11 ms·

The AI Aesthetic

378 points by montroser 2mo ago

luciana1u 2mo ago
[flagged]
genshro 2mo ago
Hmm its really interesting, im gonna try.
nader 2mo ago
agree!
anon373839 2mo ago
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.
- Waterluvian 2mo ago
  The nice thing about web and electron apps is you generally get zoom for free. I like the icons as they just kind of work better for my brain.
  - dpark 2mo ago
    I really hope AI is going to help turn the tide from this “everything runs a copy of chrome” architecture. It’s never been cheaper to build fast native UIs than right now, but everyone is still shipping web apps wrapped in chromium.
- piskov 2mo ago
  The issue with the icons is not the diameter but their stroke thickness — it should be the same as the letters.
  - anon373839 2mo ago
    Oh, huh. I was focused on the scale but you’re right, they are kind of wispy. That reminds me of the anorexic typography trend from ~2013. It’s probably intended to convey sophistication.
fenestella 2mo ago
[flagged]
guessmyname 2mo ago
> 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.
- genghisjahn 2mo ago
  That’s what that was. I thought someone there screwed up an image path.
- a1o 2mo ago
  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.
  - spaghettifythis 2mo ago
    They published 17 pages [0] of docs about it. Here's their intro page: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/get-started/about-stacked-prs https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/get-started/about-s... [0]: https://github.github.com/gh-stack/ https://github.github.com/gh-stack/
    - a1o 2mo ago
      Oh, I was meaning the pancakes
  - Izkata 2mo ago
    Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114450
    - a1o 2mo ago
      Thanks!
- dd8601fn 2mo ago
AsyncBanana 2mo ago
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.
- collingreen 2mo ago
  As the saying goes: Slowly, then all at once.
  - abrowne 2mo ago
    “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” — Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ernest-hemingway/the-sun-also-rises/text/single-page#:~:text=Gradually%20and%20then%20suddenly%E2%80%9D https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ernest-hemingway/the-sun-a...
- data-ottawa 2mo ago
  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.
  - ModernMech 2mo ago
    Shimmer effect is <marquee> for AI.
    - data-ottawa 2mo ago
      I liked marquee too… I might have poor taste lol
fidotron 2mo ago
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.
- ainch 2mo ago
  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.
jjcm 2mo ago
> 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 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/tarot/ https://html.non.io/neonRamen/ https://html.non.io/neonRamen/
- CapyToolkit 2mo ago
  To me, neither of them feels like AI generated. The tarot example feels like its inspiration came from collectible card games, while the ramen example reminds me of Cyberpunk 2077.
- sebmellen 2mo ago
  How do you prompt your diffusion models? I see that you are a founder in this space :)
  - jjcm 2mo ago
    A few layers to it. When you prompt on my product I expand out that prompt into a semantic json blob that represents the style, theme, color palette, and subjects on the screen. I then feed that blob into the diffusion model itself. The reason I feed in the json blob is it lets me better preserve subjects across multiple screens (ie you probably want to carry over the header exactly as it is in one image to another image). The example sites above though were pretty simple. I think they were something like "A tarot card website with an inky, painted artistic style, with rich illustrations on a card featured on the left, and a button to draw cards on the right" and for the other it was something like, "A cyberpunk inspired ramen cart website"
hmokiguess 2mo ago
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
- Izkata 2mo ago
  It's a simplification of the original icons which both looked like and were called menu icons/buttons, so it makes some sense if you were around long enough: https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2010/07/28/samsung-galaxy-s/292480 https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2010/07/28/samsung-galax... https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/deal-with-broken-hardware-buttons-your-android-device-0139464/ https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/deal-with-broken-hard... The Samsung one goes up instead of down because that's how it opened on the old Android phones. I tend to also still call it a menu icon.
aetherspawn 2mo ago
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.
- strictnein 2mo ago
  Agreed. Maybe I'm in the minority, but in the screenshot comparisons I greatly preferred the AI products. The Mac OS stuff seems bloated.
  - SyneRyder 2mo ago
