50 Designers used Claude Code to Design a Layout

Key Takeaways

All right. So, this is wild. I asked a bunch of designers a couple days ago to create a fictional landing page using claude code. All AI code only prompting. And take a look at these results. All right. Kind of just, you know, mid if you will. Then this one. All right. A little similar, right? Okay. I think we're seeing a like a theme playing out here. What is going on? Look at all these. You would think they're using the same exact prompt. So, I'm going to talk about why the heck some of these are so freaking similar. You know, like the AI slop, like, "Hey, that looks like it was generated by I AI." But also, I'm going to show you some of the better ones. And before I do that, this came from this challenge that I'm currently running at designcourse.com. You can take it now. And the idea is we learn AI/design through a number of fun community challenges where you can like raid each other and stuff. So, here's like one of the first challenges. uh you can just go through, you can raid people, you can see which ones I've done a video response to. Anyways, enough of that spam, but we're going to talk about why. Why are some of those designs so freaking similar? And this all comes down to prompting and the deterministic nature of these LLMs. So, just take a look at one of the part of the prompts from one of these submissions on the right. Create a fictional but sophisticated UI animation that simulates a scanning effect over a house. Use a deep navy electric emerald gold palette. Output this as clean, yada yada yada. How about another one? Um, on the right should be an illustration of a house with icons and text for an AI defect detection, crawl space, roof analysis, etc. And then how about one more before I get to my point. The right side visual, a mockup of a dashboard showing AI defect detection, bounding boxes on roof cracks, foundation issues, blah blah blah blah. Okay, so there's a couple reasons why those particular results were so similar. And really, it comes down to context, right? What you're feeding into it. A part of their prompt was this thing right here. This is uh the AI inspection business. This came as a part of the challenge that you get when you join that challenge. So, computer vision analyzes crawl space roof foundation images for common defects and autogenerate standardized inspection reports. So people pasted that in along with their prompts. And together those two factors, them kind of just having the same idea, but also including this prompt right here, computer vision, which is what the bounding boxes are, gives you very similar results. Now, I'm going to show you a few results that I thought were actually pretty good and unique in and of themselves. So here's one by Sandro. So let me get this expanded here. And this is actually pretty solid based on the prompt. Um, and I think it only took in three prompts. And this gets the idea away, you know, pretty good. And the UI, you know, fundamentals are all there. Um, and then if we just open this up real quick, we can see right here, this is the actual prompt that he used. And one of the interesting things, this is just three prompts right here, is uh the f the final prompt just said, "Good. Instead of the front of the house, open it up. I want an internal view of the house. And it did a really good job of doing, you know, like an internal view of a house. And the takeaway here is just be specific. Don't just give it whatever it spits out back at you without doing revisions. This one's nice as well, and it's not all that similar to the other ones. Yeah, there's still like a house, but it's a floor plan. It's a little bit more unique. And again, all the other fundamentals are pretty much there for the most part uh with this entry. Then here's another one. Although I think this person used Nano Banana for this image just to generate something unique and then you know have the rest of this stuff up top. Kind of reminds me of the old school Apple. This one by Sky is really solid here for the most part. Um there's some issues with like uh color contrast and all that, but at least it's way more different. And what's really telling is what this person said. When I initially started working on this, I got the same overall design that a lot of people seem to have gotten. to me it didn't feel premium enough and I freaking 100% agree. So that's why you need to follow up. This isn't just a one or two threep prompt process. You want to get the most out of it and you want to try to be unique. Here's a final entry and this is kind of like an honorable mention. There's one big issue with the type in the middle. It's not really something that contrasts well with that background but still everything else. It has a nice unique aesthetic and he didn't really follow you know the same sort of two column playbook. Now, there's a bunch more that you can actually just browse by clicking the link here. You can join up. It's free. It just requires an email and that's it. And you can also participate in these. So, tomorrow I'm going to be releasing the next one and it's going to be another unique challenge of some sort where we use AI in conjunction perhaps with our handdriven skills. We have a lot of fun ones coming up. I hope to see you join.