 you'd be seeing the G-man in corporate memphis, downloading about 500mb of assets, with 178 separate ad trackers in a consent popup, and then you'd be scrolling like mad to get through all sorts of animations that hijack the scrollbar, in order to get to any useful info. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/10sx4ve/what_steam_looked_like_in_2005/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/10sx4ve/what_stea...
volkk 6mo ago
that's how i've felt about all AI design. the harnesses get better and cooler, and the outputs up the baseline of utter crap to "whoa that doesn't look bad at all!" which works for probably 90% of the web, but anything truly unique still requires a lot of human taste. maybe that will change one day, but I hope it doesn't.
- ezst 6mo ago
  By the nature of LLMs, there's no reason to think it would.
threetonesun 6mo ago
I'd argue it's relatively unimpressive given the ability to create design systems and apply themes to them to create relatively generic content has existed for a long time now. Sure, some prototypes will be spun up more quickly. But if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already.
- ctoth 6mo ago
  > if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already. Good for everybody who isn't a large company then?
  - threetonesun 6mo ago
    I wasn't suggesting that the problem would be solved by large companies internally. If anything this is worse for smaller companies, who have already solved this problem for decades at this point by simply not caring about design too much and using the web UI framework du jour. We've already seen with Tailwind that moving to "just put money in the AI machine" comes at the expense of open source UI framework sustainability, with the upside of being slightly faster at making a first-pass boring design.
thunky 6mo ago
> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. This is exactly what I want in a UI.
- qazxcvbnmlp 6mo ago
  Exactly. If I am making a tool, I want the users mental energy to be spent on their domain, not bespoke weirdness of my ui choices.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- ljm 6mo ago
  The remaining issue is that even an AI-generated UI needs considerable UX input in order to work well, especially when you have to fit it around domain specific knowledge, use-cases, and prior art. Is it for power users or not? All that. At risk of shifting the goalposts on what I originally said, unique here isn't meant to mean quirky or weird but, simply, something that hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done as effectively. This is the challenge for B2B startups that are switching to LLM-based development and are trying to offer more than the reselling of cloud compute at a markup with specialised functionality, because AI turns SaaS into a sexy version of MS Access.
mjr00 6mo ago
There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though. If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I want my tool to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI/UX possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to do. The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's real value in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target audience.
- Fordec 6mo ago
  Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. Standardized interfaces are as exciting as kettle thermal switches or physical knobs in cars. Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Also nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it. The value becomes the architecture of the value of the tool, not the interface. There is still value being generated, but the need for a highly paid UX designer evaporates, and is ultimately replaced by the above.
  - jrimbault 6mo ago
    > Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. But there's is "pride" in making tools people actually use without issue
    - lwhi 6mo ago
      But it's possible to have usability and a unique design character, if you use a human designer.
      - whatever1616 6mo ago
        not only possible but sometimes necessary because sometimes you need to sacrifice familiarity and question the assumptions we have to truly make meaningful improvements
tcp_handshaker 6mo ago
So this will turn out to be the most expensive web template business. Not really seeing how they expect to make money. I guess post IPO, after the insiders cash in out of lock period its irrelevant.
- ljm 6mo ago
  It's a legitimate boon for throwing together little internal apps, mind. I can slap something together with Claude over a few evenings to fill a gap on tooling, or I can wrestle with Jira and CI and all that to tie things together with their own integrations. No thanks, I'll just take the API keys and build on top, to my exact specifications, and the interface will be passable even if it needs a lot of polish. Tailwind has worked wonders for that.