    I had the same reaction as well, the macOS designs looked busy and cluttered. I was surprised that AI companies had landed on something more refined. If nothing else: why is the left sidebar in macOS Liquid Glass on a raised panel? There's no need for it, and that's a whole round-rect of unnecessary visual clutter that can be removed.
cyanregiment 2mo ago
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.
cortesoft 2mo ago
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.
- dd8601fn 2mo ago
  Me too, but I suppose something had to be somewhat popular for llms to regularly put it in design artifacts, now.
  - moritzwarhier 2mo ago
    It wasn't shimmering, but the "hey I'm your computer and this is what I'm doing, oh watch, now I'm doing this" paradigm, was popular in loading screens, installers, and the explicitly personal / anthropomorphized language was on the rise for a long time. Starting with addressing users personally instead of using neutral language like with labels in physical tools. Also the "drawing attention" part I think mimics chat interfaces, e.g. Windows installer since Win 8. But still no shimmering text there. Indeed interesting who started to come up with this. Other similar, earlier trends I found: iOS Slide-to-Unlock text! And the shimmering of loading skeletons is also similar, although they're not text.
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A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago
> 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.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- sweetjuly 2mo ago
  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)
Centigonal 2mo ago
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.
- fidotron 2mo ago
  This has been a growing problem with humans for a while. Go back ten years and use "guardrails" or "top of mind" in a conversation and you'll get baffled looks. For whatever reason the fad based enthusiasm for semi jargon is a widespread affliction. In the english speaking world the political sides are even becoming unsubtly linguistically distinct. You can tell which way someone votes by their choice of vocabulary.
  - nojvek 2mo ago
    You got examples of such vocabulary?
    - fidotron 2mo ago
      Yikes!
- anon373839 2mo ago
  > everything in my AI-supported codebase is about grains, seams, tracer bullets, and load-bearing components Oh no. I'm afraid you may have neglected to do smoke tests.
dgunay 2mo ago
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.
andy_ppp 2mo ago
I think the article means the seahorse emoji, as we all know the unicorn emoji doesn’t exist.
ltbarcly3 2mo ago
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.
paxys 2mo ago
This is mostly just the 2010-2024 SaaS aesthetic. AI was trained on it and so is picking it up.
- causal 2mo ago
  Yeah. Though I wonder how capable AI is of evolving past? Especially as the content it outputs fortifies the training data that gets scraped.
baubino 2mo ago
> 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.
- ValentineC 2mo ago
  Beige/cream colours and orange accents — wait, isn't that literally the HN design? (Randomly, I love the Solarized colour schemes, so anything similar is great, vibe-coded or not.)
- monk_grilla 2mo ago
  They first starting appearing after Fable in my memory. The first HTML docs I generated with Fable had that cream serif with orange highlight look. I thought it looked awesome until I saw it on every other vibe-coded website...
- whywhywhywhy 2mo ago
  Every dark mode one with the rounded boxes with the weird use of border one side to highlight but it curves around the edge and also the tiny capitalized monospaced micro-type everywhere.
deleted 2mo ago
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firasd 2mo ago
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
- olalonde 2mo ago
  Would be cool to have models trained on specific eras of design, a bit like that LLM which was exclusively trained on pre-1931 text.
- left-struck 2mo ago
  Oh no, I just realised we’re going to have a nostalgia wave for old school AI in 20 to 30 years. Well maybe not you and I but it’s gonna happen.
  - Izkata 2mo ago
    It was already a thing two years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dn81b5/ai_art_is_worse_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dn81b5/ai_a...
blfr 2mo ago
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.
- john01dav 2mo ago
  I disagree because they communicate different things (to me). Seeing Bootsrap for some custom software at my university pre-llm: "I think that a programmer made this and didn't have a designer helping them so they just used a library" Seeing vibe-coded frontend: "This app may be entirely vibe coded so I am deeply suspicious of it, or it could be a programmer who didn't have a designer helping them and thus used Bootstrap"
  - Planktonne 2mo ago
