How To Avoid AI Design Slop

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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 Shad 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.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  All right, today, I am thrilled to be joined by Raphael Shad, one of the newest visiting partners here at YC. And Raphael 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 Raphael, it's an honor to have you here and it's an honor to work together now at YC.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, super fun to be now back in YC and helping founders, next generation founders, build iconic companies.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. This all kind of started when I had a late-night thought and tweeted that I see a lot of dumb, hammer effects on landing pages of startups these days, presumably white-coded. And so I was kind of curious to peel the layer back there. It's like, how did these, what I thought were dumb effects, how did they make it into LLMs and why are they everywhere now? A couple of 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 can like fade as you go in, as you scroll, and they fade in and fade out.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's not so much that those inherently are bad. It's not purple gradients are bad and nobody should ever use them. It's that now they're just so ubiquitous everywhere that they kind of lose all meaning and specialness and originality.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Let's have a look.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  All right. Okay. First up, we've got nu nu.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.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Purple gradients.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  So first thing that jumps out, 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 like, that's what it screams to me. Okay. So one thing that's interesting is we, as you start scrolling here, we've got this line that's following us up and down. And it's interesting because I honestly find this, this line to be a little distracting. I'm paying more attention to the line than I am the, the things that I think that it wants me to pay attention to.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  It's, 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.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  And just because we now can, just because LLMs are kind of like good at these type of like SVG, you know, buildups or transforms, doesn't mean that it's actually a good design and helps you convert potential, you know, visitors into, into customers, basically.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  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. Like 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.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Yep, contrast could be improved there a little bit. So these cards are interesting, right?

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is cool.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  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, so like the powers of LLMs, to build more compelling websites.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  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, multiplayers, 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 you down the page didn't add much value. This is, this would have been really hard to do, and now you kind of get it for free.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  You don't have to go from scratch building a lot of this stuff.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  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, and the default of browsers also doesn't work that way. And now LLMs just somehow decided that that's a good hover kind of like effect, but it makes no sense.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  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 bright purple, and then having the hand already tells me like I can click on this thing. 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.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Do you have any rules of thumb when 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?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, make it sort of like clickable. Steve Jobs famously said, you know, he wanted to make things clickable 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? But I see it increasingly used to kind of like disclose additional and critical information or functionality. And I don't think that's the best use for hover.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Not to mention that, you know, there isn't a concept of hover on mobile as well, so.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  And long press, which is kind of the equivalent of hover, never really caught on on mobile.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Probably because it's so hard to discover.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Desk up interface, a tool where you have to hover around everywhere to discover where this 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.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  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 and once again, like you start to see the trend. Here we've got the purple gradient again.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  We've got a very similar kind of pinkish purple accent color up here. 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.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  So let's dig in here. This is the first time we're looking at these live.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  So Rosebud AI, create games of AI. And there's a prompt to to to prompt to game kind of interaction, I would assume.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  That's cool. There's something you can instantly play.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Let's try it.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Whoa, it's like a 3D game in the browser. That's cool.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Person walking around.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Can I use the arrows?

• 10:16Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Oh, WASD, we have a old school game.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Old school.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  You can jump.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  All right, let's escape out of this.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  But cool, definitely kind of like engaging. I wonder whether this is actually their like product code running on the website here?

• 10:36Speaker 00

  I would assume that it is.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Vite-coded sandbox environment.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  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?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, these are just anchors jumping vertically around.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  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?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so maybe kind of like a thing to take away here is that using this non kind of like 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,

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  I feel like it's a little lazy. And so I feel like L L M's kind of take the easy path because they don't have any I P really themselves. They're just like big models.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Kind of cobbling things together. They use like these standard icons everywhere and it's just immediately kind of like a tell.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we could just use more context up here, too. And, and you know, the, the name of the company is, 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.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then the value prop kind of being more clear. Um, you know, uh, create games with A I, something, something. It's kind of like what's important for the H one 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? Um, and if those three things plus the call to action, um, are not kind of above default, then it's a harder time to convert, uh, convert visitors.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Yep. Um, okay, we've got some, I guess, examples of games. Yep, so games created with Rosebud A I. 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 create.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  This is like remixing?

