Unity enabled a flood of slop games long ago. Dreamweaver enabled countless slop websites. Photoshop delivered us heaps of slop images. Amazon delivers thousands of slop products from slop manufacturers every day.
The slop isn't coming, it arrived decades ago. The Pandora's box of slop is already open. Maybe AI widens the aperture, but if you cannot handle the discernment required to separate slop from something useful or meaningful, that is your problem.
If I download Blender today, as a true beginner, is what I make extraordinary? If it's not, does that mean I am not allowed to use Blender? What if I want to use Blender and I am not interested in making anything extraordinary? What if I want to use Blender to make a stupid little iPhone game that no one will ever play? Is that considered extraordinary, or not? What is this criteria?
The truth is, the vast majority of art is not extraordinary, whether it comes from a canvas, a typewriter, Photoshop, or Blender. That is as true for AI as it is for humans. Likewise, the vast majority of people who kick a soccer ball will never be extraordinary soccer players.
I firmly believe that tools which enable people to get closer to their goals are always a good thing. The concept of what makes something "extraordinary" does not come from the maker, or the tool, but from the beholder. It is the audience's job to discern what is and isn't "extraordinary", not the makers'.
The solution is an open, flexible, scriptable and drawable canvas where design and code co-exist in exact harmony. Design changes directly modify front-end code, and front-end code directly modifies design equivalently. I see the endgame as a model where designers and FEE's are co-owners and co-authors of the front-end with zero handoff.
I used Claude Design to see how it'd spit out a design I already had been working on for some weeks, given a dense enough prompt and a decent requirements document (I did not feed it visuals). I thought the output was pretty good! It didn't match the style we're after at all but it did do some logical content grouping and made some IA decisions I decided to pull into my own explorations. Overall I left with a good impression.
And then I was scrolling Twitter, and saw someone else post their own "success story" and the design was nearly identical to the mock up Claude Design made for me. Lol. The homogenization problem will continue to plague tools like these to some degree, much in the same way AI generated text or code or imagery has a sort of homogenous tone or feel to it.
That’s because designers stopped caring about following each platform’s guidelines because they want to spread “brand recognition” or some shit like that.
This is kind of a revisionist view of software. I think most of the consistency we remember from software past is because skipping the OS tollboxes and doing your own custom UI was hard rather than because most software developers cared about consistency. Yes the OS vendors did, but one doesn't need to go far to find applications that very much did their own thing. "Bubbly" and "goopy" UIs of the sort "Kai's Power Tools" exemplified were all over in the 90's. Everyone's favorite Winamp was famously not using the standard UI toolkits and had a heavily customizable UI. To say nothing of the many software packages that used the standard toolkits only far enough to give you a window that was then filled with some sort of Macromedia or similar UI that was then completely proprietary to the application itself (think encyclopedia and other educational software of the day). Even the OS vendors couldn't help themselves sometimes (looking at you QuickTime 7)
If older software was more consistent, it's only because the OS didn't provide nearly the same degree of customization options that HTML and CSS provide developers today. Not because of some pride in consistency.
This exudes everywhere. I've had cases of where some weirdo company changes their packaging on, say, soap... and now I literally can't find what I used to use. The logic is that some other company is cloning their look, so they want to "stand out" again, and thus change theirs.
Sometimes, I'll manage to find the brand with the new colours and logo. But often even then, I can't find the specific product from that brand. They've changed it so much I can't tell which version I picked before. Which makes me look for something more like what I used to have.
Good job "standing out" guys. I'd say literally maybe 1/3 of the time, I've just literally lost products. I don't know the name, just how it looks.
Distinctive hammers and other tools get brand recognition and free marketing out in the field, ostensibly increasing sales - that's why all the tool companies have their distinct colors and you can see the type of tool someone uses from a distance. Matching chargers/batteries incompatible with other brands perpetuate this even further.
Someone IS designing all this, they just aren't optimizing for what you wish they were.
Design is too broad a word for what is being discussed here and often in the world at large.
Still, to me, good design is intuitive. I look at the thing, and I know how to use it. If it looks great and distinctive, even better. But most outlandishly distinctive design I've (consciously?) found is terrible.
Obviously, these short sentences hide a lot:
- To know how to use things, I must have prior experience. But different users have different prior experiences and acquired design patterns (i.e. interaction patterns)
- My knowledge of the domain is also different from that of other users.
- The way I interact with the system is affected by many factors (e.g. accessibility related concerns, zoom, etc.)