    Basic bootstrap means 'the developer did not care much about design'. Vibe-coded frontend means 'the creator didn't care about design or potentially any aspect of this'.
    - john01dav 2mo ago
      > Basic bootstrap means 'the developer did not care much about design'. It could also reasonably mean that they consider a generic design fine. Design has many aspects, and branding/uniqueness is only one. You could, for example, have a very high quality layout of the bootstrap controls that is very easy and intuitive to use.
- smoe 2mo ago
  I would say by default, the AI aesthetic is the opposite of utilitarian. It adds so much unnecessary bits and bobs everywhere, random things that look reasonable at first glance but often are nonsensical noise. The visual equivalent of the endless yapping in chat. For me it was a lot of work with Fable to keep it focused on producing a minimal, medium-high information density system. Sure, it works very well if you are just IP laundering another product, less so for more niche applications. Still super useful, but I haven't seen it produce much "intentional" design on its own.
ayaros 2mo ago
> 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.
ajkjk 2mo ago
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.
- soupspaces 2mo ago
  And worse it's usually next to the search button or might even activate itself as "helpful" assistants
yieldcrv 2mo ago
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”
- blt 2mo ago
  Yep, same with code, the models are always verbose by default. Conincidentally, the output is charge per token. Another one is a table of contents in something short.
omoikane 2mo ago
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-a-fake-new-york-generated-by-ai-but-its-entirely-made-by-humans https://www.ign.com/articles/pragmata-contains-a-stage-thats...
aenvoker 2mo ago
Web devs gonna focus on web dev things. But, I’m more interested in the works of artists like https://www.rooperainisto.com/ https://www.rooperainisto.com/ and https://andreaciulu.com/ https://andreaciulu.com/ who embraced the glitchy aesthetic of early AI image generation and made it integral to their art instead of fighting it.
- rsoto2 2mo ago
  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.
- djeastm 2mo ago
  I miss the short era of glitchy dream-like AI images. I wish we'd never moved into real-ish, uncanny valley era.
j_aime 2mo ago
[flagged]
gitgud 2mo ago
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
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
  > Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones And then get get every precision input being represented by a slider versus text box.
- r0b05 2mo ago
  Why are tiny icons good abstractions?
  - gitgud 2mo ago
    I assume they signal what menu item does what, to make it less confusing on different screen sizes. I.e. Large displays get “icon + label”, whereas small displays just get “icon”
    - r0b05 2mo ago
      I believe it has to do with the size of the icons rather than placing the icon with a label. The AI trend is towards smaller icons. That being said, the more I look at the pic in the article, the more pleasing the smaller icons look to me. Perhaps we just didn't know any better.
- markdown 2mo ago
  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.
- summermusic 2mo ago
  I really hope streamed text doesn’t outperform other design patterns in places where it doesn’t make sense.
saretup 2mo ago
> AI = sparkles and rainbow colors — it’s funny when you think about it Never seen anyone use rainbow emoji to convey AI
- magarnicle 2mo ago
  Not the emoji, but the text, borders, or other elements for AI features are often in rainbow colours.
panic 2mo ago
I am pretty sure the shimmering effect for loading originated in the Facebook Paper app, released in 2014.
qwery 2mo ago
> 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].
- flemhans 2mo ago
  So slowness was is the reason for both old games and LLMs to use the streaming text method. Makes sense!
yakkomajuri 2mo ago
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 https://imgur.com/a/xqKi6X6 (in the website everything in the park moves btw)
- cadamsdotcom 2mo ago
  Thanks for not shipping your first draft!
  - yakkomajuri 2mo ago
    Oh yeah I mean check these out: https://imgur.com/a/kLKTtAz https://imgur.com/a/kLKTtAz https://imgur.com/a/9fidnRv https://imgur.com/a/9fidnRv The rollercoaster on the second one was the breakthrough that then eventually led to what I have today
    - dyarosla 2mo ago
      The second link here is easily my favorite of the three.
      - yakkomajuri 2mo ago
        Ha interesting! Well I don't hate it but much prefer the current version ofc But that's how taste works! It's personal
    - 2mo ago
cat5e 2mo ago
Thank you, Jim. For writing an article that is digestible in one sitting! Great read.
cautiouscat 2mo ago
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.
vladsiu 2mo ago
[dead]
40four 2mo ago
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 :)
