In short
Y Combinator Startup Podcast: Episode Summary
Episode Title
How To Avoid AI Design Slop
Overview In this episode of the Y Combinator Startup Podcast, hosts Aaron Epstein and visiting partner Raphael Schaad discuss the increasing prevalence of AI-assisted design tools. They explore the resulting trends, particularly the pitfalls (termed "AI design slop") and how to create standout, engaging websites using these new technologies. The episode features reviews of user-submitted websites with an emphasis on maintaining originality and effective design.
Key Themes
- AI Design Tools: The episode highlights the convenience and drawbacks of using AI tools for web design.
- Common Design Pitfalls: Identifies typical mistakes, such as overused visual effects like purple gradients, distracting animations, and non-intuitive hover effects.
- Brand Originality: Stresses the importance of maintaining a unique brand identity amidst the widespread use of AI design tools.
Key Discussions
Introduction to AI Design Trends
- Positive Applications:
- AI tools democratize design, making it accessible for non-designers.
- Good design can be achieved more easily, with less technical expertise needed.
- Negative Trends (AI Design Slop):
- Common Aesthetic: Many designs feature similar elements like purple gradients and unnecessary animations, resulting in a lack of originality.
- Vibe Coding: Sites often appear to be "vibe coded," meaning they feel more about aesthetics than functionality.
Review of User-Submitted Websites
- Nunu.ai:
- Utilizes purple gradients, which are prevalent across startup websites.
- Some elements (like distracting lines) detract from user experience.
- Effective use of hover effects that enhance brand identity.
- Rosebud AI:
- Similar color schemes and gradients noted.
- Engaging interactive features, though navigation can be confusing.
- Get Crux:
- Issues with scroll jacking and distracting animations noted.
- Poor visual hierarchy, making it hard to understand the site's purpose.
- Sphinx:
- Notable for excessive button styles and confusing animations that detract from usability.
- Build Zero:
- Displays typical AI design patterns; excessive use of gradients and distracting hover effects.
- Zarna:
- Also suffers from scroll jacking and lacks clarity in messaging; design feels clunky.
Best Practices for Using AI Design Tools
- Evaluate Outputs: Founders should take the time to assess AI-generated designs critically.
- Maintain Brand Identity: Start from a defined brand palette and messaging to shape the final output, rather than solely relying on AI suggestions.
- QA Processes: Ensure thorough quality assurance to identify any quirks or bugs in design that may confuse users.
Conclusion The hosts conclude that while AI design tools present incredible opportunities for startups, they must be wielded with intention and creativity to avoid falling into the trap of sameness and inadvertent design flaws. The key takeaway is to leverage these tools to enhance originality and improve engagement on landing pages that serve as customer acquisition channels.
Key Takeaways
- Use AI design tools wisely to maintain brand uniqueness.
- Avoid overused design trends like purple gradients and distracting animations.
- Focus on creating user-friendly interfaces that clearly communicate product value.
- Conduct thorough QA on AI-generated designs to catch potential issues.
This episode serves as a reminder that while technology can simplify design processes, the human touch remains essential in creating compelling and effective digital experiences.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring AI Design Trends
0:45 to 1:14
Discussion on the good and bad aspects of AI-assisted design.
“Yeah, super fun to be now back in NYC and helping founders, next generation founders, build iconic companies.”
Identifying Common AI Design Flaws
1:14 to 2:35
Insights into common AI design trends and their implications on originality.
“So what are some of the common things that you've seen recently, a lot of the top AI design trends that are standing out that you'd want to call out for the audience before we jump into some sites?”
Analyzing Nunu.ai's Website
2:35 to 4:21
Review of Nunu.ai's website and its use of AI design elements.
“So we've got a bunch of YC companies that have submitted their websites that were all built with AI coding tools.”
Evaluating Hover Effects and Interactivity
4:21 to 7:21
Discussion on hover effects and their effectiveness in web design.
“And this is actually like a pretty tasteful way of using leveraging the powers of LLMs to build more compelling websites.”
Best Practices for Hover Effects
7:21 to 8:26
Recommendations for implementing effective hover effects in design.
“is a lot to kind of like reveal additional information.”
Reviewing Rosebud AI's Website
8:26 to 9:15
Analysis of Rosebud AI's website and its design choices.
“Now think of a desktop interface, a tool where you have to hover around everywhere to discover where the stuff actually lives.”
Assessing Get Crux's User Experience
9:15 to 13:31
Examination of Get Crux's website and its design interactions.
“And there's a prompt to game kind of interaction, I would assume.”
Design Distractions: The Moving Button
14:01 to 16:40
Explore how distracting design elements can detract from user engagement.
“I like the sticky header, but it's just like smoothly transition one to another.”