  - mattmanser 6mo ago
    Previously you'd buy an admin template from ThemeForest for $10, slap your logo on it and and be done.
- dgb23 6mo ago
  Thank you for saying this. I hear it all the time in the recent two years: web development is apparently dead now, because anyone can just slap together a web site or build a dashboard in minutes etc. because of LLMs. But that has been true for decades: Templates, component libraries and so on. But I guess it’s now easier to adjust them if you‘re not familiar with their configuration or something.
adriand 6mo ago
There are still SO MANY insanely ugly, hard-to-use, absolutely horrible apps out there though. Sure, in consumer-focused apps, there's a lot of competition and pretty much everything popular is well-designed. But in enterprise? My god, it's still a massive shitshow. The hilarious thing is that I would be willing to bet than in a decade, it's STILL a massive shitshow in enterprise. That's because the problem with enterprise software is not that good design is all that difficult to pull off (it just requires caring!) It's that the people making enterprise software have terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use.
- jjk166 6mo ago
  > It's that the people making enterprise software have terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use. Generally the issue with enterprise is that its designed to appeal to the stakeholders who will make the purchasing decision, not the person who is actually going to use it. The people making it may have great taste and know damn well what they could do to make it more usable, but if a clean and easy tool doesn't match someone's preconceived notion of what the purchaser thinks the tool ought to look like then it's not going to fly.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
codegeek 6mo ago
"Twitter Bootstrap". Havent heard that term for years. The OG of CSS frameworks.
- coffeebeqn 6mo ago
  Most companies I’ve worked at still use bootstrap or something that looks very much like it for most internal web tools
rustystump 6mo ago
I am not so sure. I lean towards client work on desktop/mobile/web and while the initial output is workable as new requirements come in it starts to fall apart largely because the vibe coder doesn’t understand design basics. It is one of those you dont know what you dont know and not that ai cannot write workable css or w/e.
crazygringo 6mo ago
> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. Which is exactly what I want. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a competent UI? Why do people celebrate consistency and uniformity in desktop apps, wanting to crucify developers for not following platform idioms and guidelines... and then suddenly want things that are "truly unique" or "mind-blowing" or "artisanal weirdness" when it comes to a web app? A competent UI with little effort is a godsend.
- allan_s 6mo ago
  Are these ugly and hard to use website made by people who did want to be unique ?
carimura 6mo ago
Music isn't really new either it's just recombining riffs already created. But the recombinations create new experiences. Might be the same with design?
- ljm 6mo ago
  AI can already generate music and it stands out a mile both in terms of the lyrical content and how middle of the road it all is. People will create some slop on Suno and lip-sync to it on TikTok because they absolutely don't sound like a thousand country singers blended into one. So it's competent, for sure, but that is damning it with faint praise.
est 6mo ago
> how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.
jjk166 6mo ago
> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. 90+% of attempts at making a truly unique or mind-blowing UI produce a mind-blowingly bad UI. For 0.5 seconds of wow factor, you've added substantial unnecessary friction. Outside of art projects where that wow factor is the point, it really should not be attempted, most certainly not by someone without the appropriate skillset. The old skool artisanal weirdness was not a purposeful stylistic choice, it was a bunch of people trying to do the best they could with crappy tools. There may be some je ne sais quoi which is lost with the shift to mass adoption, but the reason for the mass adoption of these particular design trends was that they were objectively superior.
- alberto467 6mo ago
  I agree, only the very best designs (and their designers) can nicely mix utility and beauty (or the wow factor, it’s hard to define). And people sometimes overestimate their designs because beauty is subjective, and because all children are beautiful in the eyes of their parent. Also, there’s a reason why the mass adopted plastic, monobloc, stackable chair design is worldwide common and is studied as a cornerstone of design.