JbMaj9 2mo ago
The AI aesthetic, is really just intensified and overused human aesthetic. Because it’s trained on our work. It’s easy to say AI this AI that, but we have too much pride to admit AI is the child inheriting average quality of human labor, often mediocre at times. I think the rate of us seeing new stuff churning out everyday has actually lowered our sensitivity of nice things, even it’s entirely made by humans. I don’t quite get that sense of awe looking at new websites nowadays even it’s objectively well made and non-AI style. I hope this feeling won’t creep into other fields like books movies or even art.
dancheong 2mo ago
Working designer here (print first, then web). The beige-serif-sparkle look predates the models — it's the 2019–2022 premium-SaaS rebrand wave, and the corpus rewarded it. What the article calls an aesthetic I'd call the absence of one: no constraint pushing back. Every strong visual tradition came from limits — lead type, CMYK, mineral pigments. I've been rebuilding a color system from traditional Korean temple pigments lately, and the constraint is the interesting part: five base colors, and every pair has to earn its contrast. AI defaults have no friction, so everything settles on the same safe mean. "Prompt for weirder" won't fix that; real constraints might.
throwaway27448 2mo ago
> As another example, before AI what were the connotations of the sparkle emoji ? Personally, I don’t know, but now it means A I can safely say it has never once crossed my mind to think about ai when seeing sparkles
harisamin 2mo ago
Let's be real * remember the 90s internet aesthetic? geocities anyone? GIFs everywhere? * how about the Flat Design aesthetic? * How about the Twitter Bootstrap aesthetic? ... This too will pass ...
xiaoni-liahuas 2mo ago
[flagged]
msy 2mo ago
I suspect a lot of these aesthetic baselines aren’t some kind of organic emergence from the model and more a layer of human curated fine tuning, prompting and harness adjustments to produce a positively received aesthetic in lieu of user guidance.
jwr 2mo ago
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.
- h2aichat 2mo ago
  [flagged]
BrenBarn 2mo ago
The article doesn't mention what I think is one of the most notable AI aesthetic tropes, which is lists of bullet points where the bullets are emojis. Admittedly these mostly occur in documents (especially AI-generated repo readmes) rather than UIs, but they've become ubiquitous and I find them rather gross.
yewenjie 2mo ago
The sparkles emoji means AI???
- Gud 2mo ago
  Yes, ChatGPT loves that shit.
stasomatic 2mo ago
There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces as well as whack-a-mole UI controls (you know, the ones where you click the toggle and the entire UI repaints and you have to move your mouse somewhere else in the UI to click the toggle again? The non-determinism of AI’s grain has seeped into its UI/X). Ahahaha, like this? https://monosnap.ai/file/TzFL6H6fRMfsv1G8v0mbKH2hI1kL8e https://monosnap.ai/file/TzFL6H6fRMfsv1G8v0mbKH2hI1kL8e This is an HN userstyle css that I had Claude help me with. No serifs though.
felineflock 2mo ago
There are no beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces associated with AI.
spicyusername 2mo ago
Tiny icons existed in desktop interfaces long before AI. Personally, I think they make it easier to read.
chkaloon 2mo ago
I use AI all the time, but I avoid the sparkle icons like the plague. Nothing good comes from accidentally hitting one of those.
m348e912 2mo ago
I love this analysis. I chalked the new aesthetic up to AI companies using a new breed/generation of highly talented and highly paid UI/UX designers who have the opportunity to bring their own flavor and influence to an emerging but extremely influential space.
not_a_bot_4sho 2mo ago
I'm surprised I didn't see the rounded left border in this list. It's all but a exact fingerprint of Anthropic models.
empath75 2mo ago
A lot of the AI aesthetic of UX _currently_ is a function of the defaults in the skills and tools that ai agents are equipped with. That's distinct from the "AI look" for image generation which is just baked into the weights. You can get AI to build a UX with any aesthetic you want with the same design language tools that human designers use.
accrual 2mo ago
> where you have desktop AI apps on the left (Claude, Codex, Cursor) and macOS apps from Apple on the right (Finder, Photos, Mail). You can see how the AI apps all have much smaller, thinner icons than their native counterparts. This would be such a simple, easy fix too. Increase the icon size, increase the stroke width slightly, raise from light grey to white or near-white (inverse for light mode). Then it would look like the system.
- theshrike79 2mo ago
  The point being is that the default for some reason is to use nigh-illegibly small text. Just did a SwiftUI app with Claude and it defaulted to sub-.body font sizes pretty much everywhere.

The AI Aesthetic

378 points by montroser 2mo ago

luciana1u 2mo ago

[flagged]

genshro 2mo ago

Hmm its really interesting, im gonna try.

nader 2mo ago

agree!

anon373839 2mo ago

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.

Waterluvian 2mo ago
The nice thing about web and electron apps is you generally get zoom for free. I like the icons as they just kind of work better for my brain.
- dpark 2mo ago
  I really hope AI is going to help turn the tide from this “everything runs a copy of chrome” architecture. It’s never been cheaper to build fast native UIs than right now, but everyone is still shipping web apps wrapped in chromium.
piskov 2mo ago
The issue with the icons is not the diameter but their stroke thickness — it should be the same as the letters.
- anon373839 2mo ago
  Oh, huh. I was focused on the scale but you’re right, they are kind of wispy. That reminds me of the anorexic typography trend from ~2013. It’s probably intended to convey sophistication.

fenestella 2mo ago

[flagged]

guessmyname 2mo ago

> 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.

genghisjahn 2mo ago
That’s what that was. I thought someone there screwed up an image path.
a1o 2mo ago
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.
- spaghettifythis 2mo ago
  They published 17 pages [0] of docs about it. Here's their intro page: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/get-started/about-stacked-prs https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/get-started/about-s... [0]: https://github.github.com/gh-stack/ https://github.github.com/gh-stack/
  - a1o 2mo ago
    Oh, I was meaning the pancakes
- Izkata 2mo ago
  Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114450
  - a1o 2mo ago
    Thanks!
dd8601fn 2mo ago

AsyncBanana 2mo ago

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.

collingreen 2mo ago
As the saying goes: Slowly, then all at once.
- abrowne 2mo ago
  “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” — Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ernest-hemingway/the-sun-also-rises/text/single-page#:~:text=Gradually%20and%20then%20suddenly%E2%80%9D https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ernest-hemingway/the-sun-a...
data-ottawa 2mo ago
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.
- ModernMech 2mo ago
  Shimmer effect is <marquee> for AI.
  - data-ottawa 2mo ago
    I liked marquee too… I might have poor taste lol

fidotron 2mo ago

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.

ainch 2mo ago
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.

jjcm 2mo ago

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

CapyToolkit 2mo ago
To me, neither of them feels like AI generated. The tarot example feels like its inspiration came from collectible card games, while the ramen example reminds me of Cyberpunk 2077.
sebmellen 2mo ago
How do you prompt your diffusion models? I see that you are a founder in this space :)
- jjcm 2mo ago
  A few layers to it. When you prompt on my product I expand out that prompt into a semantic json blob that represents the style, theme, color palette, and subjects on the screen. I then feed that blob into the diffusion model itself. The reason I feed in the json blob is it lets me better preserve subjects across multiple screens (ie you probably want to carry over the header exactly as it is in one image to another image). The example sites above though were pretty simple. I think they were something like "A tarot card website with an inky, painted artistic style, with rich illustrations on a card featured on the left, and a button to draw cards on the right" and for the other it was something like, "A cyberpunk inspired ramen cart website"

hmokiguess 2mo ago

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

Izkata 2mo ago
It's a simplification of the original icons which both looked like and were called menu icons/buttons, so it makes some sense if you were around long enough: https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2010/07/28/samsung-galaxy-s/292480 https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2010/07/28/samsung-galax... https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/deal-with-broken-hardware-buttons-your-android-device-0139464/ https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/deal-with-broken-hard... The Samsung one goes up instead of down because that's how it opened on the old Android phones. I tend to also still call it a menu icon.

aetherspawn 2mo ago

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.

