The AI Aesthetic
blog.jim-nielsen.com
The AI Aesthetic
1–10 of 188 posts
Re: The AI Aesthetic
#2agree!
Re: The AI Aesthetic
#3How 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.
Re: The AI Aesthetic
#4[flagged]
Re: The AI Aesthetic
#5How 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.
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.
Re: The AI Aesthetic
#6> 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.
Re: The AI Aesthetic
#7How 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.
The issue with the icons is not the diameter but their stroke thickness — it should be the same as the letters.
Re: The AI Aesthetic
#8A 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.
Re: The AI Aesthetic
#9The 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.
Re: The AI Aesthetic
#10> 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: