{"id":658,"date":"2026-06-24T11:37:06","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T11:37:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=658"},"modified":"2026-06-24T11:37:06","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T11:37:06","slug":"the-a-i-design-aesthetic-thats-taking-over-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=658","title":{"rendered":"The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That\u2019s Taking Over the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Matt Str\u00f6m-Awn, an independent designer, works mostly with startups in their early stages. Recently, two different clients proudly showed him sales decks that they had produced to court customers. Both decks had a bright-colored first slide with a mission statement, written in three declarative bullet points. Both had second slides featuring four rectangles laying out \u201cthe playing field\u201d\u2014the market in which the startup was operating\u2014and both had third slides with a centered line of text reading \u201cour move\u201d and describing the startup\u2019s disruptive tactic. \u201cThey actually look like they were generated by the same company,\u201d Str\u00f6m-Awn told me. \u201cThe logo is different, but the design is the same.\u201d The decks looked the same because both were made using Claude Design, an A.I. tool that Anthropic launched in April. The new technology, Str\u00f6m-Awn said, \u201cdefaults to the same aesthetic for every single person that\u2019s using it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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As Claude Design catches on among Anthropic users, a generic-design aesthetic is emerging that\u2019s as noticeable as text-based A.I. tics such as overenthusiastic em-dash usage or \u201cnot X . . . but Y\u201d constructions. In slide decks and on website interfaces, there\u2019s a predominance of beige- and cream-colored backgrounds, rusty orange-hued accents, and large serif typefaces that are italicized and highlighted in zealous attempts to emphasize. Subheadings are often \u201ctracked out,\u201d in design parlance, with spaces between the letters, and there\u2019s an inexplicable prevalence of ticker-like text bars, as if the website were a cable-news show. Another designer I spoke to, David McGillivray, pointed out how Claude often creates dashboard elements with multiple rounded rectangular outlines, sometimes with a neon glow underneath for good measure. The designer and writer Celine Nguyen identified a combination of \u201ctasteful, slightly askew primary colors,\u201d desaturated hues redolent of mid-century modernist design. Such qualities might be unobjectionable, even desirable, in and of themselves, but their ubiquitous appearance across the internet has turned them into instant design clich\u00e9s. \u201cNow I find myself instinctively repulsed by the warm tones even though I love this kind of color palette,\u201d Nguyen said.<\/p>\n

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Newsletrix, a newsletter-analytics dashboard; Wesley Wang Media, a production house; GrassDX, a tool for diagnosing problems with your lawn; Haute Living, a real-estate-agent directory; and DeployGraph, a research firm on A.I. companies\u2014these are just a few of the companies whose sites bear a Claudian sameness. This is not an entirely new problem in web design. In the early days of the internet, HTML code and the need to design simple, small-size sites downloadable on dial-up led many hosts to adhere to a strict, basic palette. Eventually, website-building services such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix offered templates that became popular clich\u00e9s of their own (think of sans-serif text over full-bleed splash images). But A.I. tools instill a particularly swift and stubborn genericism. Anthropic concedes as much in its guidance documents, noting that, when left to its own devices, Claude\u2019s model \u201chas strong design instincts, with a consistent default house style. . . . This default is persistent.\u201d Not coincidentally, this default has a lot in common with Anthropic\u2019s own branding\u2014beigey backgrounds, off-red highlight colors, big typefaces, lots of serifs and underlines. The company notes that giving the program \u201cgeneric instructions\u201d such as \u201cdon\u2019t use cream\u201d is likely to \u201cshift the model to a different fixed palette rather than producing variety.\u201d In other words, the user has to fight to produce visuals that stray from the formula. As Str\u00f6m-Awn put it, \u201cThe preferences and tendencies and aesthetics are deeply baked into its machinery; it is always going to struggle to produce something that doesn\u2019t look like A.I.\u201d (An Anthropic spokesperson told The New Yorker<\/em> that Claude Design should ideally be able to deviate from a \u201cstandard look,\u201d when users prefer it. \u201cThis doesn\u2019t always happen the way we\u2019d like and the team is working hard to improve it,\u201d he said.)<\/p>\n