strictnein 2mo ago
Agreed. Maybe I'm in the minority, but in the screenshot comparisons I greatly preferred the AI products. The Mac OS stuff seems bloated.
- SyneRyder 2mo ago
  I had the same reaction as well, the macOS designs looked busy and cluttered. I was surprised that AI companies had landed on something more refined. If nothing else: why is the left sidebar in macOS Liquid Glass on a raised panel? There's no need for it, and that's a whole round-rect of unnecessary visual clutter that can be removed.

cyanregiment 2mo ago

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.

cortesoft 2mo ago

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.

dd8601fn 2mo ago
Me too, but I suppose something had to be somewhat popular for llms to regularly put it in design artifacts, now.
- moritzwarhier 2mo ago
  It wasn't shimmering, but the "hey I'm your computer and this is what I'm doing, oh watch, now I'm doing this" paradigm, was popular in loading screens, installers, and the explicitly personal / anthropomorphized language was on the rise for a long time. Starting with addressing users personally instead of using neutral language like with labels in physical tools. Also the "drawing attention" part I think mimics chat interfaces, e.g. Windows installer since Win 8. But still no shimmering text there. Indeed interesting who started to come up with this. Other similar, earlier trends I found: iOS Slide-to-Unlock text! And the shimmering of loading skeletons is also similar, although they're not text.
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A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago

> 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.

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sweetjuly 2mo ago
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)

Centigonal 2mo ago

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.

fidotron 2mo ago
This has been a growing problem with humans for a while. Go back ten years and use "guardrails" or "top of mind" in a conversation and you'll get baffled looks. For whatever reason the fad based enthusiasm for semi jargon is a widespread affliction. In the english speaking world the political sides are even becoming unsubtly linguistically distinct. You can tell which way someone votes by their choice of vocabulary.
- nojvek 2mo ago
  You got examples of such vocabulary?
  - fidotron 2mo ago
    Yikes!
anon373839 2mo ago
> everything in my AI-supported codebase is about grains, seams, tracer bullets, and load-bearing components Oh no. I'm afraid you may have neglected to do smoke tests.

dgunay 2mo ago

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.

andy_ppp 2mo ago

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

ltbarcly3 2mo ago

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.

paxys 2mo ago

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

causal 2mo ago
Yeah. Though I wonder how capable AI is of evolving past? Especially as the content it outputs fortifies the training data that gets scraped.

baubino 2mo ago

> 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.

ValentineC 2mo ago
Beige/cream colours and orange accents — wait, isn't that literally the HN design? (Randomly, I love the Solarized colour schemes, so anything similar is great, vibe-coded or not.)
monk_grilla 2mo ago
They first starting appearing after Fable in my memory. The first HTML docs I generated with Fable had that cream serif with orange highlight look. I thought it looked awesome until I saw it on every other vibe-coded website...
whywhywhywhy 2mo ago
Every dark mode one with the rounded boxes with the weird use of border one side to highlight but it curves around the edge and also the tiny capitalized monospaced micro-type everywhere.

deleted 2mo ago

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firasd 2mo ago

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

olalonde 2mo ago
Would be cool to have models trained on specific eras of design, a bit like that LLM which was exclusively trained on pre-1931 text.
left-struck 2mo ago
Oh no, I just realised we’re going to have a nostalgia wave for old school AI in 20 to 30 years. Well maybe not you and I but it’s gonna happen.
- Izkata 2mo ago
  It was already a thing two years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dn81b5/ai_art_is_worse_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dn81b5/ai_a...

blfr 2mo ago

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.

john01dav 2mo ago
I disagree because they communicate different things (to me). Seeing Bootsrap for some custom software at my university pre-llm: "I think that a programmer made this and didn't have a designer helping them so they just used a library" Seeing vibe-coded frontend: "This app may be entirely vibe coded so I am deeply suspicious of it, or it could be a programmer who didn't have a designer helping them and thus used Bootstrap"
- Planktonne 2mo ago
  Basic bootstrap means 'the developer did not care much about design'. Vibe-coded frontend means 'the creator didn't care about design or potentially any aspect of this'.
  - john01dav 2mo ago
    > Basic bootstrap means 'the developer did not care much about design'. It could also reasonably mean that they consider a generic design fine. Design has many aspects, and branding/uniqueness is only one. You could, for example, have a very high quality layout of the bootstrap controls that is very easy and intuitive to use.
smoe 2mo ago
I would say by default, the AI aesthetic is the opposite of utilitarian. It adds so much unnecessary bits and bobs everywhere, random things that look reasonable at first glance but often are nonsensical noise. The visual equivalent of the endless yapping in chat. For me it was a lot of work with Fable to keep it focused on producing a minimal, medium-high information density system. Sure, it works very well if you are just IP laundering another product, less so for more niche applications. Still super useful, but I haven't seen it produce much "intentional" design on its own.

