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.
Speaking of this, GitHub replaced theirs with a pancake emoji.
Maybe related to the stacked pull-requests announcement earlier today.
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.
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:
The funny thing is that looking like everyone else was once considered the definition of good UI design, because it helps users understand a new interface. Then mobile apps came and suddenly UI design was about “expressing your brand” or whatever.
The bubble in tech is pretty strange but I digress
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.
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.
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.
nader•50m ago