  - DrewADesign 6mo ago
    The core principles of interface design (even graphic design to a slightly lesser extent) have nothing to do with aesthetics. People, mostly developers, dick around with an interface’s aesthetics until they get something that looks cool… but the design still sucks because they didn’t do the actual design parts— knowing exactly what the design communicates to the user about program state, available actions, etc etc etc just through things like information hierarchy, gestalt, visual patterns, focus through visual composition, and things like that. Things that are well-designed are easy to make look cool because they’re sane, organized, and have subconscious meaning to the user. A good interface designer will spend as much time on aesthetics as a chef spends on plating. It’s a nice bonus, but you can have beautifully plated food that sucks, or horrific-looking food that’s phenomenal. I do the world’s biggest facepalm when I see projects doing things like adding customizable color themes in response to people saying their UX sucks.
voidfunc 6mo ago
Homogenous design is a good thing. The internet isn't nearly homogeneous enough actually. The mid-90s desktop apps got it right and we've been regressing ever since then because web designers are like kids with crayons.
- slopinthebag 6mo ago
  The early web was filled with wacky and unique websites and it's a ubiquitously loved period of the internet.
  - voidfunc 6mo ago
    The web was, the desktop... less so. Not until the late 90's when stuff started to get wacky.
- Bridged7756 6mo ago
  UI Design is an art. Like any other art, it's bound to have constant currents and counter currents. More than the designer's whims, it's the population's need for novelty, generational differences, and the desire of companies to stand out what is driving the wheel.
- Griffinsauce 6mo ago
  This take is the death of joy. Look up in an old city, look at the facades of the buildings. They have quirks, uniqueness, it makes the city almost a living thing. Every time we shave off another edge we lose that. Nevermind the fact that shoehorning everything into the same patterns is actually an antipattern and very good paradigms have been invented after the 90s. It's not perfect, but I'd rather have a bit of a mess than boring emptiness.
  - skydhash 6mo ago
    Facade are to be looked at, not to be used. Most things that are to be used in a practical manner has retained the same basic form: desks, chair, handle, cart, cup,…
armchairhacker 6mo ago
Did you try asking Claude Design to generate a complex UI with lots of custom details? Or “2000s aesthetic” for something before Web 2.0 (although you’ll get a generic 2000s aesthetic unless you provide more detail).
afavour 6mo ago
That’s good design though. Users want consistency. Truly unique design is awesome but it belongs with experiential stuff, not a CRUD app. You might just as well bemoan the homogeneity of Windows 95 apps. All those gray buttons in the bottom right of windows.
- snek_case 6mo ago
  Sort of. At the moment there is a fad of websites that mess with your scrolling and have very low content density. They are all trying to imitate Apple's marketing pages. Most startup websites do this. It's not at all good design, it's user-hostile, but it's trendy and popular right now.
- sieabahlpark 6mo ago
  [dead]
godzillabrennus 6mo ago
Nothing screams old school more than 98.css https://jdan.github.io/98.css/ https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
dayvid 6mo ago
Twitter Bootstrap did more to elevate design on the web than reduce artisinal quality. Most of it was bad and definitely not ADA/other compliant
nunodonato 6mo ago
> Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness of yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic. but does it still exists? Even without AI everyone is utilizating the same css frameworks, same libraries and templates... design is pretty much boring these days. CSS Zen Garden anyone?
- gfat 6mo ago
  The small web still has a unique soul to it. dimden.dev is a good example.
operatingthetan 6mo ago
>but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. This is most every corporate website.
p_stuart82 6mo ago
IMO it doesn't flatten design into one thing. it splits it. cheap obvious work at scale, and a way smaller premium tier for real authorship. the middle is what actually gets crushed.
- wek 6mo ago
  this is true of AI in general
LordDragonfang 6mo ago
Everyone else is already pointing out how competent over unique is purely a positive, so I want to criticize the other implicit assumption here. This comment is just a rehash of the increasingly outdated and incorrect assertion that LLMs can't possibly exhibit any creativity -- and it's also incorrect. If you're yearning for "old skool artisanal weirdness of yore", look up the trend on Twitter a month or two ago of people asking Claude to make YTPs. They ended up very weird and artisanal in a way distinct from how any human would do it.
