Noah Davis writing in Web Designer Depot, says aloud what I’d thought—but never wrote down—before AI, templates started to kill creativity in web design.

If you’re wondering why the web feels dead, lifeless, or like you’re stuck in a scrolling Groundhog Day of “hero image, tagline, three icons, CTA,” it’s not because AI hallucinated its way into the design department.

It’s because we templatified creativity into submission!

We used to design websites like we were crafting digital homes—custom woodwork, strange hallways, surprise color choices, even weird sound effects if you dared. Each one had quirks. A personality. A soul.

When I was coming up as a designer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of my favorite projects was designing Pixar.com. The animation studio’s soul—and by extension the soul I’d imbue into the website—was story. The way this manifest was a linear approach to the site, similar to a slideshow, to tell the story of each of their films.

And as the web design industry grew, and everyone needed and wanted a website, from Fortune 500s to the local barber shop, access to well-designed websites was made possible via templates.

Let’s be real: clients aren’t asking for design anymore. They’re asking for “a site like this.” You know the one. It looks clean. It has animations. It scrolls smoothly. It’s “modern.” Which, in 2025, is just a euphemism for “I want what everyone else has so I don’t have to think.”

Templates didn’t just streamline web development. They rewired what people expect a website to be.

Why hire a designer when you can drop your brand colors into a no-code template, plug in some Lottie files, and call it a day? The end result isn’t bad. It’s worse than bad. It’s forgettable.

Davis ends his rant with a call to action: “If you want design to live, stop feeding the template machine. Build weird stuff. Ugly stuff. Confusing stuff. Human stuff.”

I will admit that I’d not heard of this website until I came across this article. Playing around with Perfectly Imperfect myself, I find it to be the strange web Brutalist manifestation of MySpace for the Gen Z generation.

Sudi Jama, writing for It’s Nice That:

Talking about the design for Perfectly Imperfect’s social site pi.fyi, on the other hand, Tyler says: “The design calls back to an era where algorithms didn’t dominate your day-to-day experience on the internet.” Tyler rejects the homogenisation of web design and decided to swerve Perfectly Imperfect into a lane of its own, inspired by the early internet aesthetics of “solid but saturated colours, lack of texture, MS Paint-style airbrushing, and a singular broadcast-style aesthetic”, Brent David Freaney tells us. Brent’s studio Special Offer collaborated with Tyler to bring the best parts of early internet’s visuality, whilst still creating something that belongs in 2025. Some fun facts: Pi.fyi’s colour system was modelled from 1990s McDonald’s brand and style guidelines, and the spray paint logo was inspired by an old Teenage Fanclub band t-shirt Tyler got on eBay.

The platform thrives in the chaos, all born from its visible human touch. “A lot of the core pages that users spend time on (the home page, profiles, etc) are designed to look more like a magazine than a social site.” The visuals are deliberately flat, featuring few animations, in order to let the design cut through. The mixture of a home page presented as acting front page, with editorial content, user posts, profiles adorned in large image paired with bold bordered text, and written content pouring from the right side of the screen. Tyler says: “It’s this approach that’s led us to calling Perfectly Imperfect a ‘social magazine’.” Tyler is inspired by the likes of Index Mag, MySpace, and i-D, among others – all boundary-pushing platforms which hold a cultural authority.

Brad Frost, of atomic design fame, wrote a history of themeable UIs as part of a deep dive into design tokens. He writes, “Design tokens may be the latest incarnation, but software creators have been creating themeable user interfaces for quite a long time!”

About Mario and Luigi from Super Mario Bros.:

It’s wild that two of the most iconic characters in the history of pop culture — red-clad Mario and green-clad Luigi — are themeable UI elements born from pragmatic ingenuity to overcome technological challenges. Freaking amazing.

Luke Wroblewski, writing in his blog:

Across several of our companies, software development teams are now “out ahead” of design. To be more specific, collaborating with AI agents (like Augment Code) allows software developers to move from concept to working code 10x faster. This means new features become code at a fast and furious pace.

When software is coded this way, however, it (currently at least) lacks UX refinement and thoughtful integration into the structure and purpose of a product. This is the work that designers used to do upfront but now need to “clean up” afterward. It’s like the development process got flipped around. Designers used to draw up features with mockups and prototypes, then engineers would have to clean them up to ship them. Now engineers can code features so fast that designers are ones going back and cleaning them up.