Visual Consistency and Clarity
16:41 to 19:05
Learn the importance of maintaining visual consistency across design elements.
“Let's go back up to the top and remind ourselves.”
Animation Effects and User Attention
19:06 to 21:00
Discuss how excessive animations can confuse users and detract from content.
“Okay, next we got Sphinx, your last compliance hire.”
Show all 16 chapters
Information Hierarchy in Design
21:01 to 24:10
Understand the significance of clear information hierarchy in web design.
“If we watch this animation here for a second, this button over here, the big star kind of button, like moves around and now it's a circle button.”
Common Design Patterns and Their Impact
24:11 to 28:01
Examine how prevalent design patterns can affect originality and branding.
“So I just kind of miss everything over here on the side.”
The Impact of AI on Design Originality
28:01 to 28:58
Explore how AI is affecting design originality and brand identity.
“Yeah, and these kind of like bento boxes is not a bad pattern, but it's also very non-original.”
Balancing AI Use in Product Development
28:58 to 30:26
Learn how to responsibly leverage AI tools in product design without losing authenticity.
“So it can really work on the hard kind of questions of your offering of your product of your company, such as like, what are we making?”
Evaluating Design Patterns in AI
30:26 to 34:40
Discuss the evaluation of common design patterns generated by AI in websites.
“All right, next up we got Zarna, AI Associates for Private Capital Markets.”
Ensuring Quality and Originality in Design
34:40 to 36:55
Understand the importance of quality assurance and brand representation in design.
“Yeah, I think definitely lots of purple gradients.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Raphael Schaad:It's easier than ever to design with AI tools, but that doesn't mean you should always accept all changes. So today I'll be joined by Raphael Schaad to look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of AI-assisted design and sort through how to use these superpowers to stand out. Welcome to another design review.
0:26Raphael Schaad:All right, today I am thrilled to be joined by Rafael Shad, one of the newest visiting partners here at YC. And Rafael was the co-founder of Kron, a modern calendar tool, which you sold to Notion a while back and are also one of the top designers that I know and have worked with. So Rafael, it's an honor to have you here and it's an honor to work together now at YC.
0:48Aaron Epstein:Yeah, super fun to be now back in NYC and helping founders, next generation founders, build iconic companies.
0:56Raphael Schaad:Well, you're the perfect person to have on here because the topic that we're going to be talking about today is AI design trends. On the negative end, there's the AI design slop. And on the positive end, there's a lot of AI design trends that now are easier to build for anybody, even if they're not a designer. So what are some of the common things that you've seen recently, a lot of the top AI design trends that are standing out that you'd want to call out for the audience before we jump into some sites?
1:23Aaron Epstein:Yeah, sure. This all kind of started when I had a late night thought and tweeted that I see a lot of dumb hover effects on landing pages of startups these days. Presumably wipe coded. And so I was kind of curious to peel the layer back there. It's like, how did these, like what I thought were dumb effects, how did they make it into LLMs and why are they everywhere now? A couple other trends that we then identified was kind of like purple gradients. All of a sudden, all startup websites had purple gradients everywhere. Or these sections that kind of like fade as you go in, as you scroll and they fade in and fade out.
1:57Raphael Schaad:Yeah. And it's not so much that those inherently are bad. It's not purple gradients are bad. Nobody should ever use them. is that now they're just so ubiquitous everywhere that they kind of lose all meaning and specialness and originality.
2:11Aaron Epstein:Totally. And one of the key things was when there was a good website kind of establishing a trend, it took a while in the old world for others to kind of like copy these trends. But now with LLMs, if there's a good website with a purple gradient, it makes it into the LLM because the LLM gets trained on like the good examples that get linked to a lot. And then all of a sudden, like the next week, all the startup websites look the same.
2:33Raphael Schaad:Yes. And so this is both good and bad if this power is used in the right ways. So we've got a bunch of YC companies that have submitted their websites that were all built with AI coding tools. So this should give us good grounds to figure out ways that they have been used really, really well and things that we would do differently if we were designing it ourselves. So let's dive into some examples. Let's have a look. All right. Okay. First up, We've got Nunu.ai. Solve your game testing with AI agents. Save countless hours of manual game QA by using AI agents performing end-to-end tests at scale.
3:09Raphael Schaad:Purple gradients.
3:10Aaron Epstein:It's the first thing that jumps out.
3:12Raphael Schaad:It's a very purple site, which, you know, we were just talking about. That's one of the most common things that you see. So it's interesting, like, pre-LLM day, I think I would have looked at this and gone, like, wow, this looks really nice. And now I look at it and I'm like, they used AI to design this. Maybe they didn't, but that's what it screams to me. Okay, so one thing that's interesting as you start scrolling here, we've got this line that's following us up and down. And it's interesting because I actually find this line to be a little distracting. I'm paying more attention to the line than I am the things that I think that it wants me to pay attention to.
