I honestly don't think this is bad. For anyone who is not a frontend engineer / designer, using tailwind gives good defaults and better LLM support.
Frameworks were always about lowering the bar for entry with cost to genuine new design. The alternative is worse than this. I honestly prefer this over a backend engineer using WordPress / static site generators / other no-code platforms.
Tailwind and slop apps
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brand differentiation, not art
Quick, pull up VictoriaMetrics.com and Honeycomb.io. Tell me how the design differentiates the brands. Sell me on the idea that anybody picks one over the other based on these web designs.
That’s not the point. The point is that when I visit a website that exactly matches XYZ pattern, and am encountering sites exactly like it multiple times every day, I’m left wondering whether the sites are trying to say something new and interesting. What ends up happening: the many slop variants have poisoned my opinion on all of them. I can instantly identify certain AI slop Claude designs, and I instantly remember the many flashy, yet buggy sites I’ve encountered.
The “vibe” of a product is absolutely important. Do logstash and datadog have similar vibes in their log viewers? Fuck no. I can instantly tell I’m using something related to that tool because of its design language. That helps it stay sticky. If you’re datadog, you don’t want users thinking the product feels and looks exactly like all the other log viewers. You want them to think it’s unique and the best or whatever. Marketing sites extend that, and are absolutely a component of the “vibes” you get from a product before doing a strict engineering breakdown.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brand differentiation, not art
Quick, pull up VictoriaMetrics.com and Honeycomb.io. Tell me how the design differentiates the brands. Sell me on the idea that anybody picks one over the other based on these web designs.
Terrible examples - they're both ugly. The honeycomb one is particularly bad because it's covered up with a cookie popup on the left and the chat widget on the right.
Yes they both have the same overall structure as the Stripe landing page but if you can't tell the difference between the level of execution of those three, then you're just arguing for mediocrity.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#54These pages look fine. I'm not seeing the problem. Most landing pages don't need to be creative statements; in fact, I'd wager the majority are hurt by creativity; real creativity is risky! Which of these applications want an artistic statement on their brochure pages?
Probably at the very least the one for artists and DJs, you don't think so? You'd rather take your car to the sweaty, unkempt mechanic with his hands coated in motor oil, who you've never seen without his overalls, or the clean mechanic who wears a nice business attire with the classy shoes and tie? I rest my case.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#55Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" fra…
What a bunch of nonsense. Tailwind doesn't come with components.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#56Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" fra…
Bingo! People mustve forgotten about the bootstrap era
Well there you go. If you want to differentiate yourself today, just use bootstrap!
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#57This is completely wrong, all this pages are mine and are Tailwind:
https://berrus.app/ (game) https://josepvidal.dev/ (my site) https://fescims.com/ (mountaineering community)
Even my mobile app for the mountaineering community is tailwind (Yes, there is Tailwind for ReactNative): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cims-mountain-challenges/id674...
My point being, quick AI slop landing pages and products will share the same vibes, but at the end Tailwind is just a collection of css classnames, allowing you to build and create as much as cool and unique pages as with plain css if you put the effort.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tailwind is the latest bootstrap Bootstrap ships components. AFAIK you need another library if you want that in Tailwind.
>Bootstrap ships components. I haven't used it in ages, but it used to be that Bootstrap also shipped drop-in CSS that would give you decent-looking styles on all the common elements, so a single minified style sheet would give you that classic "2010s startup" look.
Bootstrap was originally built so internal Twitter apps had a decentish UI
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#59This is completely wrong, all this pages are mine and are Tailwind: https://berrus.app/ (game) https://josepvidal.dev/ (my site) https://fescims.com/ (mountaineering community) Even my mobile app for the mountaineering community is tailwind (Yes, there is Tailwind for ReactNative): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cims-mountain-challenges/id674... My point being, quick AI slop landing pages and products will share the s…
Unfortunately, I actually think you back up the authors point.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#60Tailwind, IMHO, doesn't bring any real value to the developer or the codebase.
It's just a weird way to write CSS right in the classes. We have a tool for that, it's called "writing CSS", and it actually has classes that allow sharing style choices across various components (which somehow is marketed as feature of TW)
In other words, I don't see how Tailwind is just "I want to write my CSS in obscure way in the wrong place".