1006: Can AI Make Good Design?

Wes and Scott talk about whether AI can actually create good design, or if it just remixes the same patterns over and over. They dig into AI-generated UX, design systems, YouTube thumbnails, Google’s design.md spec, programmatic design, and the tools designers are actually using today. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 03:20 Can AI actually make you creative? 08:52 Why AI-generated YouTube thumbnails all look the same 10:34 Can good design be extrapolated from patterns? 13:46 Google’s design.md and AI steering documents 16:57 Can AI make good UX? 19:37 Brought to you by Sentry.io 21:03 Can good design be programmatic? 23:57 Can AI optimize design for outcomes and conversions? 27:40 Should designers use AI to enhance their work? 32:41 The AI design tools people are actually using Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. We lost the first like 20 seconds of this episode on Riverside, so I'm here recording it again. I went to find the shirt that I was wearing. I spilled swarm of poutine on it, so it's dirty. So, listen up. We're gonna get the editor to try to cut it in perfectly. And I'm just gonna start saying what I was saying at the beginning of it. We have a show on AI design, and don't turn it off just yet, because this isn't the AI design show where guys are like, "Oh, I one-shot at this, and it looks amazing to me, and I think designers are toast." No, that's not what this show is about. This show is about, uh, we know that AI can write pretty good code, and that's great, because it's very deterministic. It's, you can be tested, things like that. But design, like, can a model create something that is good,

• 0:45Wes Bos?

  that is functionally useful, that converts well for the business, that helps the actual end user? Um, we're in this, like, weird space right now, where it seems like everybody is just ripping each other off. Every app looks exactly the same, and there's tons of new tools to help you. So, in order to get to the bottom of this, we're gonna attempt to answer some of the following questions. Can AI be creative? Can it make you creative? Can good design be extrapolated? Um, what about user experience? Can AI make a good user experience? You know, does it know about all of the complexities of your UI, of what people are trying to get done? Uh, can you make good design programmatic? We've talked about this in a, in a previous many episodes of like, can you programmatically pick good colors? You, like, with math, those things are kinda hard to get to. So,

• 1:28Wes Bos?

  we'll, we'll answer that question. Can AI make design that influences the end goal? So, buying something, you know, or, or helping somebody get to the, the end use? Why are they using your application? At the end of the day, can you help them with that? Um, and then we're gonna end it off with just like, tools and thoughts of, if you want to design something, whether you're a designer or not, what tools should you be looking at, and how should you be thinking about using these things? My name is Wes. With me as always is Mr. Scott Tolinski. You ready to get into it, Scott?

• 2:00Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I'm so ready to get into it. I, this is a topic that I, I think a lot about, especially given just how many, how many vibe-coded designs you see. And it's such a tell, there's so many tells these days of, once you've worked with AI, I can, I feel like I could even tell Wes which model designed something at this point. Which, yeah, like, there are specific tells for, for GPT versus Anthropic, et cetera. So I, I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on this, but also in general, man, design is something that I'm constantly looking to get better at and feel like I'm constantly not good enough at. So, uh, let's get into it.

• 2:42Wes Bos?

  I know, sort of an aside from that, but I know that there are many architects which, which can look at a building and say, I know which software this building was designed in due to the way that the, the curves fit together, you know, as soon as they add a new affiliate tool, then all of the buildings have that, which is absolutely crazy. And I feel like I'm gonna be on Antiques Roadshow when I'm older, being like, well, yes, that was, uh, that was done with Sonnet 4.5, not 4.6, it might be a little bit confusing, you know? I'm gonna be able to pick it out, so stay tuned for that. But, let's talk about, like-

• 3:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, the border left here is indicative of the era.

• 3:20Wes Bos?

  So I got on to this whole thing because I get these emails every single day from these like slop-coded startups and they say like, here, check it out, like, let me know if you, if you wanna use it. And I always click through to the website and see what it is. And it's, it's the same thing of everything, right? Every, someone just logged into V0 or Lovable or Claude or whatever and typed like, make me a business, make no mistakes, and it shat out some, uh, business out the other end. And what's interesting is that on all of these, I see the same name over and over again. I see Sarah Chen on there. And I was like, where is Sarah Chen coming from? And I, I was like, I gotta get to the

• 4:02Wes Bos?

  bottom of this. So first of all, I thought like, maybe this is just the same person doing this over and over again. And it turns out that wasn't the case. Was many websites. So I was like, where is Sarah Chen coming from? Like, maybe it's coming from like, one of these like site builders, you know, maybe they have like seeded it with a template that has Sarah Chen as a testimonial and just uses that. And I looked into it and it didn't seem to be the case because all of the examples that I had found, I looked on GitHub and the use of Sarah Chen in the last year has just skyrocketed. And, and they were all from like different generators, you know, some of it was in like PHP code. Some of it was in like markdown documents and PowerPoint slides and there, there didn't seem to be any commonality between them all.