3:47Aaron Epstein:It's almost like something that it's kind of like probably hard to implement for a human. and you would have never thought to actually code this up before AI. And just because we now can, just because LLMs are kind of good at these type of SVG buildups or transforms, doesn't mean that it's actually a good design and helps you convert potential visitors into customers, basically.
4:11Raphael Schaad:Yeah. Yeah, I don't know anybody that's like, we need a line that goes through here. Let's start coding that from scratch. You would only implement something like this because it was so easy to do. but I don't think it actually adds value if anything I think it distracts from the rest of the page I can't recall anything from these sections based on this okay so now we're down to everything in one place I find this hard to read it's very light maybe I'm just old yeah contrast could be improved there a little bit
4:45Aaron Epstein:so these cards are interesting this is actually pretty good This is probably something that would have been maybe too expensive to do or only like the very best or like website designers would have kind of gotten to the lengths of doing something like that. These hover animations for the cards. But AI is so simple to do. And this is actually like a pretty tasteful way of using leveraging the powers of LLMs to build more compelling websites.
5:10Raphael Schaad:Yeah, what's cool about it is it feels like it helps establish the brand and it's unique and it's creative and it's fun. And it's actually trying to, you know, multi-players like two controllers with lightning connecting them. And it actually helps reinforce the points that I think that they're trying to make here. And this is a great example of, you know, where the line that was following down the page didn't add much value. This would have been really hard to do. And now you kind of get it for free. You don't have to go from scratch building a lot of this stuff.
5:45Aaron Epstein:One of the things I want to try out is up here. So we here have the main navigation. One of the things that jumps out here is that as you hover, you generally kind of want to make things pop. But here it actually kind of disappears. So instead of inviting to click, to talk to them, it kind of like goes into the background. Same here, it kind of fades out as you activate one of these menu points. This is something that I think a designer would almost never choose to do. and now uh and the default of browsers also doesn't work that way and now ellen's just somehow decided that that's a good uh hover kind of like effect um but it makes no sense um think about it that way like the browser already has like a built-in hover effect for free even without css it turns the cursor into a hand right so that already indicates like i can click here so just leaving it white in this case or just kind of like the the bright purple and then having the hand already tells me like I can click on this thing.
6:41Aaron Epstein:So if you want to add a CSS effect, then you know, make it maybe like a little pop. Maybe make it like one shade lighter or more active or add like a little, you know, a little glow around it. But don't make it go away.
6:54Raphael Schaad:Yeah. Do you have any rules of thumb when, you know, you're designing something and you're trying to come up with hover effects? Like what are your goals when you're trying to come up with the right hover effect?
7:03Aaron Epstein:Yeah, make it sort of like clickable. Steve Jobs famously said, you know, he wanted to make things lickable with the Aqua interface back in the day. I think, you know, make things clickable, kind of like inviting to click. Stick to sort of like pretty standard, again, kind of I think the hand indicates that something is clickable. And so I wouldn't go much beyond that. Another thing that I see hover being used is a lot to kind of like reveal additional information. So not just kind of like a hover effect to make the UI more feel alive. Like hover is great to kind of make UIs feel more alive, right?
7:33Aaron Epstein:But I see it increasingly used to kind of like disclose additional critical information or functionality. And I don't think that's the best use for Hover. This whole trend that maybe like kind of like macOS kind of started to over the years get more and more into kind of like very clean interfaces, get the functionality and the tools and the buttons all out of the way. So there's all this space for content. I don't want to have my computer to be just like all content. I actually want it to be, you know, a bicycle for the mind, a tool. And so revealing additional functionality only on Hover and you have to go hunt for what the tool can actually do, I think it's kind of like an anti-pattern.
8:10Raphael Schaad:Yeah. Not to mention that, you know, there isn't a concept of hover on mobile as well. Yeah.
8:14Aaron Epstein:And long press, which is kind of the equivalent of hover, never really caught on on mobile.
8:21Raphael Schaad:Probably because it's so hard to discover. Yeah. You don't want to sit there long pressing all the time to try to figure out if there is any additional functionality behind it.
8:29Aaron Epstein:Now think of a desktop interface, a tool where you have to hover around everywhere to discover where the stuff actually lives. you know, the disclosure arrows or like hiding something or getting to a dot, dot, dot kind of menu to get to extra functionality. If that's all hidden behind hover, then, you know, you're just not as efficiently communicating the functionality of your software.
