The AI Aesthetic

> 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:

https://html.non.io/tarot/

https://html.non.io/neonRamen/

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)

> 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.

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 text

> 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.

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.

Thank you, Jim. For writing an article that is digestible in one sitting! Great read.

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.

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.

This is mostly just the 2010-2024 SaaS aesthetic. AI was trained on it and so is picking it up.

I thought this article was going to be about graphical imagery as opposed to textual elements. I was specifically thinking about certain levels in Pragmata where they had this somewhat broken and inconsistent look that was meant to resemble AI-generated imagery, but was actually all done manually:

https://www.ign.com/articles/pragmata-contains-a-stage-thats...

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.

> 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.

the sparkle emoji used to mean magic or excitement or a really clean counter, and now it means a robot is thinking. we gave the most whimsical punctuation in unicode to a probability calculator

I think that most early AI aesthetic will go the way of bootstrap and become associated with ultra utilitarian software where no one thought about intentionally making a design.

Fable can easily generate something like a design system for itself from whatever starting point you give it. So if you want different aesthetic, you can bang out the aesthetic first in Claude Design and then serve it to Claude Code to follow. It will follow.

I’m just going to leave this here because many of us (myself included) are prone to going to comments first before finishing the post:

This post is in regards to the design aesthetics we encounter as users when we are interacting with AI. Not the aesthetics that AI outputs when we ask it to write code for us.

I also assumed it would be about what a “typical” front end output looks like from LLMs, but it’s not :)

Tangent but, I still know plenty of people who are not aware of the "hamburger menu" and also do not know it as such or reference it as such.

The bubble in tech is pretty strange but I digress

Sums up the whole situation nicely.

I’ve been sort of viewing these sites in a similar way I view generated advertising posters. You have no brand, you have no identity. You’re just another business in the crowd that hasn’t put any care into showing who you really are.

It makes those that put the care in stand out more. On the flip side it feels like swimming through an ocean of slop trying to get your precious attention. It’s tiring.

For as long as the sparkle emoji has been in use I have taken it to be a red flag, the telltale sign of "buttons not to click". I can't imagine how a designer could justify including it at this point.

An irony to this is that the front-ends generated by older models are gonna end up looking distinctive. If you rock a Claude Sonnet 3.7 (or was it Sonnet 4) mid-2025 purple gradient background forever you've set yourself well apart

I am pretty sure the shimmering effect for loading originated in the Facebook Paper app, released in 2014.

Is the "'shimmering text' for waiting" thing really that recent? I feel like that is a bit older, but maybe I am wrong. I have more and more difficulty remembering how long things have been around as I get older.

Another AI-ism is the use of the word "grain" in technical contexts. I'm confident the OP is human-written, but everything in my AI-supported codebase is about grains, seams, tracer bullets, and load-bearing components now.

I'd barely heard some of these words before, and now they're everywhere. It's like everyone suddenly has a friend who speaks in the same idiosyncratic way, and we're all picking up their vocal stims.

> AI = sparkles and rainbow colors — it’s funny when you think about it

Never seen anyone use rainbow emoji to convey AI

Interesting observations. It's fascinating how a handful of companies' design decision can quickly spread to the entire industry. I still remember when everyone was emulating Stripe or 37signals before that.

How could an article on the AI aesthetic not mention the curiously anatomical company logos?

On a more serious note, I like the tiny icon trend as depicted in the article. Those little icons next to menu text are pretty ornamental, and don't need to be as big as they usually are.

My bathroom break was longer than that article.

I think the article means the seahorse emoji, as we all know the unicorn emoji doesn’t exist.

The tiny icons are good. There was a touch device fad that surfaced, and is subsequently dying, now that people realise that using laptop screen realestate more efficiently helps those doing actual work.

> Some patterns are very specific to the interactions inherent to the nature of AI as a technology. For example: streaming text. This is a pattern made for and refined by chat interfaces, so it may not have tons of utility for reuse across other software interaction paradigms.

I'm used to the software industry being isolated (vice versa) from the games industry, but I'm a bit surprised by this point because "streaming text" is a pattern inherent to video games running on low powered computers (i.e. 8/16 bit game consoles) and games continue to implement this as a stylistic (or aesthetic) choice today.

Then, thinking about it for more than a second:

Text streaming into view is also inherent to [slow] "network" connections, including the early internet and terminal interfaces (paper and CRT), the default way that computer text appeared for decades. These are less common, though still present today, but a keen-eyed observer [and I genuinely place Nielsen in this category] will surely have noticed the film & TV industry is still running with the trope/meme of text-appears-slowly as the best way to show computer action.

A more relevant example for a huge number of people is found on Tik Tok videos, where it's the default way for text to appear on screen[0]. Platforms desperately chasing Tik Tok have adopted the same effect -- it's a significant part of the aesthetic -- even Youtube's autogenerated captions[1][2][3] on "normal" videos.

[0] I mean "default" aesthetically, purely looking at the output. Not a "default" option like a software thing.

[1] which now come on by default if you have actual captions enabled -- it used to be like a separate language choice, like how if you select Italian subtitles it won't give you Spanish -- Valve^wYougle please fix.

[2] And these are arguably not really captions, by the way. Ignoring how wrong they are, and other issues, I'm just talking about in relation to the subject of this comment: captions and subtitles don't appear one word at a time. Show me a reasonably long phrase and let me read it. The / one / word / at / a / [music] / time / thing / is / a hippo / not / it / and / I / don't / receive / true / meaning. ('hypnotic', by the way)

[3] Yes, this is presumably AI. No, I don't think that undermines my point. It's still a choice (the people in charge did the choosing, not the confabulator), and it's a choice that goes against the extremely well established best practices for captioning as an accessibility service, as I whinged above[2].

> They should’ve just thrown unicorns in there for the trifecta

Ah, unicorns. We've seen plenty of them throughout the AI bubble. Very apropos.

There are like 43 tiny icon libraries and frameworks for web design. AI didn't start this trend at all. This article is just "put AI in the title and it will get attention" and apparently it works.

Uhh what? So shadcn, bad devs using small icons and antialiasing - I think this is all peripheral to AI aesthetics.

Midjourney has a definite aesthetic.

Minimax has one. Stable Diffusion definitely (ugly, but free )

Sora everything is rendered in Octane lol

If it’s cartoon or animated it’s Ghibli.

I have not noticed “orange” as a particular AI trend.

agree!

loooooooooooong landing pages is a sure tell sign of vibe coded slop, the new geocities

“you know what, ten more sections to get the point across is absolutely the right move, you’ve nailed it, and frankly, that’s rare”

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