• 4:46Wes Bos?

  So finally I went into chat GPT and I said, give me a list of like five random testimonials or not random, five testimonials. And Sarah Chen, bam, first one. And I went into every other model and every single one had either, I think four out of five had Sarah Chen as the first and then somewhere in there it had a variation of Sarah Chen in there, which was absolutely wild. So every single model is using Sarah Chen as it. And, and I, I thought like, hmm, if you think AI is, is making you creative, it's, it's not. It's making you like what programmatically, what, what, what did I, what was I saying it was called? Hold on.

• 5:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's making you probable or likely. I gotta ask, how, how did you notice Sarah Chen? Because for me, my brain just glosses over that stuff. You know, the times that I don't are when I see my good buddy Wes up there. I'm like, hey, that's Wes. So he's got a little Wes quote. But I don't think I would have noticed any random.

• 5:41Wes Bos?

  This guy emailed me and says like, hey, we are a business. And then I like go to his website and it says Sarah Chen. And then there's like a, an obviously an AI photo. And I was like, that's not Sarah Chen. And so I Googled, it, there was another one. It was like Marcus Rodriguez was the one, the other one that kept showing up. So I Googled Marcus Rodriguez and testimonial. And I found, I'm not kidding, I probably found two or 300 like startups, dot coms that had him as a thing. And in, in many cases, his like attribution of the, well, company he's associated with was also the same. It was like InfoTech or something like that. So I like, just by Googling it, I found like, man, this Marcus Rodriguez.

• 6:23Wes Bos?

  And then beside it was always Sarah Chen was used over and over and over again. So it's just. Deterministic, right?

• 6:30Scott Tolinski?

  Did you, did you respond to the?

• 6:34Wes Bos?

  I did, well, I asked the guy.

• 6:36Scott Tolinski?

  People who emailed you asking you, Sarah Chen.

• 6:37Wes Bos?

  So I first thought like, oh, I'm on to some like slop ring, you know, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna infiltrate the slop ring. So I emailed him and I was like, hey, can we, can we jump on a call? I would love to do a syntax episode on this. And he's like, yeah, absolutely. Let's, let's talk right now. And then I realized like, no, it's not a slop ring. It's just that everybody's using the same Sarah Chen testimonial. So.

• 6:59Scott Tolinski?

  I feel like, I feel, I feel like that is fraud.

• 7:04Wes Bos?

  That is fraud? Yes. Oh, absolutely.

• 7:06Scott Tolinski?

  I would say that is fraud, yes. Yeah. That's crazy.

• 7:10Wes Bos?

  So all of that to say, like, can AI make you creative? I, I think like, if you are expecting it to do all of the work of making you something beautiful, something creative, something that goes into whatever, it's not gonna happen, right? I think that it can certainly help you explore ideas. With the Mad CSS website, right? We, we had these like, super silly, like 90s basketball themed photos, which one person asked if we'd like, took those, which was like, of course not. We, those are, we didn't travel back to the 90s and take like NCAA photos.

• 7:47Scott Tolinski?

  And, and me at my, my, you know, massive height of five foot seven, I, I can certainly dunk like that. You best believe, uh, I am good on the trampoline, but not that good.

• 7:59Wes Bos?

  But when I was designing that thing, I went through, I don't know, probably like 20 or 30 different like iterations of what we could do. And it, it certainly helped me explore different areas. And I think that AI can help you do that. But at the end of the day, it's not coming up with, with new ideas. It's all been trained on stuff that has been done before, which is maybe not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think it's actually making you creative. And it's just making everything some disgusting, warm stew that is just all of the ideas that have been done before, all of the stuff it's been trained on. And it's all sort of just this mediocre sort of watered down version of that.

• 8:40Scott Tolinski?

  But what about these design tools that create really good designs?

• 8:44Wes Bos?