ayaros 2mo ago

> 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.

ajkjk 2mo ago

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.

soupspaces 2mo ago
And worse it's usually next to the search button or might even activate itself as "helpful" assistants

yieldcrv 2mo ago

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”

blt 2mo ago
Yep, same with code, the models are always verbose by default. Conincidentally, the output is charge per token. Another one is a table of contents in something short.

omoikane 2mo ago

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-a-fake-new-york-generated-by-ai-but-its-entirely-made-by-humans https://www.ign.com/articles/pragmata-contains-a-stage-thats...

aenvoker 2mo ago

Web devs gonna focus on web dev things. But, I’m more interested in the works of artists like https://www.rooperainisto.com/ https://www.rooperainisto.com/ and https://andreaciulu.com/ https://andreaciulu.com/ who embraced the glitchy aesthetic of early AI image generation and made it integral to their art instead of fighting it.

rsoto2 2mo ago
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.
djeastm 2mo ago
I miss the short era of glitchy dream-like AI images. I wish we'd never moved into real-ish, uncanny valley era.

j_aime 2mo ago

[flagged]

gitgud 2mo ago

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

JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
> Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones And then get get every precision input being represented by a slider versus text box.
r0b05 2mo ago
Why are tiny icons good abstractions?
- gitgud 2mo ago
  I assume they signal what menu item does what, to make it less confusing on different screen sizes. I.e. Large displays get “icon + label”, whereas small displays just get “icon”
  - r0b05 2mo ago
    I believe it has to do with the size of the icons rather than placing the icon with a label. The AI trend is towards smaller icons. That being said, the more I look at the pic in the article, the more pleasing the smaller icons look to me. Perhaps we just didn't know any better.
markdown 2mo ago
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.
summermusic 2mo ago
I really hope streamed text doesn’t outperform other design patterns in places where it doesn’t make sense.

saretup 2mo ago

> AI = sparkles and rainbow colors — it’s funny when you think about it Never seen anyone use rainbow emoji to convey AI

magarnicle 2mo ago
Not the emoji, but the text, borders, or other elements for AI features are often in rainbow colours.

panic 2mo ago

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

qwery 2mo ago

> 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].

flemhans 2mo ago
So slowness was is the reason for both old games and LLMs to use the streaming text method. Makes sense!

yakkomajuri 2mo ago

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 https://imgur.com/a/xqKi6X6 (in the website everything in the park moves btw)

cadamsdotcom 2mo ago
Thanks for not shipping your first draft!
- yakkomajuri 2mo ago
  Oh yeah I mean check these out: https://imgur.com/a/kLKTtAz https://imgur.com/a/kLKTtAz https://imgur.com/a/9fidnRv https://imgur.com/a/9fidnRv The rollercoaster on the second one was the breakthrough that then eventually led to what I have today
  - dyarosla 2mo ago
    The second link here is easily my favorite of the three.
    - yakkomajuri 2mo ago
      Ha interesting! Well I don't hate it but much prefer the current version ofc But that's how taste works! It's personal
  - 2mo ago

cat5e 2mo ago

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

cautiouscat 2mo ago

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.

vladsiu 2mo ago

[dead]

40four 2mo ago

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 :)

JbMaj9 2mo ago

The AI aesthetic, is really just intensified and overused human aesthetic. Because it’s trained on our work. It’s easy to say AI this AI that, but we have too much pride to admit AI is the child inheriting average quality of human labor, often mediocre at times. I think the rate of us seeing new stuff churning out everyday has actually lowered our sensitivity of nice things, even it’s entirely made by humans. I don’t quite get that sense of awe looking at new websites nowadays even it’s objectively well made and non-AI style. I hope this feeling won’t creep into other fields like books movies or even art.