8:46Raphael Schaad:Yeah. Overall, I think this is a very nicely designed site. I think it's easier than ever using AI design tools and LLMs to get a professional looking site. There's almost no excuse for not having it now. And especially as we're reviewing YC applications, if you look at a demo and that demo does not have a base level of quality design, it seems like the person just didn't even try because it's so easy to do it now. So Nunu, really cool site and some really interesting applications of using AI here. So well done. All right. Next up, we got Rosebud AI. Create games with AI. And once again, like you start to see the trend here we've got the purple gradient again we've got a very similar um kind of pinkish purple accent color up here um and that's why like in isolation with one of these like it looks cool it looks modern everything but you know one after the other they all start to kind of look the same and it takes away a lot of the core brand and originality and things like that that i think most founders want for their site so let's dig in here this is the first time
9:49Aaron Epstein:we're looking at these live. So Rosebud AI, create games of AI. And there's a prompt to game kind of interaction, I would assume. That's cool. There's something you can instantly play. Yeah. Let's try it. Whoa, it's like a 3D game in the browser. That's cool. There's a person walking around. Can I use the arrows?
10:15Raphael Schaad:There we go.
10:16Aaron Epstein:Oh, WASD. We have an old school gamer here. All right, you can jump. All right, let's escape out of this. But cool, definitely kind of like engaging. I wonder whether this is actually their product code running on the website here. I would assume that it is. Or this is like a vibe-coded sandbox environment.
10:40Raphael Schaad:Yeah, I would assume that this is the type of thing you can create with their product. But that's an interesting point is that they don't really tell us. It doesn't say like, play a game made with our product right now. It's interesting, is this following us? Yes. These are just anchors jumping vertically around. Yeah. So what's interesting is, I didn't realize this at the time, but when we went to that one we were just playing, that was under modify games. And so what I wonder is if this is a game that has already been created that we can modify in real time and that's what they're trying to show off rather than the creation part.
11:14Aaron Epstein:Yeah. So maybe kind of like a thing to take away here is that using this non-standard navigation is tripping us off a little bit on how to use this website. Another thing that kind of jumped out here at the top is like, I don't think anyone would think of combining a red logo with purple as an accent color necessarily. It's not necessarily complimentary. and I guess whenever I see the use of emojis, even though they're not the system emojis, I feel like it's a little lazy. And so I feel like LLMs kind of take the easy path because they don't have any IP really themselves. They're just like big models kind of cobbling things together.
11:55Aaron Epstein:They use like these standard icons everywhere and it's just immediately kind of like a tell.
11:59Raphael Schaad:Yeah, I think we could just use more context up here too. And the name of the company is here. it looks like it's almost part of the headline rather than I would expect it to be up here by the logo.
12:11Aaron Epstein:Yeah. And then the value prop kind of being more clear, you know, create games with AI, something, something. So it's kind of like what's important for the H1 is typically kind of, you know, what is it? Who is it for? And to what end? Why should that person that it's for care? And if those three things plus a call to action are not kind of above default, then it's a harder
12:34Raphael Schaad:time to convert uh convert visitors yeah um okay we've got some i guess examples of games yep so games created with rosebud ai um okay this is interesting so there's another effect here you can see the light following my cursor um around the edges and yeah this is the kind of thing where you know you're like hey it costs nothing to do this then maybe you're like yeah sure let's throw it in it's fun and it's playful um but if you had to spend a week coding this and you know getting it to work right you'd be like that's not worth it okay so we've got a lot of a lot of game examples and it looks like maybe this is just the rest of the site here okay and then we hit a footer there's a like remixing oh yeah okay okay so some some of the some of the um projects you can remix
13:18Aaron Epstein:and then it kind of puts up the conversion wall okay um that would go beyond sort of like landing
13:24Raphael Schaad:page very cool awesome well done rosebud okay so next up we've got get crux and one of the first things that I noticed here was kind of the fade in. It was this automatic fade in. Oh, and another thing that I noticed is my scroll is hijacked here.
13:41Aaron Epstein:Yeah, it's maybe a little hard to see on screen, but there's certainly some scroll jacking logic going on. And there's also like a state where you see both the detached and the fixed header menu, like both at the same time, like right around here. So typically kind of like they should just smoothly. I like the sticky header, but it's just like smoothly transition one to another. And here you see sort of like that, you know, there are clearly two distinct menus that just happen to going to be the same. I'm sorry. I'm so distracted by the button that's chasing me around
14:16Raphael Schaad:the screen here. Yeah, I almost feel like it's hard to get the button to click on it because it's constantly moving.
14:25Aaron Epstein:Does it make you want to talk to the founders more or less?
