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- Hacker News
- 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
- 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
- > 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 - 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 - > 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 - > There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces
Something to consider regarding the narrow space AI-created designs align on: LLMs are trained to write consistent code. This makes sense for something like a billing or a backend function - you want that code to be consistent. The problem though is that LLMs write code to represent designs as well, which means you get consistent designs. You end up aligning on a generic mean because of it, which is often why you see these repeated aesthetics.
It was something I saw when I was working on AI tooling over at Figma. It was very hard to get creative, unique outputs out of LLMs.
One thing I'd recommend if you're trying to avoid this is try a diffusion model as a starting point. Gpt-image-2 is a VERY capable designer, and Opus and Fable are fantastic at converting images to webpages. Starting with images will let you sidestep a lot of the uniformity of output that LLMs have. I'm heavily biased here as this is what I left figma to build (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995754), but even starting with gpt-image-2 to give you a general sense of the look/feel will heavily differentiate you on the design front.
Here are some examples of image->webpage outputs I've been playing with:
by jjcm