  Well, well, we'll talk about that, cause like you, you see a lot of these design tools that put out seemingly. Decent looking websites. We'll talk about that in just a sec, but let's talk about YouTube thumbnails for a second. The latest Gemini can crank out like a Mr. Beast style thumbnail, which is like super high high HDR, it widens eyes. It does all the like stupid YouTube thumbnail stuff that like we do it as well, right? Because why? Because it works, right? But now that it they're able to just simply, you can just type, type, type, and it cranks out what you used to pay hundreds of dollars for to a designer for this type of thumbnail. Now, everybody, every single thumbnail is like that on YouTube, right?

• 9:27Wes Bos?

  It's the the wow face, all of that. It's the the the blue versus red, the thing down the middle, big letters on top. That is now table stakes. And I think that now that is table stakes, it's going to stop working in the next two or three weeks. I guarantee you because everyone has figured out, oh, I don't need to like previously it was somebody like Mr. Beast, they had somebody on staff figuring out these. And then other people started to copy those and now it's simply just like a prompt away. And every single thumbnail looks like that. Now it's going to stop working because it's table stakes. Everybody can do it, right? And now we're going to have to guarantee we're going to see like a shifting of YouTube thumbnails to something else. And I don't know what that something else is, but we will see.

• 10:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know it's a YouTube thumbnails are a whole thing in general, even like thinking about that wow face. I hate the wow face, but it works and I'll tell you why it works. It's psychology. People recognize faces and expressions better than they recognize text or images like that. So the faces work, even though I hate them and they're ugly, but we gotta do it.

• 10:34Wes Bos?

  The next question here is can good design be extrapolated? Meaning that if you were to provide it with a list of examples, a list of rules, colors, spacing, type, all of that stuff, if you sort of make a good base of design, can it then be extrapolated into to something larger? And I think partially, yes, that's what we're seeing now with tools like Google Stitch where. You go into it and you tell it what you want. In my case, I found what was helpful is I asked Claude to summarize all of the features and all of the layouts and whatever that needs to happen without describing what it looks like. And then I took that, copy pasted that into Google Stitch and it cranked out like a decent

• 11:19Wes Bos?

  looking design. But after using it three or four times, you can clearly tell that they have seeded it with some good stuff, right? They have a whole bunch of templates. They have a whole bunch of good fonts. They have a whole bunch of rules about what colors work well with each other. They probably have a massive prompt of like, these are the things that look good. And then out the other end, you, the user can say, all right, well, I want it to do this, right? I need form inputs or sliders or all that stuff. Then I want to use these colors. And then it can, it can take those things and sort of extrapolate that into something that is looking half decent.

• 11:59Wes Bos?

  But even after it's been out for like a month or two, I can now eyeball one of these Google Stitch designs, no problem, because they all start to look the same after, after a while.

• 12:10Scott Tolinski?

  I think that goes along very nicely and nicely in a sense where like even with development, a lot of people feel like AI is really helpful in greenfield in general. But the times where I find it to be the most helpful are with established patterns, taking care of tasks that you, is like mostly just regurgitating either patterns that you've already done or re-implementing those same patterns. But without those established patterns left to its own devices, it's way less effective. So I think extrapolating good design, to me, falls under that same category of established

• 12:51Scott Tolinski?

  patterns and extrapolating on those established patterns with hard rules about how to extrapolate on those patterns, i.e. you know, especially when you get into CSS stuff, whether that is like not adding new CSS files without approval, et cetera.

• 13:09Wes Bos?

  There's probably people screaming at the the radio right now being like, that's what a design system is, you dummy. And like, we've had this before we've had AI, and that is a system of rules and pieces that you can sort of put together. But there is a limit to it as well, right? Because like, we had Bootstrap, we had have Shad CN, and those things look really good out of the box. But at a certain point, you can't just click them together like they're Lego. You have to have a little something that is a little bit higher. You have to be able to figure it out. And that's what my next point is, is can AI make a good UX? But before we get into that, let's talk real quick about this like design.md. So this is a, do you want to give a quick explanation of what it is?

• 13:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So, like, a couple of weeks ago, Google came out with their design.md spec, which the idea for the design.md spec is that you are putting, it's kind of like your agents.md or any of these steering documents that you have inside of your codebase, but only for design patterns. And when I first saw design.md, I was looking at it, and it's basically what it's a Markdown file with front matter about your design tokens, your properties.

• 14:30Wes Bos?

  It's a parser as well, and like a linter. So it is a lot more structured than just a Markdown file. But you're right, it is a steering document.