juleiie 6mo ago
You know where this is all going ? In a direction where the AI model basically serves you everything live. No sites, no front end, just databases and model embodying them. I mean why even code anything in the future where it is cheap and fast enough to just come up with everything each time based on each user need. I am not saying it’s good but it’s lazy. And if one thing is for certain is that laziness prevails. Some even mistake it for progress. But then, is human programming language really the most optimal way for an ai to steer the silicon? Some kind of bare AI OS with kernel, drivers and there in the middle a fat specialised asic ai chip to orchestrate everything.
- codingrightnow 6mo ago
  I think that's where everything is headed.
avaer 6mo ago
> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. The shelf-life of unique and mindblowing has reduced to a week (being generous) before it's copied by slop artists looking for a resume booster or funding, and months tops before it's part of training data for everyone. Unless you find it in that small time window everything will seem homogenous. It could just be a systemic result; unless you deliberately take the lonely road to parts of the internet where other people aren't, you will not see unique and mind blowing things. Which by definition you can't source from a place that has a lot of users, like social media or popular forums.
dweekly 6mo ago
Having just checked my child in for their doctor appointment, 90% of web software would be dramatically improved by using very boring best practices and readable and accessible web practices.
nimchimpsky 6mo ago
[dead]
josefrichter 6mo ago
Design is primarily craft, not art. The designers who believe they’re artists are often dangerous and toxic, coz they feel the urge to inject their “art” into everything they touch. I say that as a professional designer.
evbogue 6mo ago
Twitter Bootstrap 2 was the height of web design. If we can go back and stay there forever why should anyone fault our society.
KellyCriterion 6mo ago
> since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over And rounded corners, of course! :)
rawoke083600 6mo ago
I know what you mean.. and me as traditional none designer have been using bootstrap css since the start. As usually my css would look like an engineer trying toso design. When you say old school artisnal design and weirdness do you mean something like this: (shameless plug, but relevant to design) https://swellslots.com https://swellslots.com (surf forecast site) The design for this was literally "90s Arcade / street fighter 2 look" Funny enough without AI, i would not have been skilled enough to make the graphics (background, logo etc)
jfoster 6mo ago
> ... because of how homogenous the internet has become... Designs have been settling on a local maxima. If you are aware of a better hill to be climbed, please do let everyone know.
stingraycharles 6mo ago
You say homogenous as if it’s a bad thing. I look at proper desktop app ecosystems, and wish the web didn’t try to reinvent everything all the time. It’s 2026 and every web application has a different menu layout, date picker, etc.
imposter 6mo ago
[dead]
dilberx 6mo ago
but other llm's won't even give good design at all. For low effort automated design, being homogenous is not bad right?
LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
Now do AI art and music. I think a lot of the same applies there.
chiefalchemist 6mo ago
Screen size is probably responsible for a vast majority of the homogeneous of the internet; but that a good thing. The space has matured and horrible experiences fewer. There’s a fine line between creativity and bullshit. Less bullshitting is a good thing. p.s. Perhaps “quirky” is less because it’s simply not fulfilling? Too often it’s visual gaslighting pretending to be design?
michaelteter 6mo ago
Most day to day apps and websites should be boring and usable, not truly unique or mind-blowing. In fact, humans waste countless hours trying to figure out what is what and how things work, just because there's always some designer trying to do something nifty. And by "designer", I don't necessarily mean professionally trained designer - although the pros can be given to trying to make artistic rather than functional interfaces.
deterministic 6mo ago
The vast majority of people using UI's want predictability. Not "guess how this UI works!" games where you have to click on things at random to figure out how the UI works. If you are an UI designer and want to create art then fine do that in your spare time. But at work be a professional and make the UI predictable and functional above all else.