14:27Raphael Schaad:it makes me distracted i would say i'm not paying attention to what they do i'm just uh i'm like why is this button following me around um it definitely got my attention i would say um one of the other things that i noticed first too is almost these like meteors that are you know shooting down from the angles you can kind of see them over there um that's another kind of thing where like it doesn't feel like it actually adds a lot of value to the product and again if you had to build that from scratch like it would never be worth your time um but you it's so easy to do it that people are like yeah let's throw that in it looks cool um but i actually find it a little distracting um i don't
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15:06Aaron Epstein:think it adds value to the the product here and the hero screenshot here is um i guess a poster image for a video um uh and it goes into what looks like a completely different video yeah that was confusing and the poster image is just very blurry here um i don't know whether this is like an artifact of like using using ai or not um but just as a general design principle i think all all your assets should be you know high res high quality um and this just looks like something very
15:33Raphael Schaad:blurry blurry yeah and again back on the button too because i still see even when we're down here it's like still chasing us around you know this is another example of the type of thing that you would only do because it's easy but just because something is easy doesn't mean it's worth doing Like there's a lot of things that are now at your fingertips with AI that, you know, anything imaginable is possible. Just because something is possible doesn't mean you should say yes to it.
15:58Aaron Epstein:Here we're kind of like hitting a little bit on just a lack of visual consistency. Like this looks like an entirely different visual language than anything we've sort of seen above. Where do you think that comes from? I wonder maybe different sections of the website being made by to like different parts of the tool. Maybe it's also just kind of like a function of like this year looking very different than like the website content. Yeah. Sometimes just like a clear image with a little bit of text, maybe a headline and then some subtext goes a long way. Yeah.
16:37Raphael Schaad:And I got to say, we're like halfway down the page right now. And if you asked me what they did, I would not be able to tell you. Let's go back up to the top and remind ourselves. AI creative strategist to make ads that work. Okay, so it's something to make ads, it seems like. It's interesting. They do kind of have like a visual style to it with a lot of these. It's almost like a vertical motion blur or something on a color gradient that we see in some of these images. Like these right here. And we saw the same thing. and these here, and these here, and these here. But it's constrained to some of these elements, and it feels like it's maybe a little overused here because it's hard to read these, and this feels more like a rainbow rather than calling the attention to it.
17:23Raphael Schaad:But up here does not have that style at all, which is maybe the point that you were making earlier. And I could see something where the background here is more reflective of this type of style, and then that might carry it through all the way through the rest of the page.
17:36Aaron Epstein:Yeah. Let me quickly reload the page and try something. So we see all these sections kind of like fading in. And here again, it's just like fading in. And one of the things that I noticed, I just don't see the advantage of having these things not just right there as I scroll. Because scrolling already like is the motion. Why does it have to like also then kind of like fade in? And one of the things that you get is these weird, for example here, right? We say, we're here to answer all your questions. And then there's one question and we, we, we break tier earlier. And I was like, wow, that's a lame FAQ.
18:12Aaron Epstein:If there's only like one Q and one A. But then I was like, aha, it just hasn't come in yet. And so not a fan of that pattern.
18:23Raphael Schaad:Yeah. What bothers me with the fade ins a lot of time, and I'm not sure if this does it or not, is when they're on a timer, sometimes I'm scrolling really quickly and I'll get all the way past the section as it's starting to fade in up at the top and I miss the content altogether. So I'm curious to try that here and see how they did this. So like if I'm just kind of zooming down. So these seem to fade in at least when it's at the bottom of the page.
18:51Aaron Epstein:But it still feels like going through molasses because it's all scroll checked. Right. Like hijacking the sort of like actual native browser scrolling to do some fancy thing with JavaScript to actually have the hooks to do all these animations. Yeah. All right.
19:05Raphael Schaad:Super interesting. Very creative. So well done, Get Crux. Okay, next we got Sphinx, your last compliance hire. All right, we've got some animation thing going on here. I think one of the trends that we've seen so far is just like way more animation these days than there were, you know, three years ago, probably because these AI design tools make it so easy to do this.
19:29Aaron Epstein:Yeah. Let's really talk about hierarchy here um so we start with um a logo type kind of a stylized version of the name of the company sphinx right that's cool top left pretty standard but then we have the h1 is also good and the subtext but also we have like this kind of like weird in between like fourth style right um not something that i typically ever saw designers or engineers kind of come up with their own landing pages. There's only something kind of like these many, many styles mixed is something that I increasingly see kind of LLMs do because like somehow the LLM thought it's clever to have like an extra label here and an extra style meets Sphinx.
20:11Aaron Epstein:But we already have the company name. We already have, you know, three different styles basically. If you count this here, it's like four styles. This just adds a fifth, complicating the hierarchy, not really adding. It adds a bunch of vertical space. Like we could just like move the H1 a little bit up and then, you know, the valued and trusted logos would already be like a little higher. So this is something that I increasingly see kind of like LLM stream up that isn't really tight information hierarchy and graphic design.
