ai-generated-ui-craftlisted

# AI-Generated UI Craft Ask any AI coding assistant to "build a landing page" with no other direction and the outputs cluster around a small set of tells: warm cream background with a serif display face and a terracotta accent, or near-black with a lone neon-green/vermilion pop; a purple-to-blue gradient hero on white; Inter or Space Grotesk as the "safe" font; emoji used as section markers; everything centered; `rounded-lg` on every card; an accent bar down the left edge of rounded cards. None of these are wrong in isolation — the problem is they're the *default*, reached for the same way regardless of what the page is actually about, which is what makes the result read as templated rather than designed. The fix isn't a better palette to default to instead — any single new default becomes the next cliché the moment enough people copy it. The fix is a process: derive every choice from the specific subject in front of you, and run a self-critique pass that catches genericness before shipping, not after. ## 1. Ground every choice in the specific subject - Before picking a color, font, or layout, name the one concrete subject, its audience, and the page's single job. Distinctive choices come from that subject's own vocabulary and materials — a page about a coffee roaster and a page about a compiler shouldn't default to the same visual language just because both requests said "make it look professional." - Build with the real content throughout, never placeholder/lore