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, okay.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so some, some of the, some of the, um, projects you can remix and then it kind of puts up the conversion wall.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Um, that'll go beyond sort of like landing page.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Very cool. Awesome. Well done, Rosebud. Okay, so next up, we've got Get Crocs. And one of the first things that I noticed here was kind of the fade in. It was this automatic fade in. Ooh, and another thing that I noticed is my scroll is hijacked here.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's maybe a little hard to see on screen, but there's still 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 gonna be the same.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  I'm sorry, I'm so distracted by the button that's chasing me around the screen here.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, this, I almost feel like it's hard to get the button to click on it because it's constantly moving.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Does it make you want to talk to the founders more or less?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  It makes me distracted, I would say. I'm not paying attention to what they do. I'm just, I'm like, why is this button following me around?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  It definitely got my attention, I would say. 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. 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. But it's so easy to do it that people are like, yeah, let's throw that in. It looks cool. But I actually find it a little distracting. I don't think it adds value to the product here.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Then the hero screenshot here is, I guess, a poster image for a video.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  And it goes into what looks like a completely different video.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's confusing.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And the poster image is just very blurry here. I don't know whether this is like an artifact of like using AI or not. But it's just as a general design principle, I think all your assets should be, you know, high res, high quality. And this just looks like something very blurry.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. And again, back on the button too, because I still, 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. 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.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Here we're kind of like hitting a little bit on on just a lack of visual consistency. Like this looks like an entirely different visual language than anything we've sort of seen seen above.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Where do you think that comes from?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I wonder, um, 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 here looking very different than to 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.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  And I gotta say, we're like halfway down the page right now. And if you ask 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. Ads that, okay, so it's something to make ads, it seems like. It's interesting, they they do kind of have like a visual, um, like, style to it with a lot of these, uh, it's almost like a vertical motion blur or something on a color gradient that we see in some of these images, um, like these right here. And we saw the same thing in these here and these here, um, and these here. But it's it's constrained to some of these elements and it feels like, you know, it's maybe a little overused here because it's hard to read these.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  And this feels like more like a rainbow rather than calling the attention to it. But up here does not have that style at all, which is maybe, you know, 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.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  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 can like fade in? Um, and one of the things that you get is these weird, um, for example, here, right? We said, we're here to answer all your questions. And then there's one question and we, we, we break here earlier and now it's like, wow, that's a lame FAQ. If there's only like one Q and one A.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Um, but then I was like, aha, it just hasn't come in yet.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  And so not a fan of that pattern.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  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, I'm curious to try that here, um, and see how they do this. So like if I'm just kind of zooming down, um, so these seem to fade in. Um, at least when it's at the bottom of the page.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Um, but it still feels like going through molasses because it's all scroll checked.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Like hijacking the sort of like actual native browser scrolling, um, to do some fancy thing with JavaScript. To actually have the hooks to do all these animations.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  All right.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Super interesting, very creative. Uh, so well done, Get Crocs. Okay, next we got Sphinx, your last compliance hire. All right, we've got some animation thing going on here. Um, 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.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's quickly 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. Meet Sphinx. But we already have the company name. We already have, you know,

• 20:14Speaker 01

  three different styles, basically. If you count, 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 value entrusted. Logos would already be like a little higher. So this is something that I increasingly see kind of like LLMs dream up that isn't really tight information hierarchy and graphic design.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  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 in designing these around what you think is the right thing, not just kind of saying yes, accept all changes.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're not the editor.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  With every suggestion. Yes, yes. And, 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, yeah, like moves around and now it's a circle button. I think that's a button. 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. And it's very confusing.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  It's actually not a button. Like, yes, it shows the hand, but that's a head fake.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess it just moves to the next thing.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  It doesn't really, well, I guess it's kind of like a next button.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  But then also on auto advance.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is very confusing 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.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Actually, you can just click anywhere and it, it advances. So it's not even like this button or the whole thing is a click target.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels like the visual manifestation of LM hallucinations. Let's quickly look at the menu here.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  All right.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Pretty standard stuff. I never like when the menus can go away like in between.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Like there's the gap and then something goes away.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  What's happening on the right side of a couple of those? There were two of those and there's kind of a grid on the right side, yeah, with an icon. Is that interactive or anything or is that?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Nope, it's just something DLM thought was cute.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  How about if you hover over on? Yeah, okay, so it's just giving you a different icon.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Icon. No, the icons are actually kind of cute. The seem somewhat original and on brand here. I would just never thought to do this little, like if you want to make a point that onboard is like four circles and 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 not essential. So I can probably just like leave it out.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  What happens when we go further down?

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Valued and trusted by, okay, we've got a bunch of lines going everywhere.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  All right, so we've got that line following you down the page pattern again.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  And now we're scroll checked. We're locked into this position here of the website in order to build up this animation.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  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? Whereas it's just like showing it already in the built out state?

• 23:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  It's also if these landing pages are 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.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  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 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?

• 25:02Speaker 00

  All right. 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. Cause 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.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  So right off of that, we got some purple grading.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, there we go again. And let's see here. So the menu nicely morphs. Ooh, and then my pet peeve, dumb hover effects. It 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?

