This article is about lazy web design not AI web design

"That" web design

Do you know how like Claude or Chat can make a website with no barrier for entry? I personally find that in the last 2 or so years, the amount of generic websites that are made with vibecoding has skyrocketed, leading to businesses that should normally present themselves with prestige instead appear as unremarkable and even cheap.

AI fatigue

Let's for the moment brush past the societal and environmental impacts of AI. I want to make a case that AI/ vibecoded websites made with very little human input are bad on an aesthetic level that is separate from the other reasons why rampant AI usage might be bad.

Functionally, for a business, storefronts and webpages are often the first impression a customer has, and organizations that wish to present themselves as premium will inevitably look for ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack. In the case of vibecoded websites, there has begun to be a general look that people can recognize that gives away that a large portion of the DESIGN of the website was outsourced to an AI.

Markers of AI

For fun I just want to list what I've noticed as marks of vibe-coded websites.
- drop shadows on everything
- rounder corners
- em dashes
- a helvetica-ass font
- a colored stripe on the left side of a box (extra points if its also rounded at the corners)
- liquid glass effects (although this depends on execution)
- fake testimonials (although this can just be a template)
- bulletpoints
- having the 3 pricing tiers that spread out horizontally across the width of the page
- being purple and black with some rough grainy gradient background
- dot grids
- hover animations on everything

The Future I think

I personally believe that this is where bespoke assets and a turn away from AI polish will become more and more important. Honestly I don't even think this is a point about AI websites. I think templates, the consumer market for Wordpress and Weebly and Elementor and Fill-In-the-Blank caused an influx of low-quality websites that were pumped out just so that a company could have an online presence. The importance for brands is to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack. All AI has done is accelerate rapidly the rate that people can churn out websites that don't have a great attention to detail. I believe that in the future, personal touches, bespoke assets, a return to marks of physical media, and a focus on small details will be more important for companies that have a strong internet presence. You can see this trend in websites such as Beam's catalogue created by MAAM Inc.

Websites like these feature unique illustrations, cutouts, simple scrolling elements, and are remarkably flat. For me, this is the perfect level of interactivity and use of images in a website. I hope to make web design look as effortless as the Japanese team at MAAM.