In addition to reinforcing graphic-design tropes, Claude Design tends to direct all of its users toward the same libraries of open-source code, the tools behind user-interface design. Shadcn UI and Radix UI provide ready-made building blocks for websites; Drizzle manages databases. Lucas Gelfond, a software engineer, likened the uniformity that these products encourage to the effects of mass manufacturing following the Industrial Revolution. Automated industrial processes left signatures: \u201cseams on injection-molded plastic, industrial saw marks in wood,\u201d Gelfond said. \u201cI think about a lot of the tells in L.L.M.-generated software\u2014bright accent serifs, overuse of dots, dividing characters, and emojis, high-contrast indicators\u2014as similar marks of the tool.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The advent of A.I. has caused Silicon Valley types to fixate on the concept of \u201ctaste\u201d<\/em>; when machines can spit out images and words instantaneously, the thinking goes, humans must be discerning enough to separate the quality output from the slop. Str\u00f6m-Awn described Claude\u2019s default design choices as a mark of complacency, \u201ca filtering mechanism\u201d that exposes \u201cpeople who didn\u2019t spend the time\u201d creating something unique. Nguyen brought up a credo of the mid-century American designers Charles and Ray Eames that defined the ideals of modernism: \u201cThe best for the most for the least.\u201d What Claude Design offers, Nguyen said, is \u201cthe pretty good for the most for the least effort, and pretty low cost.\u201d She continued, \u201cYou\u2019re just paying a twenty dollar a month Claude Pro subscription instead of hiring a designer. Is this the modernist world we wanted?\u201d<\/p>\n

Notably, none of the designers I spoke to are against A.I. altogether. All of them said that the technology is unavoidable, and shared that it\u2019s possible to use A.I. tools such as Claude Design and OpenAI\u2019s Codex to achieve a distinctive look, if you\u2019re willing to put in the labor. Hilary Gridley is the founder of Writerbuilder, a newsletter focussed on A.I., and she previously worked as the head of core product at the A.I. wearable company Whoop. \u201cMost people don\u2019t want to go through a full creative process,\u201d she told me, adding, \u201cThere\u2019s no easy button for good work.\u201d Gridley sometimes uses A.I.-generated bird illustrations in her own branding. To produce a finished product, she assembles mood boards of inspirational material and sketches out drafts of the illustrations by hand, then she feeds that material into an image generator along with a description of the final art she envisions. The result is highly textured A.I. imagery that could be mistaken for handmade. Loredana Crisan, the chief design officer of Figma, a popular digital product-design app that integrates A.I. features, told me, \u201cThe job of the designer is to stay with uncertainty long enough to discover something new.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s recent branding choices suggest an effort to sidestep its own visual clich\u00e9s. Its latest model, Fable 5\u2014launched this month, then quickly suspended after the U.S. government cited national-security concerns\u2014features marketing imagery comprising collaged vintage illustrations of insects, flowers, and other scientific ephemera. They call to mind the nineteenth-century moth illustrations of the French botanist and geologist Charles Dessalines d\u2019Orbigny, source material that is redolent of human knowledge and the organic world. Even that new aesthetic is liable to become absorbed by the machine, however. As Gridley put it, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be surprised if we saw that design showing up everywhere.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

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Anthropic\u2019s new tool, Claude Design, is creating overnight web-design clich\u00e9s, writes Kyle Chayka.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":657,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-infinite-scroll"],"yoast_head":"\nThe A.I.-Design Aesthetic That\u2019s Taking Over the Internet - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=658\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That\u2019s Taking Over the Internet - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Anthropic\u2019s new tool, Claude Design, is creating overnight web-design clich\u00e9s, writes Kyle Chayka.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=658\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-24T11:37:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=658#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=658\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That\u2019s Taking Over the Internet\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-24T11:37:06+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=658\"},\"wordCount\":1273,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=658#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/21b2d7cf90f752c589b6b0bffea73adf.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Infinite Scroll\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=658#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=658\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=658\",\"name\":\"The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That\u2019s Taking Over the Internet - 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