• 14:38Scott Tolinski?

  Right. And so there are those aspects of it too, right? Where there is validation involved in this document. But it is really, and my initial reaction was like, this, this looks like just a root CSS declaration.

• 14:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Scott Tolinski?

  There are more things in here, but it feels like prime territory for Drift for kind of...

• 15:03Scott Tolinski?

  It's like duplication of ideas that are expressed in code already. But the idea is that your AI uses this as essentially a design document. This is the rules of this library. If you're adding a design to this, it's following these dang rules. Whether that is the colors, fonts, all that stuff, the naming of things, what belongs to what? What the spacing are, rounded corner spacing again. Yeah, I still don't necessarily get it, get the need for it, but.

• 15:39Wes Bos?

  I think the big play here is that like it's a standard that can be translated between things. So like if you have a Figma that can output this and then like you have like a like a tailwind, it can be converted from one to another. But first of all, I wonder like, do we, do we need this rigidness? And second of all, I say, if there is rigidity, I feel like I would rather do this in like a CSS file with comments, maybe?

• 16:12Scott Tolinski?

  I would love, I know this is not gonna happen. I would love a standard way of just defining CSS variables because that's really kind of what this is. Cause like spacing, rounded, all that stuff, just, just come up with a standardized name for all this stuff in your root CSS declaration, point it there, add some comments about the overview or whatever. Bingo, bingo. Now you're not having an AI document in a code document that could get out of sync.

• 16:35Wes Bos?

  The drift kills me. I think there's, there's a different world for this as well, where the whole design tokens folks, you know, where you, your sales force and you have 40 different implementations of your design. But I'm curious to see if there's any, any uptake. I certainly don't want another file in my, my root of my repo.

• 16:53Scott Tolinski?

  Oh yeah, right? Another, another my repo, yeah.

• 16:57Wes Bos?

  The next one is can AI make good UX? So much of design is not just making it look good. It's, it's about making interface that is consistent, something that has clear purpose, low friction to the user. Right? And quite honestly, I don't think AI is very good at this. I think it's great at throwing buttons on there. I think it's good at having cards and putting cards inside of cards. But when it comes down to. This is our specific app and we are doing this one thing, right? Like, we are booking trailers. Yeah, we are U-Haul. That, maybe that's a good example. I freaking hate U-Haul. U-Haul's app is absolutely awful. The UX is, I won't, makes me want to kill myself. And it's just the worst.

• 17:39Scott Tolinski?

  I don't think you could say that. You could say. I think you're too too motivated.

• 17:44Wes Bos?

  The UX makes me want to die. And it just, it drives me nuts, right? And what needs to happen there is that a designer that understands UX needs to come in and understand what is actually getting done here and figure out both the interface as well as the flow for, for actually booking a trailer on U-Haul, right? And I don't know that if you were to give AI these problems, that it would make a good thing, because it, it just really doesn't understand. Maybe you could, I don't know, take a whole bunch of user feedback and like, and pipe that in and summarize it and stuff. But I think at a certain point, you still need somebody who understands the stuff and has a good UX.

• 18:26Wes Bos?

  Because it's just, you're gonna get these awful interfaces at the end of the day.

• 18:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I find most of the UX work that AI does, even with strict rules. And you can download a UX skill from Skills, whatever, that malware, and throw it on your system and prompt away. Make this UX more user friendly. And like, it just flat out is bad at that. Yeah, like, I have such strict UX rules in mind and it still just like falters with that. I always, I find, I find myself saying, move, move out of the way. I, let me do it, like, way more than ever these days.

• 19:00Wes Bos?

  I even think that just like, so much of that is just subjective, you know? Like, oh, I'm.

• 19:05Scott Tolinski?

  It's taste.

• 19:06Wes Bos?

  I hate that, like, taste thing so much. But yeah, it makes sense. It's just like, somebody needs to.

• 19:10Scott Tolinski?

  It's taste.

• 19:11Wes Bos?

  Use this thing and go, oh, you know what? When I selected my location and then the trailer wasn't available, there should be a very good UX for being able to realize, oh, there is a similar trailer at a different place nearby. Or there are, this is a trailer that I could get that is similar at this location. And. Yeah, that's just, there's so much to it. So not good at UX, IMO.

• 19:37Scott Tolinski?