20:39Raphael Schaad:Yeah, I think going through these, I keep coming back to the concept of like, it's easy to do anything. You really have to be opinionated as the human that's in the loop and designing these around what you think is the right thing, not just kind of saying yes, accept all changes. Yeah, you're not the editor. Yes, yes. And another thing that I'm noticing happening here is this section on the right, it just keeps swapping around. If we watch this animation here for a second, this button over here, the big star kind of button, like moves around and now it's a circle button. I think that's a button.
21:18Raphael Schaad:Yeah, I guess that's clickable. And then it's going to come back over to the left side and it's going to be a big round rectangle kind of button and so we have a lot of different button styles i'm not sure why things are moving like this um and it's very confusing it's actually not a button like yes it shows the
21:33Aaron Epstein:hand but that's a head fake yeah i guess because if you click it it doesn't really well i guess it's kind of like a next button yeah but then also on auto advance yeah this is very confusing
21:43Raphael Schaad:to me i'm not sure what it's showing and and i can't tell what's happening in this animation either it seems to be some kind of workflow um actually you can just click anywhere and it it it advances.
21:53Aaron Epstein:So it's not even like this button or the whole thing is a click target.
21:56Raphael Schaad:Yeah. This is again, one of those things where it's hard for me to imagine a human just being like, let's have three different style buttons that every time you click it, they all reorient and shift. And, you know, it's, it feels like the type of thing that an AI design tool would have suggested and you would have said, sure, that seems cool.
22:13Aaron Epstein:Yeah. It feels like the visual manifestation of lm hallucinations um let's go look at the menu here um all right pretty standard stuff i never like when like the menus can like go go away like in between yeah like there's the gap and then something goes away what's happening on the right side
22:34Raphael Schaad:of a couple of those there were two of those and there's there's kind of a grid on the right side yeah with an icon is that interactive or anything or is that nope it's just something the lm thought How about if you hover over on, yeah. Okay. So it's just giving a different icon.
22:49Aaron Epstein:The icons are actually kind of cute. Um, the seems somewhat original and on brand here. Um, I would just never thought to, to do this little, little, uh, like if, if you want to make a point that onboard is like four circles in the square arranged in that way, like if that was important, which it doesn't seem like it, like you probably just put the icon here kind of back to the like why reveal stuff as you hover that is essential but it's probably non-essential so it can probably just like leave it out what happens when we go further down valued entrusted by okay we've got a bunch of lines going everywhere
23:30Raphael Schaad:all right so we've got that line following you down the page pattern again and now we're scroll
23:34Aaron Epstein:We're locked into this position here of the website in order to build up this animation. I wonder what it wants to tell me. Like, why is it important to capture me here on this point to like build out this animation versus just like showing it already in the built out state?
23:55Raphael Schaad:And I find the animation is getting all of my attention rather than what it says all the way over here on the left side. So I'm not even noticing any of this. And this is not, on the right side, it's not giving me enough visual information to communicate something valuable about what they do or how the product works. So I just kind of miss everything over here on the side. The animation is too distracting.
24:20Aaron Epstein:It's also if these landing pages, I kind of like build up and then keep you in a section for a little while. It's really hard to know when you're, like how far into the book you have read.
24:31Raphael Schaad:Yeah.
24:31Aaron Epstein:Right. Like if you have a physical book, you're kind of like, oh, halfway through here, it's kind of like, I don't know, maybe it feels like we're halfway through, but maybe, you know, it's going to keep me for another 15 seconds on some, some like really rich build out of a landing page. So the scroll indicator is a really important tool, I think, kind of like to get a grasp on sort of like the, you know, the landing page. And here it's completely failing me. Kind of like, where am I in the website? All right.
25:02Raphael Schaad:Overall, like visually, I think it looks nice. It looks modern. There's a theme that they're, you know, you've got the orange accent color. You've got the black is kind of your primary brand color. You've got the line that's kind of following you down. And my hunch is that that is sort of reproducing what the product looks like, because we keep seeing all these workflows with orange lines in the product itself. And I think that's what they're trying to communicate here. and so you know that makes sense to me their headline up at the top I think does a great job of explaining what it is and who it's for so I think they really nailed that awesome Sphinx great work next up we got build zero let's take a look here build custom internal apps with AI
25:45Aaron Epstein:so right off the bat you got some purple gradients yeah there we go again and let's see here so the menu nicely morphs ooh and then my pet peeve dumb hover effects just doesn't add anything this vertical movement is just distracting and not cool it pushes also there's another thing where because of the effect it kind of like horizontally shifts the whole menu which kind of just seems like a bug and then here's another like effect kind of like the arrow has to move somehow vertically. Why?
26:23Raphael Schaad:The arrow at least should go to the right also. Yeah, it goes like backwards.