• 26:23Speaker 00

  The arrow at least should go to the right also.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it goes like backwards. 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. Um, then what else have we got? Uh, we've got a little like interactive element here, can click through it. Ooh. Okay, there seems to be some like bug with the selection here.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Um, if this was hand-coded, like no way someone would have not noticed it. I almost wonder like if you're just one-shot landing pages. Um, do you actually go and really like use it with the same attention detail as if you if you had like built it?

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  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 box that the L M A.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Um, 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. Um, that's got, you know, it's got like the red, green, blue, purple kind of callouts up here. That's one of the hallmark classic things that uh, a lot of AI design tools will will actually create.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, every fake dashboard looks basically like like something like that.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  They've got the icons that are a darker version of the lighter background color. Um, it's it's usually like the Google colors, you know, it's like red, yellow, green, blue.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  The Fisher Prize primary. Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Yep, yep. So that that that we tend to see a lot. Um, ideas to working apps in minutes, transformative.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and these like kind of like bento, bento boxes, um, is is not a bad pattern, um, but it's also very non-original. Um, and so this L M's oftentimes kind of come up with these, um, just like icon at the top. Uh, and then a bit of text and you know, uh, in this case kind of like a three by two. Um, that that's, yeah, quite common.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, we've got some quotes. We've got the purple gradient.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  We've got some frequently asked questions and then more gradients.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  You know, 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.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  When it has elements that every other site and every other product has too.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  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, 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 responsively.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Gets a little bit wasted. And so that's the fine line to walk, I feel, for builders in 2026.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, 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 any, anybody else in the audience, like you lose a little bit of credibility. I think, you know, when your customers are viewing your product and they're saying like, eh, this looks like a bunch of other things I've seen. They probably just use AI to build this and design it. If that's the case, like, how good is the actual product?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Or are they vibe coding that too?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Use AI to build this by any means, but just kind of like, you know, 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, and, you know, designing a wonderful product that you can then showcase, et cetera.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Yep, that's great advice. Awesome. Build Zero. Thank you.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  All right. Next up, we got Zarna, AI associates for private capital markets. Oh, we're scroll jacked again.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Oh yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  10x everything, all the things.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Unlocked IRR. This, this site, yeah, 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.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  I feel like I have, like even this is deal volume 10x, like.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's all, everything 10x just feels made up. 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.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  One of the things I personally like, if we go to the top, right now, the sort of background here uses 100% of the vertical space. Which kind of like, almost like 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, but I know there's like more good stuff down here.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  The, 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 peeking up or something like that. That would be cool. And then I immediately, without any indicators, like no one wants to kind of like scroll down and discover it, right?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, we've stopped at the perfect point here because you cannot see anything in the top navigation bar.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yep. It's, uh, 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.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is interesting, yeah.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  So here it picked it up.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  So it's smart, but it's not smart when there's video behind it.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  You're right. That is the nuance.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Okay, these I can't click on. I would have expected that I could click on any of these.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Maybe the Chevron?

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Oh, I don't know what just happened.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  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 like, yeah, that's cool.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And it does sometimes work.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Only on those nested ones. If you try the other ones, it doesn't do anything.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this better label here is super hidden. There's sometimes a Chevron, sometimes not. Yeah, this feels maybe like a little bit sloppy.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, one agentic layer, generate an investment memo.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, even the little bits of motion 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. 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.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  We got some fade ins. It just feels like it's lacking a lot of like useful information presented in the right ways.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  And at least not purple, though. We got a lot of blue.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fit and finish as well. It's kind of like meaty content.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Like clear messaging is maybe lacking a little bit. The visual style, if I didn't have to scroll through it, is actually kind of fresh.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah, like it reminds me of lovable or things like that that kind of have that like grainy zoomed in kind of picture in the background.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Not sure what these boxes here represent in the background. Yeah, some weird artifact.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  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?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think definitely lots of purple gradients. And in general, kind of like a lot of kind of like the same, the same patterns. You know, we see animations, kind of like for animation's sake, just because it's, uh, 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. And I think that's what a landing page should do in the end. It's kind of like a custom acquisition channel, right? This is not your product. This is not a website as in kind of like a cool thing on the web.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  There's space for that as well, but these are like startup landing pages. And they're basically custom acquisition channels. So that's how I would really use these tools.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  I totally agree with all of those. 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. 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.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  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. And so to use that for ways that 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.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Well, thank you so much for joining, Raphael. It's been amazing to get your perspective on all of these. And thank you to everybody that submitted websites.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  We will see you on the next Design Review.