  So if you have AI designing your app, you're going to want to make sure that you have Sentry. Because why? They have rage click detection. Because when AI designs your crappy user experience, users are going to be clicking on stuff and being like, "Why doesn't this work right?" Or, "Why isn't this doing what I'm expecting it to?" And then you're going to get those reports in your dashboard in Sentry, and you're going to be able to see exactly who's having issues. You can also collect user feedback for when users feel like this thing might suck. There's a lot of great stuff here too, like outages and being able to track errors from your slop-coded mess. So check it out at sentry.io/syntax.

• 20:21Scott Tolinski?

  Sign up, get two months for free using the coupon code TASTYTREAT. Trust me, this is a tool that is going to help you at every single stage.

• 20:30Wes Bos?

  Rage clicks and dead clicks as well. That's if you're interested in the difference between the two. Rage click is where someone clicks multiple times and is raging out. And a dead click is where somebody clicks on something that is seemingly interactive, like a button or a link. And then after a threshold, I think it's like 200 milliseconds or something, nothing happens, right? And if nothing happens, that's a dead click. I have a sick shirt from Sentry that says "dead click" on it. So take your dead clicks, pipe them back into your AI, and get Sentry to fix it. Can good design be programmatic? This is kind of an interesting one. And we've asked this many times to many of our guests over the years of, "Can you programmatically pick good colors?"

• 21:14Wes Bos?

  And I think the answer to that is, is no. So like, I think Warp Terminal is a good example of this. They have this concept of themes. And you give them, I don't know, three or four colors of what you want it to do. And then it tries to skin the entire terminal based on those. Programatically lighter, darker, contrast, you know, all of that stuff. And it just, it doesn't, it's not a good-looking terminal. I don't think so. It just doesn't look Very good. Whereas if you look at something like a VS Code terminal where you can control absolutely every little thing, looks a lot better, right? I don't think you can programmatically pick good design. And then also you have this this aspect of the colors are trendy.

• 21:56Wes Bos?

  What what comes and goes is very trendy. And now as everybody's ripping each other off, those trends move so much faster than they previously were. So I don't think it can be programmatic in that regard, but I do think it can be programmatic in other ways, like text wrap balance, right? Text wrap balance in the browser makes if you have two lines of like an H2 and it will figure out how to balance those things. That is an algorithm, right? The browsers implement those and they figure out how wide the letters are and whatnot. So I think like that can be programmatically done. A lot of design can be programmatically done, but a lot of it can't be as well.

• 22:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I I agree on on most accounts and I'm the type of person, like I said, we've talked about this before, where my design inclination is to make a system and follow that system. Like that is just how my brain works. And then you come in with your paintbrush and you're like, F your system and it always looks better. So I I tend to agree with you on this. But for my ego, I'm going to say that it can be programmatic just because otherwise I can't design for.

• 23:08Wes Bos?

  Programmatic and maintainable are different things here, Scott.

• 23:12Wes Bos?

  Because often the like just tweaking it here and there and adding your own little flair to things to look good. It looks good initially, but then all of a sudden your your spacing is inconsistent. Your font sizes are not the same across the board. And then it becomes a little bit harder to maintain over time because everything has been tweaked a little bit. That's why people are so strict about their design systems because.

• 23:40Wes Bos?

  You're not gonna like let somebody add their little bit of flair or change the blue or add a gradient here or there because then it just becomes a mess over time and things drift.

• 23:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, I like my design systems because once I have a plan in place, I do not like that plan to change. I like, this was my plan.

• 23:57Wes Bos?

  Can AI make a design that influences an end goal? For example, buying something or trying to book a flight or like whatever the end goal of your application is. And that's kind of an interesting question to me because I think with enough data, yes, the reason why like TikTok, Twitter, all these things are so addicting is because they have these algorithms that are able to figure out like what you actually like. And then like with enough A B testing, you can figure out what all the dark patterns are or what are all the best patterns, you know? Like we had Travis on who works at Google and he does exactly that is like, he does

• 24:39Wes Bos?

  design for what happens when there's a tornado and someone Googles tornado. What should pop up on Google? And like, that's kind of time sensitive, right? So I'm sure they're, they're very data heavy on that type of thing. And I don't necessarily know if that, that pushes itself into AI, but certainly you could, you can start pushing that into to algorithms. So I think yes, but then I think about like, like marketing. I saw this tweet the other day where someone's like, I replaced a social media person that was $500 an hour with this one skill. And it's like, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You're not.

• 25:18Scott Tolinski?