dancheong 2mo ago

Working designer here (print first, then web). The beige-serif-sparkle look predates the models — it's the 2019–2022 premium-SaaS rebrand wave, and the corpus rewarded it. What the article calls an aesthetic I'd call the absence of one: no constraint pushing back. Every strong visual tradition came from limits — lead type, CMYK, mineral pigments. I've been rebuilding a color system from traditional Korean temple pigments lately, and the constraint is the interesting part: five base colors, and every pair has to earn its contrast. AI defaults have no friction, so everything settles on the same safe mean. "Prompt for weirder" won't fix that; real constraints might.

throwaway27448 2mo ago

> As another example, before AI what were the connotations of the sparkle emoji ? Personally, I don’t know, but now it means A I can safely say it has never once crossed my mind to think about ai when seeing sparkles

harisamin 2mo ago

Let's be real * remember the 90s internet aesthetic? geocities anyone? GIFs everywhere? * how about the Flat Design aesthetic? * How about the Twitter Bootstrap aesthetic? ... This too will pass ...

xiaoni-liahuas 2mo ago

[flagged]

msy 2mo ago

I suspect a lot of these aesthetic baselines aren’t some kind of organic emergence from the model and more a layer of human curated fine tuning, prompting and harness adjustments to produce a positively received aesthetic in lieu of user guidance.

jwr 2mo ago

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.

h2aichat 2mo ago
[flagged]

BrenBarn 2mo ago

The article doesn't mention what I think is one of the most notable AI aesthetic tropes, which is lists of bullet points where the bullets are emojis. Admittedly these mostly occur in documents (especially AI-generated repo readmes) rather than UIs, but they've become ubiquitous and I find them rather gross.

yewenjie 2mo ago

The sparkles emoji means AI???

Gud 2mo ago
Yes, ChatGPT loves that shit.

stasomatic 2mo ago

There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces as well as whack-a-mole UI controls (you know, the ones where you click the toggle and the entire UI repaints and you have to move your mouse somewhere else in the UI to click the toggle again? The non-determinism of AI’s grain has seeped into its UI/X). Ahahaha, like this? https://monosnap.ai/file/TzFL6H6fRMfsv1G8v0mbKH2hI1kL8e https://monosnap.ai/file/TzFL6H6fRMfsv1G8v0mbKH2hI1kL8e This is an HN userstyle css that I had Claude help me with. No serifs though.

felineflock 2mo ago

There are no beige/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces associated with AI.

spicyusername 2mo ago

Tiny icons existed in desktop interfaces long before AI. Personally, I think they make it easier to read.

chkaloon 2mo ago

I use AI all the time, but I avoid the sparkle icons like the plague. Nothing good comes from accidentally hitting one of those.

m348e912 2mo ago

I love this analysis. I chalked the new aesthetic up to AI companies using a new breed/generation of highly talented and highly paid UI/UX designers who have the opportunity to bring their own flavor and influence to an emerging but extremely influential space.

not_a_bot_4sho 2mo ago

I'm surprised I didn't see the rounded left border in this list. It's all but a exact fingerprint of Anthropic models.

empath75 2mo ago

A lot of the AI aesthetic of UX _currently_ is a function of the defaults in the skills and tools that ai agents are equipped with. That's distinct from the "AI look" for image generation which is just baked into the weights. You can get AI to build a UX with any aesthetic you want with the same design language tools that human designers use.

accrual 2mo ago

> where you have desktop AI apps on the left (Claude, Codex, Cursor) and macOS apps from Apple on the right (Finder, Photos, Mail). You can see how the AI apps all have much smaller, thinner icons than their native counterparts. This would be such a simple, easy fix too. Increase the icon size, increase the stroke width slightly, raise from light grey to white or near-white (inverse for light mode). Then it would look like the system.

theshrike79 2mo ago
The point being is that the default for some reason is to use nigh-illegibly small text. Just did a SwiftUI app with Claude and it defaulted to sub-.body font sizes pretty much everywhere.