by ljm 6mo ago

quacked 6mo ago

I hate it so much. Ah, your website/app/program is comprised of rounded-corner cards in four colors (color/pale color/white/grey), with a dark theme. Your clickable text isn't visually distinguishable from your non-clickable text. All of your logos are sans-serif SVGs. Your settings and action menus are split across four different primary hidden locations. Your scroll bars disappear even when there's text hidden offscreen. You try to guess what I want to click on by showing a series of competing horizontally-organized pills over the top of the content instead of just giving me a consistent set of action buttons. AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those steps so they're even easier to generate!" I think the same thing is happening in physical construction. Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the windows.

Maxion 6mo ago
This aestethic is useful though for SaaS apps and the like that know themselves to be generic.
rob 6mo ago
What's great is I can take what you just said now and use it as context when generating my new DESIGN.md system and making sure it doesn't look like any of the other stuff. Thank you! Superpowers will show me all the options in their built-in visual companion when brainstorming. :)
- quacked 6mo ago
  I don't know, I looked at their demo video and it was tile/cards all over the place. I haven't seen an old-fashioned user interface like the kind we saw before 2020 in ages.
  - ljm 6mo ago
    There was a screenshot of Valve's front page back when Half Life 2 was released in the early 00s[0]. It was well laid out, straight to the point, and had design flourishes that would have been painful to put together at a time where CSS was new and not supported very well. Obviously a product of its time and laid out similar to how it'd be printed in a magazine (the characters slightly overflowing the borders and such like). Accessibility wasn't a thing back then. If a different company did that in 2018 you'd be seeing the G-man in corporate memphis, downloading about 500mb of assets, with 178 separate ad trackers in a consent popup, and then you'd be scrolling like mad to get through all sorts of animations that hijack the scrollbar, in order to get to any useful info. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/10sx4ve/what_steam_looked_like_in_2005/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/10sx4ve/what_stea...

volkk 6mo ago

that's how i've felt about all AI design. the harnesses get better and cooler, and the outputs up the baseline of utter crap to "whoa that doesn't look bad at all!" which works for probably 90% of the web, but anything truly unique still requires a lot of human taste. maybe that will change one day, but I hope it doesn't.

ezst 6mo ago
By the nature of LLMs, there's no reason to think it would.

threetonesun 6mo ago

I'd argue it's relatively unimpressive given the ability to create design systems and apply themes to them to create relatively generic content has existed for a long time now. Sure, some prototypes will be spun up more quickly. But if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already.

ctoth 6mo ago
> if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already. Good for everybody who isn't a large company then?
- threetonesun 6mo ago
  I wasn't suggesting that the problem would be solved by large companies internally. If anything this is worse for smaller companies, who have already solved this problem for decades at this point by simply not caring about design too much and using the web UI framework du jour. We've already seen with Tailwind that moving to "just put money in the AI machine" comes at the expense of open source UI framework sustainability, with the upside of being slightly faster at making a first-pass boring design.

thunky 6mo ago

> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. This is exactly what I want in a UI.

qazxcvbnmlp 6mo ago
Exactly. If I am making a tool, I want the users mental energy to be spent on their domain, not bespoke weirdness of my ui choices.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ljm 6mo ago
The remaining issue is that even an AI-generated UI needs considerable UX input in order to work well, especially when you have to fit it around domain specific knowledge, use-cases, and prior art. Is it for power users or not? All that. At risk of shifting the goalposts on what I originally said, unique here isn't meant to mean quirky or weird but, simply, something that hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done as effectively. This is the challenge for B2B startups that are switching to LLM-based development and are trying to offer more than the reselling of cloud compute at a markup with specialised functionality, because AI turns SaaS into a sexy version of MS Access.

mjr00 6mo ago

There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though. If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I want my tool to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI/UX possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to do. The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's real value in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target audience.

Fordec 6mo ago
Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. Standardized interfaces are as exciting as kettle thermal switches or physical knobs in cars. Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Also nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it. The value becomes the architecture of the value of the tool, not the interface. There is still value being generated, but the need for a highly paid UX designer evaporates, and is ultimately replaced by the above.
- jrimbault 6mo ago
  > Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. But there's is "pride" in making tools people actually use without issue
  - lwhi 6mo ago
    But it's possible to have usability and a unique design character, if you use a human designer.
    - whatever1616 6mo ago
      not only possible but sometimes necessary because sometimes you need to sacrifice familiarity and question the assumptions we have to truly make meaningful improvements

tcp_handshaker 6mo ago

So this will turn out to be the most expensive web template business. Not really seeing how they expect to make money. I guess post IPO, after the insiders cash in out of lock period its irrelevant.

ljm 6mo ago
It's a legitimate boon for throwing together little internal apps, mind. I can slap something together with Claude over a few evenings to fill a gap on tooling, or I can wrestle with Jira and CI and all that to tie things together with their own integrations. No thanks, I'll just take the API keys and build on top, to my exact specifications, and the interface will be passable even if it needs a lot of polish. Tailwind has worked wonders for that.
- mattmanser 6mo ago
  Previously you'd buy an admin template from ThemeForest for $10, slap your logo on it and and be done.
dgb23 6mo ago
Thank you for saying this. I hear it all the time in the recent two years: web development is apparently dead now, because anyone can just slap together a web site or build a dashboard in minutes etc. because of LLMs. But that has been true for decades: Templates, component libraries and so on. But I guess it’s now easier to adjust them if you‘re not familiar with their configuration or something.

adriand 6mo ago

There are still SO MANY insanely ugly, hard-to-use, absolutely horrible apps out there though. Sure, in consumer-focused apps, there's a lot of competition and pretty much everything popular is well-designed. But in enterprise? My god, it's still a massive shitshow. The hilarious thing is that I would be willing to bet than in a decade, it's STILL a massive shitshow in enterprise. That's because the problem with enterprise software is not that good design is all that difficult to pull off (it just requires caring!) It's that the people making enterprise software have terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use.

jjk166 6mo ago
> It's that the people making enterprise software have terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use. Generally the issue with enterprise is that its designed to appeal to the stakeholders who will make the purchasing decision, not the person who is actually going to use it. The people making it may have great taste and know damn well what they could do to make it more usable, but if a clean and easy tool doesn't match someone's preconceived notion of what the purchaser thinks the tool ought to look like then it's not going to fly.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

codegeek 6mo ago

"Twitter Bootstrap". Havent heard that term for years. The OG of CSS frameworks.

coffeebeqn 6mo ago
Most companies I’ve worked at still use bootstrap or something that looks very much like it for most internal web tools

rustystump 6mo ago

I am not so sure. I lean towards client work on desktop/mobile/web and while the initial output is workable as new requirements come in it starts to fall apart largely because the vibe coder doesn’t understand design basics. It is one of those you dont know what you dont know and not that ai cannot write workable css or w/e.

crazygringo 6mo ago

> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. Which is exactly what I want. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a competent UI? Why do people celebrate consistency and uniformity in desktop apps, wanting to crucify developers for not following platform idioms and guidelines... and then suddenly want things that are "truly unique" or "mind-blowing" or "artisanal weirdness" when it comes to a web app? A competent UI with little effort is a godsend.

allan_s 6mo ago
Are these ugly and hard to use website made by people who did want to be unique ?

carimura 6mo ago

Music isn't really new either it's just recombining riffs already created. But the recombinations create new experiences. Might be the same with design?

ljm 6mo ago
AI can already generate music and it stands out a mile both in terms of the lyrical content and how middle of the road it all is. People will create some slop on Suno and lip-sync to it on TikTok because they absolutely don't sound like a thousand country singers blended into one. So it's competent, for sure, but that is damning it with faint praise.

est 6mo ago

> how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.

jjk166 6mo ago

> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. 90+% of attempts at making a truly unique or mind-blowing UI produce a mind-blowingly bad UI. For 0.5 seconds of wow factor, you've added substantial unnecessary friction. Outside of art projects where that wow factor is the point, it really should not be attempted, most certainly not by someone without the appropriate skillset. The old skool artisanal weirdness was not a purposeful stylistic choice, it was a bunch of people trying to do the best they could with crappy tools. There may be some je ne sais quoi which is lost with the shift to mass adoption, but the reason for the mass adoption of these particular design trends was that they were objectively superior.

