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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

> since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over

And rounded corners, of course! :)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

> 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?

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.

> how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design

I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.

> 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.

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

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.

>but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.

This is most every corporate website.

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.

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.

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.

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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.