Transcript
A (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 Rafael 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. 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 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, Rafael, it's an honor to have you here and it's an honor to work together now at yc.
B (0:48)
Yeah, super fun to be now back in YC and helping founders, next generation of founders, build iconic companies.
A (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, 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, that you'd want to call out for the audience before we jump into some sites?
B (1:23)
Yeah, sure. This all kind of started when I had like 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 can like fade as you go in, as you scroll, scroll. And they fade in and fade out.
A (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.
B (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 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.
