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- Hacker News
- > before AI what were the connotations of the sparkle emoji ?
It generally stood for either:
- fireworks (combined with other firework emojis,)
- birthdays/festivals (next to the birthday cake and "party popper" thing emoji,)
- magic (next to the wizard or wand, which features almost identical sparkles)
It was pretty festive. Now it's just AI, lol.
by A_D_E_P_T - there was also a small trend a while ago of using it to bracket tongue and cheek/sarcastic phrases, for example:
> setting your computer on fire for (sparkle) self care (sparkle)
by sweetjuly - The defining "AI" aesthetic is the TUI, for better or worse.
The real question is what the post-AI aesthetic will be, and at a guess it will bifurcate into obsessive recreations of earlier happier pre-AI times, and some sort of opposite extreme of videos of Chinese cities covered in LEDs.
by fidotron - Perhaps amongst coders, but I doubt most users are interacting with TUIs - my retired mother uses ChatGPT most days, but I suspect it'll be a while before she downloads Claude Code.by ainch
- Web devs gonna focus on web dev things. But, I’m more interested in the works of artists like https://www.rooperainisto.com/ and https://andreaciulu.com/ who embraced the glitchy aesthetic of early AI image generation and made it integral to their art instead of fighting it.by aenvoker
- lol this is actually my art(slop). I "prompted" it from the internet and it materialized on my screen. I own it, please don't misattribute it.by rsoto2
- I miss the short era of glitchy dream-like AI images. I wish we'd never moved into real-ish, uncanny valley era.by djeastm
- This is mostly just the 2010-2024 SaaS aesthetic. AI was trained on it and so is picking it up.by paxys
- Yeah. Though I wonder how capable AI is of evolving past? Especially as the content it outputs fortifies the training data that gets scraped.by causal
- Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones, which means they endure, are copied, and eventually become the implied standard UX… some examples of this are; the hamburger menu, tiny icons and auto-scroll for streaming textby gitgud
- I might be an old man yelling at cloud, but for things coming after win98 era this feels demonstrably false in many cases.by IsTom
- I really hope streamed text doesn’t outperform other design patterns in places where it doesn’t make sense.by summermusic
- Why are tiny icons good abstractions?by r0b05
- Doesn't necessarily have to be good. Can also propagate and become "standardised" if it's the easiest, most convenient, most well documented way. Eg. Twitter Bootstrap.by markdown
- Hamburger menu is not a good UX abstraction, that's why the mass usage stage of it was pretty short lived and most people are leaving it for more obvious patterns, like tab barsby toymin
- > Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones
And then get get every precision input being represented by a slider versus text box.
- There's definitely a lot of AI-generated websites, especially for dev tools & SaaS, that love to have dark backgrounds, cool colors (purple especially is making a resurgence it seems), and tons of fancy UI widgets.by dgunay
- A lot of these things are continuations of previous trends too. The shimmering text effect is strongly reminiscent of skeleton UI, only repurposed for chat interfaces. As always, design is more continuous evolution than discrete shifts.by AsyncBanana
- As the saying goes: Slowly, then all at once.by collingreen
- I actually like the shimmer effect, I think it’s preferable to almost all spinners.
If the agent is set up to properly show intent then this is better than spinners or exponentially decreasing loading bars.
by data-ottawa - > For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to the constraints around screen size.
Speaking of this, GitHub replaced theirs with a pancake emoji.
Maybe related to the stacked pull-requests announcement earlier today.
by guessmyname - Some sites use “the waffle”.
Weird that they’re all food.
by dd8601fn - Did they write anywhere about it? I noticed it - and I think it uses the system emoji, because I noticed the pancake was different between my systems.by a1o
- That’s what that was. I thought someone there screwed up an image path.by genghisjahn
- I think the bigger problem here is not AI, but the increasing tendency for designers and designers-groups to look at one another's work and copy it. It almost seems like every designer has an inferiority complex where they look at others and think, "I'm not as good as them, therefore I have to mimic what they do."
This results in everyone copying Apple, for example, even their bad decisions.
Somebody noticed a while ago that all the AI company logos look like anuses — and they are right! They do!
Even product design decisions are not immune to this. Look at cars for example; Tesla started designing non-circular steering wheels and everybody followed. There is absolutely no reason to do this. A non-circular steering wheel in a road car is worse in every respect than a circle shape, yet everybody does it until the trend passes (hopefully soon).
If you look around, you will find plenty other examples.
Similarly here, I think that all AI apps have small icons not because they are AI apps, but because the design groups copy each other's work.
by jwr - Interestingly, I've found that AI has actually made me more interested in design because I'm now able to actually do some things, whereas before I couldn't get my creative visions built.
As an example, I recently built my company's website and I'm really happy with the result. I wanted it to have some hints of Rollercoaster Tycoon, and with a lot of experimentation, direction, tinkering, and examples I got to something that I really liked. Two years ago my company website would have been some generic Bootstrap thing until I hired a designer.
There's a lot to improve and certainly some aspects of it feel like AI still but it's generally gotten a lot of positive feedback and above all I really like it. Considering writing a blog post about my creative process here because I'm a dev with no design background at all.
Sharing a screenshot as to not promote: https://imgur.com/a/xqKi6X6 (in the website everything in the park moves btw)
by yakkomajuri - Thanks for not shipping your first draft!by cadamsdotcom
- I love it. I'm doing similar, where I am using AI for front end work but I'm refining in 300 iterations. Removing most of the AIisms and low effort copy.
I'm rewriting my 11 year old SaaS. If anyone is interested or want to give me feedback, my contact in bio.
by tortilla - Just wanted to say, really nice design. Night and day compared to the generic starting ones linked below.
- > There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces
First, they took my em dash. Now, they’re taking my neutral background with orange accents.
by baubino