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The AI Aesthetic

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: The AI Aesthetic

#111

Post by eddythompson80 »

40four wrote: post #106
jjcm wrote: post #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,…

I hate to be crass, I’m consciously trying to avoid well defined HN guidelines here, but the article is about discussing design aesthetics we encounter when we are interacring with AI not design asthetics the AI outputs when we ask it to write code for us. I get the confusion though, the title is a bit of a trick, probably on purpose

The article is covering both

> As another example, before AI what were the connotations of the sparkle emoji ? Personally, I don’t know, but now it means AI.

> For example, a lot of AI apps use tiny icons

> 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

Are examples of the AI outputs

> For example: streaming text

> For example, the “shimmering text”

Are examples of interacting with AI

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#112

Post by JbMaj9 »

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.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#113

Post by dancheong »

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.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#114

Post by gitgud »

r0b05 wrote: post #107
gitgud wrote: post #84

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

Why are tiny icons good abstractions?

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”

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#115

Post by throwaway27448 »

> 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

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#116

Post by Barbing »

jjcm wrote: post #33
chadash wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your product and I’m gonna try it because I’m growing to hate the “Claude generated website aesthetic” but $0.13 is way too cheap.

Ha! Totally fair. 13 cents is 0% margin, which is what I'm targeting for individual plans. I literally just got my SOC2 compliance complete an hour ago, and I'm gonna roll out team plans/enterprise plans next week (unified billing + shared brands). For teams I'm gonna charge a flat 25% margin on API costs, and for enterprise I'll have a 50% margin + minimum spend. I think I'm going to keep the individual plans at 0%…

The cost-plus pricing strategy! Besides Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs, haven't encountered it much at all. Hope you start a trend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-plus_pricing / https://www.costplusdrugs.com

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#117

Post by danans »

gentoo wrote: post #73
Retr0id wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'd clock the ramen one as AI, if not for the main image being AI generated.

They both read as hyper-polished pastiches of existing, well-established aesthetics. The cyberpunk one in particular employs just about every genre trope I can think of. There's no sense of stylistic ingenuity or choice - e.g. deliberately breaking from convention or leaving things out.

> There's no sense of stylistic ingenuity or choice - e.g. deliberately breaking from convention or leaving things out.

Is stylistic ingenuity, breaking from convention, or leaving things out on a website for a Ramen restaurant chain a feature or a bug? I'd choose to go based on the quality of the food not how unusual the website UI is. The website is not the product.

I personally find navigating and ordering food on restaurant websites that don't use standard conventions a frustrating experience.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#118

Post by sweetjuly »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #19

> 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.

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)

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#119

Post by r0b05 »

gitgud wrote: post #114
r0b05 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are tiny icons good abstractions?

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”

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.

Re: The AI Aesthetic

#120

Post by XCSme »

jjcm wrote: post #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,…

Wasn't one of the main original points of LLMs to be creative? To create stories, creative writing?
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