  No, you didn't.

• 25:19Wes Bos?

  Again, we're talking about table stakes. As soon as people figure out what works in marketing, that changes, right? And it's just this constantly evolving thing. Like, and now we're starting to see, I don't know if you saw this or not, but Grok's like Imagine where they can make video of somebody like sitting in front of a camera, talking, and it is almost indistinguishable. So good. And I asked myself, why do we need this? But I also was thinking about that. I'm like, man, we're gonna have to get rid of our like nice cameras and lights because as soon as everyone starts using these like AI generated influencers.

• 25:59Wes Bos?

  I'm just gonna scroll past as soon as I my brain detects nice lighting, nice camera, good microphone.

• 26:05Scott Tolinski?

  It's looking too good.

• 26:06Wes Bos?

  It's too good. Swipe past, you know?

• 26:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Wes Bos?

  So we gotta get here.

• 26:13Wes Bos?

  Please play that.

• 26:14Scott Tolinski?

  I think that's a good point. I mean, as we when I interviewed Sarah Bird at Microsoft, she said that the things that she's most interested in now are like the things that are like the most human and imperfect like Japanese pottery and stuff like that because she's been working in machine learning for so long. And I do think that that is going to be an aesthetic pushback to this glossy fake looking everything. Yeah. So I'm sorry, folks, that I look too good that you might think I'm AI.

• 26:45Wes Bos?

  He's not.

• 26:46Scott Tolinski?

  Say that.

• 26:48Scott Tolinski?

  I'm not sorry.

• 26:49Wes Bos?

  Comment down below. Who is more AI looking Scott or I? Or me? I? I can't even.

• 26:54Scott Tolinski?

  Somebody did think I look like AI in one of my videos and they were being serious. Why is this video so weird? Are you AI? But it was an audio desync issue that caused it to be weird, I think.

• 27:05Wes Bos?

  Yeah, well, even like my kids.

• 27:06Scott Tolinski?

  A little uncanny valley.

• 27:07Wes Bos?

  Every time someone is either on a green screen or something is too produced. They start saying that's AI. You know, and we're like, no, like we were watching a baseball game and they had like the they had the interviewer and the the player so well lit that like like it was dark outside and he was so well lit. And my my kids immediately were like, that's AI. And we're like, no, it's it's not. He's just well lit. It's just good photography. You know, little bouquet in the background of the thing and they immediately were just like, no. It's too good.

• 27:41Scott Tolinski?

  So with all this said, design in AI. Should and can designers actually use AI and have it enhance your abilities rather than turn you into a mindless kind of?

• 27:55Scott Tolinski?

  Slot factory of the same stuff.

• 27:58Wes Bos?

  I think there is a range, right? There's like a tool aspect to it, which is like, I am simply just using these as tools to help me get my work done more productively, help me be able to research. It's just whatever your end game is, these tools can certainly help you. Like on one end of the spectrum, there is background removal in Photoshop. And I don't think there's anybody out there that like, as much as many designers hate AI, I don't think there's anyone and be like, you know what? We should be using the like pen tool or the little transform selection tool and like cut out around. Like I'd spent my time doing that and cutting backgrounds out. I'll take the AI background removal any day.

• 28:43Wes Bos?

  You know, that's so important for me.

• 28:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I mean, those types of algorithm, people act like that's just completely unrelated, but it's not.

• 28:50Wes Bos?

  Yeah, well, I think like

• 28:53Wes Bos?

  that one seems relatively harmless, whereas some of the like, on the other side, like there's a, the complete brand design, you know? Like I'm starting to spot, like, I always think about plumbers. Like you see a truck driving around your neighborhood, which is a plumber. And you can, again, you can almost eyeball which model they use to create their plumbing logo. You know, like you can, you can start seeing the ones that are like two years old. And you can just tell what it is. And now you're starting to see them and they have that like, sort of like, um, that orange, yellow haze to it, um, that all these like chat GPT images that get kicked out are. And I think there, there certainly is a space for it.

• 29:33Wes Bos?

  I think the best designers are going to figure out how to use this to create good experience, to create beautiful things, but not just actually do the dumb brain stuff for you. And like, we've seen this over the years, right? We had clip art and then you had these like corporate blobby people on all these websites. And then we had these like pre-purchased packs, something you may not see, but you'll probably notice it now. If you ever see, if you ever see like an, an inanimate object, you know, like a heart or a burger, and then they put fries. They put legs on it and it's like, it's like a burger that walks like the mascot for my new burger shop is a burger that walks.

• 30:11Wes Bos?

  Or like the mascot for my new coffee shop is a coffee cup with legs and a little eyeballs and it's just walking, you know, like I've, I have stickers that do exactly that. And that has become such a trope that like you could just go online and purchase like 100 eyeballs and legs and then you can just add them to whatever it is that you want, you know, I'm a lawyer. I'm gonna take the gavel and put, put legs on it. But then everybody started doing that and now I, I can't unsee it every time I see that. We have a Canva, you know, Canva brought decent design to absolutely everyone. Before we had Canva, it was just word art, clip art,

• 30:51Wes Bos?

  bad stuff that people could sort of just put together. And then Canva came out with like half decent looking stuff. You can still spot it, but is that bad?

• 31:00Scott Tolinski?

  You can spot it a mile away. Yeah. You could spot it a mile away. I mean, I think with any of this stuff that like you're in that same line that you're drawing, your AI logo and a lot of that stuff is word art, is clip art. It is that. It's just the 2026 version of that. And, and if it's not, then it's probably derivative or it's just a copy paste of some other basic logo. Then that's, that's a genre of Twitter that drives me nuts is people being like, AI is changing everything. I made this incredible logo. And it's like, oh brother, this logo sucks.

• 31:40Wes Bos?

  That's the most frustrating thing. And, and also like, do regular people care?

• 31:46Scott Tolinski?

  They probably don't. I'm gonna be honest. Yeah, they probably don't care.

• 31:48Wes Bos?

  One thing that drives me batty is that I get all these TikToks for Suno metalcore, you know, like, like AI music. And all the comments are just like, I don't care that it's AI. It's, it's a banger. And like the country music has had this for a long time. Like they know, people know programmatically what makes a good catchy riff and like what will people sing out and what will be a good bar song? And people don't necessarily care because it's just.

• 32:16Wes Bos?

  I don't know. I find myself.

• 32:18Scott Tolinski?

  Sloppy for the masses.

• 32:19Wes Bos?

  It's sloppy for the masses. So that's.

• 32:21Scott Tolinski?

  Sloppy girls.

• 32:22Wes Bos?

  That's another aspect of it as well. Like, I hate to be the guy who's like, no, you won't do that. Because like, we had those people with Dreamweaver, right? Don't use Dreamweaver. It kicks out crappy code, you know?

• 32:35Scott Tolinski?

  I did use Dreamweaver. Yes, I know. Yeah.

• 32:38Wes Bos?

  That's a kind of an interesting part. But here we are. Before we get into our final thoughts here, let's talk real quick about like, just like tools that people are using. Figma, MCP, paper, pencil. Claude is surprisingly a very good design tool. Like, the other day, I had a grid of, I think, 12 icons, right? And it was on a white background, and I needed to programmatically, I needed to like, remove the background. I needed to slice them up into their own. I needed to trim them. And normally, I would go into Photoshop, and I would slice and dice and remove the background, and then put everything in a layer, and then export them. And that would probably take me, I don't know, 20, 22 minutes or so. But in my case, I just told Claude, hey,

• 33:24Wes Bos?

  slice and dice, remove the background, trim transparent pixels.

• 33:28Scott Tolinski?

  Interesting.

• 33:28Wes Bos?

  And rename each of the icons to what they actually are. And it just looked at the thing and gave a perfect name for it. And just beautiful icons out the other end, all nicely in a folder, all exactly the same size. And that was just such a good use case of using these tools, rather than having to like, spend time clicking buttons. Because like, being a designer is not about knowing which buttons to click, you know? It's not about the medium, not about the tools. It's about the end game of what you're trying to actually get done.

• 34:02Scott Tolinski?

  I think that's such a good, because it's what you just said there, is you outsourced the busy work to AI. The stuff that is obnoxious, the stuff that takes forever, you're clicking around, you're... I love that take in terms of, like, that's the stuff that AI is the best at. Again, establish patterns or establish workflows, moving through it. The creative stuff, maybe it's good for people who don't have any design creativity at all, but you're not going to get anything. Unique out of it or genuine unless you're really, really top tier, maybe. I don't even know. Yeah.

• 34:40Wes Bos?

  Let us know down below. We'll, we'll end it out with this is let us know down below what you think. Can AI make good design? And if so, how do you make AI give you good design? Peace.

• 34:53Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.