alberto467 6mo ago
I agree, only the very best designs (and their designers) can nicely mix utility and beauty (or the wow factor, it’s hard to define). And people sometimes overestimate their designs because beauty is subjective, and because all children are beautiful in the eyes of their parent. Also, there’s a reason why the mass adopted plastic, monobloc, stackable chair design is worldwide common and is studied as a cornerstone of design.
- DrewADesign 6mo ago
  The core principles of interface design (even graphic design to a slightly lesser extent) have nothing to do with aesthetics. People, mostly developers, dick around with an interface’s aesthetics until they get something that looks cool… but the design still sucks because they didn’t do the actual design parts— knowing exactly what the design communicates to the user about program state, available actions, etc etc etc just through things like information hierarchy, gestalt, visual patterns, focus through visual composition, and things like that. Things that are well-designed are easy to make look cool because they’re sane, organized, and have subconscious meaning to the user. A good interface designer will spend as much time on aesthetics as a chef spends on plating. It’s a nice bonus, but you can have beautifully plated food that sucks, or horrific-looking food that’s phenomenal. I do the world’s biggest facepalm when I see projects doing things like adding customizable color themes in response to people saying their UX sucks.

voidfunc 6mo ago

Homogenous design is a good thing. The internet isn't nearly homogeneous enough actually. The mid-90s desktop apps got it right and we've been regressing ever since then because web designers are like kids with crayons.

slopinthebag 6mo ago
The early web was filled with wacky and unique websites and it's a ubiquitously loved period of the internet.
- voidfunc 6mo ago
  The web was, the desktop... less so. Not until the late 90's when stuff started to get wacky.
Bridged7756 6mo ago
UI Design is an art. Like any other art, it's bound to have constant currents and counter currents. More than the designer's whims, it's the population's need for novelty, generational differences, and the desire of companies to stand out what is driving the wheel.
Griffinsauce 6mo ago
This take is the death of joy. Look up in an old city, look at the facades of the buildings. They have quirks, uniqueness, it makes the city almost a living thing. Every time we shave off another edge we lose that. Nevermind the fact that shoehorning everything into the same patterns is actually an antipattern and very good paradigms have been invented after the 90s. It's not perfect, but I'd rather have a bit of a mess than boring emptiness.
- skydhash 6mo ago
  Facade are to be looked at, not to be used. Most things that are to be used in a practical manner has retained the same basic form: desks, chair, handle, cart, cup,…

armchairhacker 6mo ago

Did you try asking Claude Design to generate a complex UI with lots of custom details? Or “2000s aesthetic” for something before Web 2.0 (although you’ll get a generic 2000s aesthetic unless you provide more detail).

afavour 6mo ago

That’s good design though. Users want consistency. Truly unique design is awesome but it belongs with experiential stuff, not a CRUD app. You might just as well bemoan the homogeneity of Windows 95 apps. All those gray buttons in the bottom right of windows.

snek_case 6mo ago
Sort of. At the moment there is a fad of websites that mess with your scrolling and have very low content density. They are all trying to imitate Apple's marketing pages. Most startup websites do this. It's not at all good design, it's user-hostile, but it's trendy and popular right now.
sieabahlpark 6mo ago
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godzillabrennus 6mo ago

Nothing screams old school more than 98.css https://jdan.github.io/98.css/ https://jdan.github.io/98.css/

dayvid 6mo ago

Twitter Bootstrap did more to elevate design on the web than reduce artisinal quality. Most of it was bad and definitely not ADA/other compliant

nunodonato 6mo ago

> Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness of yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic. but does it still exists? Even without AI everyone is utilizating the same css frameworks, same libraries and templates... design is pretty much boring these days. CSS Zen Garden anyone?

gfat 6mo ago
The small web still has a unique soul to it. dimden.dev is a good example.

operatingthetan 6mo ago

>but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. This is most every corporate website.

p_stuart82 6mo ago

IMO it doesn't flatten design into one thing. it splits it. cheap obvious work at scale, and a way smaller premium tier for real authorship. the middle is what actually gets crushed.