26:27Aaron Epstein:This hover effect here, I don't mind. You know, it's like it's a black and white button and then it turns into the primary brand color, in this case kind of purple. Like, that's not a bad hover effect here. This here, pretty bad. Then, what else do we got? We got a little interactive element here. Can click through it. Ooh. Okay, there seems to be some bug with the selection here. If this was hand coded like no way someone would have not noticed it i almost wonder like if you just one shot landing pages um do you actually go and really like use it with the same attention detail as you feel if you had like built it yeah um from scratch and then because you don't um you just ship uh things that are that you wouldn't have um because you don't even notice the the little bucks that the LLM make.
27:16Raphael Schaad:Go back to the engineers tab here. Now, if this is their product, one of the other things that stands out to me is this kind of dashboard that's got, you know, it's got like the red, green, blue, purple kind of call outs up here. That's one of the hallmark classic things that a lot of AI design tools will actually create.
27:38Aaron Epstein:Yeah, every fake dashboard looks basically like something like that.
27:42Raphael Schaad:They've got the icons that are a darker version of the lighter background color. It's usually like the Google colors, you know, it's like red, yellow, green, blue.
27:52Aaron Epstein:The Fisher Prize primary.
27:54Raphael Schaad:So that we tend to see a lot. Ideas to working apps in minutes, transformative efficiency.
28:01Aaron Epstein:Yeah, and these kind of like bento boxes is not a bad pattern, but it's also very non-original. and so this LLMs oftentimes kind of come up with these. Just like icon at the top and then a bit of text and in this case kind of like a 3x2. That's quite common. We've got some quotes.
28:27Raphael Schaad:We've got the purple gradient. We've got some frequently asked questions and then more gradients. We're, I don't know, a few into reviewing these now And I think we just keep seeing a lot of these common patterns, which I think just highlights how ubiquitous they've become and how it almost like takes away from the brand and originality that I think most of these companies want to create when it has elements that every other site and every other product has too.
28:57Aaron Epstein:Yeah, look, I think the really cool thing about AI tools is that it kind of frees you from having to kind of like, you know, fiddle with like the technical details. So it can really work on the hard kind of questions of your offering of your product of your company, such as like, what are we making? For whom? Why is this valuable to them? Right. And that's the cool aspect. But if you then can like just use it to create what we sometimes call like AI, AI slop, I think this idea of having sort of like, you know, all this power that you should use responsibly gets a little bit wasted. And so that's the fine line to walk, I feel, for builders in 2026.
29:36Raphael Schaad:Yeah, there's nothing inherently bad about this. You know, it's just that we've been through a few and we've seen this before. You know, that's kind of what it feels like is I've seen this before. And for anybody else in the audience, you lose a little bit of credibility, I think, when your customers are viewing your product and they're saying, this looks like a bunch of other things I've seen. They probably just used AI to build this and design it. If that's the case, how good is the actual product? Or are they vibe coding that too?
30:04Aaron Epstein:Use AI to build this by any means, but just really then evaluate the output and use AI to make it even better and more original and spend the time that you saved one-shotting it or whatever to then really think about your messaging and designing a wonderful product that you can then showcase, et cetera.
30:24Raphael Schaad:Yep, that's great advice. Awesome, build zero. Thank you. Thank you. All right, next up we got Zarna, AI Associates for Private Capital Markets. Oh, we're scroll jacked again. Oh yeah.
30:38Aaron Epstein:It's 10x everything, all the things.
30:41Raphael Schaad:Unlocked IRR. this this site yeah it feels like i'm in molasses it just feels so clunky to use not to mention there just isn't a lot of like information um i feel like i have like even this is deal volume 10x like yeah it's all everything 10x just feels made up um and it feels like there's just so much space it feels like i have to scroll through this molasses forever to get to anything that helps me understand what this is one of the things i personally like if we go to the
31:09Aaron Epstein:top. Right now, the sort of background here uses 100 % of the vertical space, which kind of like almost like this visually kind of locks me in. And then there's like nothing more. And I hate when when people can like put like scroll down to see more because like, of course, we're on a website, of course, I know how to scroll down. So one of the things that I personally kind of like to interrupt the visual a little bit is kind of like to start a landing page, like maybe like, like this you know now i have kind of like something here at the top um but i know there's like more good stuff down here yeah the good stuff better be good because close better deals faster doesn't you know tell me much but maybe there's like you know like 10 pixels of like an awesome hero image kind of like peaking up or something like that and that would be cool and then i immediately without any indicators like no one wants to can like scroll down and discover it
32:00Raphael Schaad:right yeah well we've stopped at the perfect point here because you cannot see anything in the top navigation bar.