This is what I’ve been secretly afraid of. That we would go back to the times when designers were called in to do cleanup. Wroblewski says:

Instead of waiting for months, you can start playing with working features and ideas within hours. This allows everyone, whether designer or engineer, an opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t. At its core rapid iteration improves software and the build, use/test, learn, repeat loop just flipped, it didn’t go away.

Yeah, or the feature will get shipped this way and be stuck this way because startups move fast and move on.

My take is that as designers, we need to meet the moment and figure out how to build design systems and best practices into the agentic workflows our developer counterparts are using.

Read past some of the hyperbole in this piece by Andy Budd. I do think the message is sound.

If you’re working at a fast-growth tech startup, you’re probably already feeling the pressure. Execs want more output with fewer people. Product and engineering are experimenting with AI tooling. And you’re being asked to move faster than ever — with less clarity on what the team should even own.

I will admit that I personally feel this pressure too. Albeit, not from my employer but from the chatter in our industry. I’m observing the younger companies experiment with the process, collapsing roles, and expanding responsilities.

As AI eats into the production layer, the traditional boundaries between design and engineering are starting to dissolve. Many of the tasks once owned by design will soon be handled by others — or by machines.

Time will tell when this becomes widespread. I think designers will be asked to ship more code. And PMs and engineers may ship small design tweaks.

The reality is, we’ll likely need fewer designers overall. But the ones we do need will be more specialised, more senior, and more strategically valuable than ever before.

You’ll want AI-literate, full-stack designers — people who are comfortable working across the entire product surface, from UX to code, and from interface to infrastructure. Designers who can navigate ambiguity, embrace new tooling, and confidently operate in the blurred space between design and engineering.

I don’t know if I agree with the fewer number of designers. At least not in the near-term. The more AI is embedded into app experiences, the trend—I predict—will go in the opposite direction. The term “AI as material” has been floating around for a few months, but I think its meaning will morph. AI will be the new UI, and thus we need designers to help define those experiences.

Crazy. Methinks there’s a non-zero chance that someone at v0 read my article and decided to give us designers the control we want.

Can’t wait to try it out.

I’ve been very interested in finding tools to close the design-to-code gap. Martina Sartor writing in UX Planet articulates why that is so important:

After fifteen years hopping between design systems, dev stand-ups, and last-minute launch scrambles, I’m convinced design-to-dev QA is still one of the most underestimated bottlenecks in digital product work. We pour weeks into meticulous Figma files, yet the last mile between mock-up and production code keeps tripping us up.

This is an honest autopsy of why QA hurts and how teams can start healing it — today — without buying more software (though new approaches are brewing).

When you’re building a SaaS app, I believe it’s important to understand the building blocks, or objects, in your app. What are they? How do they relate to each other? Should those relationships be peer-to-peer or parent-child? Early in my tenure at BuildOps, I mentioned this way of thinking to one of my designers and they pointed me to Object-Oriented UX (OOUX), a methodology pioneered by Sophia Prater.

Mateusz Litarowicz writes:

Object-Oriented UX is a way of thinking about design, introduced and popularized by Sophia Prater. It assumes that instead of starting with specific screens or user flows, we begin by identifying the objects that should exist in the system, their attributes, the relationships between them, and the actions users can take on those objects. Only after this stage do we move on to designing user flows and wireframes.

To be honest, I’d long thought this way, ever since my days at Razorfish when our UX director Marisa Gallagher talked about how every website is built around a core unit, or object. At the time, she used Netflix as an example—it’s centered around the movie. CRMs, CMSes, LMSes, etc. are all object-based.

Anyway, I think Litarowicz writes a great primer for OOUX. The other—and frankly more important, IMHO—advantage to thinking this way, especially for a web app, is because your developers think this way too.

Related to my earlier post today about Arc’s novelty tax, here’s an essay by DOC, a tribute to consistency.

Leveraging known, established UX patterns and sticking to them prevent users from having to learn net-new interactions and build net-new mental models every time they engage with a new product.

But, as Josh Miller wrote in the aforementioned post, “New interfaces start from familiar ones.” DOC’s essay uses jazz as a metaphor:

Consistency is about making room for differentiation. Think about a jazz session: the band starts from a known scale, rhythm. One musician breaks through, improvising on top of that pattern for a few minutes before joining the band again. The band, the audience, everyone knows what is happening, when it starts and when it ends, because the foundation of it all is a consistent melody.

Such a gorgeous visual essay from Amelia Wattenberger. Beyond being wonderful to look at, the content is just as thought-provoking. Her experiment towards the middle of the piece is interesting. In our world of flat design and design systems, Amelia is truly innovating.