How To Avoid AI Design Slop

**Aaron Epstein** (0:00)
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 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. All right, today I am thrilled to be joined by Raphael Schaad, one of the newest visiting partners here at YC. And Raphael was the co-founder of Cron, 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.

**Raphael Schaad** (0:48)
Yeah, super fun to be now back in YC, and helping Next Generation Founders build iconic companies.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:56)
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?

**Raphael Schaad** (1:23)
Yeah, sure. This all 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. Resumably, wipe coded, and so I was 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 other trends that we then identified was 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, they fade in and fade out.

**Aaron Epstein** (1:57)
Yeah, and it's not so much that those inherently are bad, it's not purple gradients are bad, 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.

**Raphael Schaad** (2:11)
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 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 the good examples, they get linked to a lot, and then all of a sudden, the next week, all the startup websites look the same.

**Aaron Epstein** (2:33)
Yes, and so this is both good and bad if this power is used in the right ways. 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.

**Raphael Schaad** (2:56)
Let's have a look.

**Aaron Epstein** (2:57)
All right. Okay. First up, we've got newnew.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.

**Raphael Schaad** (3:09)
Purple gradients.

**Aaron Epstein** (3:10)
It's the first thing that jumps out. It's a very purple site, which we were just talking about. That's one of the most common things that you see. So it's interesting, pre-LLM day, I think I would have looked at this and gone like, wow, this looks really nice. 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. So one thing that's interesting as you start scrolling here, we've got this line that's following us up and down.
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.

**Raphael Schaad** (3:47)
It's almost like something that it's probably hard to implement for a human, and you would have never thought to actually code this up before AI. Just because we now can, just because LLMs are 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.