32:07Aaron Epstein:Yep. You better know what's in the background. And if there's a dynamic background, such as a video playing, which might have all sorts of bright colors, all of a sudden your bright menu isn't readable anymore. Okay. So this is interesting. So here it picked it up. Yeah. So it's smart, but it's not smart when there's video behind it. You're right. That is the nuance. Huh. Okay.
32:30Raphael Schaad:These I can't click on. I would have expected that I could click on any of these. Maybe the chevron? Oh, I don't know what just happened.
32:42Raphael Schaad:Okay, now I can click on those. Yeah, some of it is clickable and some of it is not, it appears. And also it's like jumping me up and down on the screen. It seems to just be moving on its own timer and not letting me do anything, which is confusing. And again, this is one of those things where it feels like you wouldn't intentionally design it to work this way. instead you just it created a component and you went and it does sometimes work only on those nested ones if you try the other ones it doesn't do anything yeah and this beta label here is um
33:16Aaron Epstein:super super hidden there's sometimes a chevron sometimes not um yeah this feels maybe like a little bit sloppy yeah one agentic layer generate an investment memo um yeah even the little bits
33:34Raphael Schaad:emotion here is the kind of thing that like ai will just give you that for free and you're like yeah okay let's go with that but you would never create yourself um yeah i can't even tell what i'm supposed to do with any of this it hovers and expands a little bit but like nothing is clickable we got some fade-ins it just feels like it's lacking a lot of like useful information presented in the right ways um and at least not purple though you got a lot of blue yeah yeah yeah
34:05Aaron Epstein:fit and finish as well as kind of like meaty content yeah um like clear messaging is maybe lacking a little bit um the visual style if i didn't have to scroll through it um is actually
34:17Raphael Schaad:kind of fresh yeah yeah like it reminds me of uh lovable or things like that that kind of have that like grainy zoomed in kind of picture in the background.
34:26Aaron Epstein:Not sure what these boxes here represent in the background. Yeah, some weird artifact.
34:33Raphael Schaad:All right, Zarna, thank you. Okay, well, thank you everybody for submitting your sites. And Rafael, we've seen a bunch of them now. What are some of your takeaways here?
34:41Aaron Epstein:Yeah, I think definitely lots of purple gradients. A lot of purple. And in general, kind of like a lot of kind of like the same patterns. You know, we see animations kind of like for animation sake, just because it's possible now. I would have killed to have these kind of like AI superpowers when I built my first website. So I think it's wonderful that we have them. But you are still kind of like responsible to outsource your thinking to LLMs and actually just use them as tools to get your brilliant ideas, designs, novel, maybe kind of like interactions out on the web to dazzle your customers.
35:15Aaron Epstein:And I think that's what a landing page should do in the end. It's kind of like a customer acquisition channel, right? This is not your product. This is not a website as in kind of like a cool thing on the web. There's space for that as well. But these are like startup landing pages and they're basically customer acquisition channels. So that's how I would really use these tools.
35:36Raphael Schaad:I totally agree with all of those. A couple others I would add. You know, one, I think it's really important that you QA everything. It's very easy to create something. But we went through and we found, you know, some quirks or bugs or things like that here or there, things that were confusing. Ultimately, you know, you, the founder, you, the human, need to be the one that goes through and make sure that, you know, the interactions and everything else work right. The other one is, you know, it's important that your site and your brand, they come through as the thing that you want to represent your company and that originality and something that feels different.
36:12Raphael Schaad:And it's very easy using the same tools that everybody else is using to end up in the same place. You have to be intentional about ending up in a different place. And so rather than start from what does the AI spit out and then let's tweak that, I would start from, you know, what color palette do we want to use and what is our brand and how can we feed that into the system and use that to make sure we end up at an end goal that represents us rather than just going with, you know, whatever the AI spits out there. We've seen a lot of people do that. And I think, you know, like you said, one of the most powerful tools ever to create incredible designs and do things that would have been impossible or taken forever that you can do just like this.
36:55Raphael Schaad:And so to use that for ways that actually help you move the lever upward and make the sites more engaging and convert better is one of the most powerful things that you can do.
37:06Aaron Epstein:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining.
37:08Raphael Schaad:Rafael, it's been amazing to get your perspective on all of these. And thank you to everybody that submitted websites. Thank you. And we will see you on the next design review.
From the publisher
As no-code design tools become more common, so do the pitfalls. You know what they look like - the purple gradients, annoying hover effects, sections that fade as you scroll. So how do you avoid a site that feels vibe coded while still taking advantage of these new tools? In this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein is joined by Visiting Partner Raphael Schaad, the founder and designer of Cron (now Notion Calendar). Together they’ll review user submitted sites with an eye for how to leverage these tools and avoid the common vibe coding mistakes.