wek 6mo ago
this is true of AI in general

LordDragonfang 6mo ago

Everyone else is already pointing out how competent over unique is purely a positive, so I want to criticize the other implicit assumption here. This comment is just a rehash of the increasingly outdated and incorrect assertion that LLMs can't possibly exhibit any creativity -- and it's also incorrect. If you're yearning for "old skool artisanal weirdness of yore", look up the trend on Twitter a month or two ago of people asking Claude to make YTPs. They ended up very weird and artisanal in a way distinct from how any human would do it.

juleiie 6mo ago

You know where this is all going ? In a direction where the AI model basically serves you everything live. No sites, no front end, just databases and model embodying them. I mean why even code anything in the future where it is cheap and fast enough to just come up with everything each time based on each user need. I am not saying it’s good but it’s lazy. And if one thing is for certain is that laziness prevails. Some even mistake it for progress. But then, is human programming language really the most optimal way for an ai to steer the silicon? Some kind of bare AI OS with kernel, drivers and there in the middle a fat specialised asic ai chip to orchestrate everything.

codingrightnow 6mo ago
I think that's where everything is headed.

avaer 6mo ago

> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing. The shelf-life of unique and mindblowing has reduced to a week (being generous) before it's copied by slop artists looking for a resume booster or funding, and months tops before it's part of training data for everyone. Unless you find it in that small time window everything will seem homogenous. It could just be a systemic result; unless you deliberately take the lonely road to parts of the internet where other people aren't, you will not see unique and mind blowing things. Which by definition you can't source from a place that has a lot of users, like social media or popular forums.

dweekly 6mo ago

Having just checked my child in for their doctor appointment, 90% of web software would be dramatically improved by using very boring best practices and readable and accessible web practices.

nimchimpsky 6mo ago

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josefrichter 6mo ago

Design is primarily craft, not art. The designers who believe they’re artists are often dangerous and toxic, coz they feel the urge to inject their “art” into everything they touch. I say that as a professional designer.

evbogue 6mo ago

Twitter Bootstrap 2 was the height of web design. If we can go back and stay there forever why should anyone fault our society.

KellyCriterion 6mo ago

> since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over And rounded corners, of course! :)

rawoke083600 6mo ago

I know what you mean.. and me as traditional none designer have been using bootstrap css since the start. As usually my css would look like an engineer trying toso design. When you say old school artisnal design and weirdness do you mean something like this: (shameless plug, but relevant to design) https://swellslots.com https://swellslots.com (surf forecast site) The design for this was literally "90s Arcade / street fighter 2 look" Funny enough without AI, i would not have been skilled enough to make the graphics (background, logo etc)

jfoster 6mo ago

> ... because of how homogenous the internet has become... Designs have been settling on a local maxima. If you are aware of a better hill to be climbed, please do let everyone know.

stingraycharles 6mo ago

You say homogenous as if it’s a bad thing. I look at proper desktop app ecosystems, and wish the web didn’t try to reinvent everything all the time. It’s 2026 and every web application has a different menu layout, date picker, etc.

imposter 6mo ago

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dilberx 6mo ago

but other llm's won't even give good design at all. For low effort automated design, being homogenous is not bad right?

LogicFailsMe 6mo ago

Now do AI art and music. I think a lot of the same applies there.

chiefalchemist 6mo ago

Screen size is probably responsible for a vast majority of the homogeneous of the internet; but that a good thing. The space has matured and horrible experiences fewer. There’s a fine line between creativity and bullshit. Less bullshitting is a good thing. p.s. Perhaps “quirky” is less because it’s simply not fulfilling? Too often it’s visual gaslighting pretending to be design?

michaelteter 6mo ago

Most day to day apps and websites should be boring and usable, not truly unique or mind-blowing. In fact, humans waste countless hours trying to figure out what is what and how things work, just because there's always some designer trying to do something nifty. And by "designer", I don't necessarily mean professionally trained designer - although the pros can be given to trying to make artistic rather than functional interfaces.

deterministic 6mo ago

The vast majority of people using UI's want predictability. Not "guess how this UI works!" games where you have to click on things at random to figure out how the UI works. If you are an UI designer and want to create art then fine do that in your spare time. But at work be a professional and make the UI predictable and functional above all else.