- Intuition is not magic. It comes after training as well. Good design is discoverable. Extraordinary design reinforces its own patterns seamlessly, so that I learn it without even knowing I'm learning (see: hidden tutorials in game design). I also include here the incredible attributes of good design that far predate computer-related design (e.g. how an icon should be recognizable just by its silhouette, or how apps "invisibly" teach us what each color or even section of the screen means).
- My incentive to learn (sometimes "tolerate") the design depends on many variables. Some of these include the design's "taste", yes. Others depend on how much my boss/client is paying me to "use this shit".
I wouldn't say I want a world where everything looks the same, but I certainly want one where everything works the same, and some geniuses once in a while add something new to my list of known (and loved) design patterns. I am not anti-design-experiments, but I will take a predictable UI that looks like windows 98 everyday over some "distinctive" shit that breaks all manner of expected behaviors (from keyboard shortcuts, to colors, to button placement, to relative sizing, to........)
I would take every news site delivering straight text, and letting me pick the page layout template to apply to all of them. Some kind of markup language that could be transmitted and then respect the users preferences as far as rendering.
I think its good that HN and reddit are basically the same, or that all old forums were basically the same but with different color schemes. Homogeneity is a blessing for UX.
Honestly, HN and Reddit are almost as different as threaded discussion forums are possible to be, especially New Reddit with it's "click hundreds of times to unhide most of the text on this page" approach to threading. Reddit's overall design aesthetic is all about pictures and headings and sidebars, and even minor details like the up/down arrows look different and are placed in a different relative position. The only design element they've got in common is Verdana, and that simply because when the websites were launched you only had two widely-installed sans-serif fonts to choose from...
It’s really difficult to make a design that is usable, follows platform standards, yet has unique personality.
I mean, really difficult.
Coming up with a design that relies exclusively on platform standards is easy, “low-hanging fruit.”
I write stuff for iOS/MacOS/WatchOS. There’s tremendous pressure to follow platform standards. In fact, if you use SwiftUI, it’s very hard to deviate from them. SwiftUI makes it easy (crazy easy) to follow the herd, and downright miserable, if you want to blaze your own trail.
90% of the time, that’s actually a good thing. I get pretty sick of designers that refuse to compromise, and believe that their graphic opus is more important than usable UI. It’s even worse, if the designer is an engineer, with little background in graphic design.
A designer that knows how to compromise, and work with usability, is a unicorn. If you have one, keep them.
Like the code that LLMs produce, I expect the designs to be fairly low-effort, but that will be a good thing, overall. They will be effective and usable. We need more of that.
Fonts are software. You can program them such that any two letters beside another can render uniquely. This is most common with ligatures like (e.g. fi -> fi) but also, say, swapping a colon from baseline oriented to centered if between 2 numbers, and so on.
>Has no one tried this before?
This is a great execution of a very common font practice.
When better standalone LLMs got "web crawling skills" integrated, it pretty much destroyed the need to ever lean on PPLX again. Perplexity is actually not a bad product, but other services like ChatGPT and Claude can do it's best thing pretty good, and do other things much better.
One thing I noticed is that whatever harness PPLX wraps around the models, the output is noticeably lower quality in aggregate. I assume some kind of token compression being used before passing your query to a given model but to my knowledge that's never been proven or confirmed?
Anyways, I get the most value out of coding and PPLX has seemingly pivoted away from that. Probably a good play to not try and compete directly with Claude Code/Codex and find a better niche, but I am not sure who or what their market is. Lovely design, however.
Being Microsoft, you'd think they would just offer a public Teams server instead? Not that you'd get more traction with it, but at least it's in-house and theoretically they would be motivated to build integrations on top.
Pretty ironic, isn't it? You'd think they'd have enough faith in Teams to compete with Discord on this front.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
Eh, good on them for not trying to act like Teams targets the same use cases as Discord just because Teams is an internal product. One is focused on the internal chats and groups within the business with occasional well defined outsiders and the other is more targeting something like live social media for consumers.
I'm not even sure if there is a way to have a team/channel for external users that they don't need to be invited to (I know you can jump through hoops to make it so they don't need to be guests in your tenant at least) or that there should necessarily be something like that in the first place.
The slop isn't coming, it arrived decades ago. The Pandora's box of slop is already open. Maybe AI widens the aperture, but if you cannot handle the discernment required to separate slop from something useful or meaningful, that is your problem.