Keen to hear if anyone has had unconventional creative adventures with it.
I find it funny about meeting requirements when you give them, and making safe choices when you don't give direction. So if you're going to rate the output aesthetics and UX/content, but you don't prompt especially much around the aesthetics, you're only getting the safe assumed defaults. It's good at making bootstrap/tailwind clone designs unless you work that angle. For simple web pages, I've started making this the only focus for initial iteration.
If I have an aesthetic in mind I'll use some screenshots of those sites in the prompt and phrase their inclusion as: "Look at these slightly non-standard designs that work really well for me." So far I've only seen Claude look for through-lines and high-level takeaways--"user likes <design feature> based on the screenshots, so I'll include that"--and screenshots aren't currently a granularity level where it can lift specific details or produce something derivative.
Other than that I try to encourage specific consideration of: type scale, borders and rounding, padding/whitespace, elevation as shadow vs blur, colors. I don't think one needs to pull every customization lever on every project.
I've been designing sites for 32 years, and I've tried almost all the tools. I was very impressed with Stitch, but I've now migrated all my designs to Claude. My aesthetic is born in the simplicity and cleanliness of mid-90s, coupled with modern CSS. I want the purest, simplest HTML, with the simplest CSS and the absolute minimum of JS. Claude generates some of the best looking, most user-friendly designs I've seen. I don't need crazy scroll effects and tons of animations; I just need sites that are easy to read, easy to navigate and let the user get the task done in the quickest way.
There’s still value in it for me, I get decent enough output to convey my intent and I sometimes manually tweak the HTML.
Defining fonts is a good way to at least not get the same typography as everyone else.
By the way, you can always tune your prompts to not be generic, if you ask for generic UIs without detailed styling prompts you will get generic designs.
By the way figma has a decent mcp that you can connect your LLMs to and extract the design tokens from.
Just like SaaS boilerplate from the decade prior, there is LLM boilerplate (since it’s trained on the internet).
So if you put in enough elbow-grease anything is (still) possible!
I don’t know what prompted to get it away from the base model and any of like the non-standard web design like styles are a little bit too harsh for me if that makes sense. Like for example I like brutalist design, but it just feels heavy sometimes on the apps that I’m making.
I’ve tried to get the AI to describe a style based on the product name or you know it seem that I wanna have for example travel. But then it creates us like steal, amorphic design where everything looks like a boarding pass airplane ticket.