Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" framework even though they were capable of writing the CSS from scratch. Now LLMs have trained on this boring cookie-cutter UI work so no one should be surprised that this is what comes out.
But the point of the comment is that both Bootstrap and Tailwind are facilitators when you don't know/want/care about getting your hands dirty with CSS. Tailwind happens to be a little less abstract than Bootstrap, but still you're not fiddling with "low level" CSS.
That abstraction is what brings the "sameness" factor in play, though.
You absolutely have to know how CSS layout works to do anything even marginally complicated with Tailwind. It's not a replacement for building flexbox layouts or dealing with Z-indexes or knowing how to compose elements for different viewport sizes. All it's actually separating you from is (most of) the "Cascading" part and having your styles separate from you elements.
I haven't used it in ages, but it used to be that Bootstrap also shipped drop-in CSS that would give you decent-looking styles on all the common elements, so a single minified style sheet would give you that classic "2010s startup" look.
These pages look fine. I'm not seeing the problem. Most landing pages don't need to be creative statements; in fact, I'd wager the majority are hurt by creativity; real creativity is risky! Which of these applications want an artistic statement on their brochure pages?
Quick, pull up VictoriaMetrics.com and Honeycomb.io. Tell me how the design differentiates the brands. Sell me on the idea that anybody picks one over the other based on these web designs.
Terrible examples - they're both ugly. The honeycomb one is particularly bad because it's covered up with a cookie popup on the left and the chat widget on the right.
Yes they both have the same overall structure as the Stripe landing page but if you can't tell the difference between the level of execution of those three, then you're just arguing for mediocrity.
That’s not the point. The point is that when I visit a website that exactly matches XYZ pattern, and am encountering sites exactly like it multiple times every day, I’m left wondering whether the sites are trying to say something new and interesting. What ends up happening: the many slop variants have poisoned my opinion on all of them. I can instantly identify certain AI slop Claude designs, and I instantly remember the many flashy, yet buggy sites I’ve encountered.
The “vibe” of a product is absolutely important. Do logstash and datadog have similar vibes in their log viewers? Fuck no. I can instantly tell I’m using something related to that tool because of its design language. That helps it stay sticky. If you’re datadog, you don’t want users thinking the product feels and looks exactly like all the other log viewers. You want them to think it’s unique and the best or whatever. Marketing sites extend that, and are absolutely a component of the “vibes” you get from a product before doing a strict engineering breakdown.
>I'd wager the majority are hurt by creativity; real creativity is risky!
yes, and who wants creativity and risk when everything can look like the interior of a McDonalds. I'd much rather look at someone's terrible and scuffed attempt at designing their own page, because it at least signals that there is a human who isn't afraid to try something out rather than the Instagram filter version of a webpage.
There are times and places where I want to see a lot of humanity and imperfection in transactions, and there are times I don't. You're dunking using McDonalds as an example, but there's a reason they all look like that, and it's one of the most successful businesses in the world.
If you're building the application equivalent of JP Graziano or La Chaparrita Taqueria, make it human, scuffed up even. I'd like JP Graziano less if it looked like a Cheesecake Factory. Right there with you. But if you're building a tool, for developers, one that will mostly be used to conduct some kind of business? Boring competence wins hands down. Users and customers are scouting for competence. Most of the time, their antennae are not in fact up for individual artistic expression.
> Boring competence wins hands down. Users and customers are scouting for competence. Most of the time, their antennae are not in fact up for individual artistic expression.
but even that doesn't really hold any more. The great slopification has made it so that people don't even associate that kind of thing with reliability. Instead it's gotten a kind of ca the year 2000 "thing out of a Chinese factory" vibe to it. Even on practical grounds you might as well give it your own shot now because that stuff is poisoned.
As a concrete example, if you wanted to make a Github competitor ten years ago you tried to look like Github, now you're better off trying to look like sourcehut or codeberg because you don't look like the thing that dies every five minutes.
It's not my argument that competent web design is a reliable signal, only that nobody is looking for incompetent design when they're shopping for a used Camry or a new rotary sander.
When Stripe or Braintree or Paypal deliberately mess up their designs so they can signal their humanity to customers, I'll check back in with this idea. Maybe companies will start introducing dumb bugs into their code, too, because if it's too perfect everybody will know a robot wrote it.
Everyone says that but in aggregate they don't act like they believe it. Having "personality" means some people will love it and others will hate it, rather than everyone finding it acceptable and moving on to the actual content.
Not every landing page needs to be a creative exercise, since bootstrap we have landed on common patterns that reduce cognitive load and that is a good thing
For all the complaints like this that I see about AI generated websites, the complaints rarely come with counter examples of what a good human generated alternative should look like.
The authors blog design is perfectly functional, and I'm not suggesting that it needs any changes, but it also isn't a particularly impressive piece of web design.
The unstated assumptions are a) a cookie cutter site is always vibecoded b) cookie cutter marketing site always means the person left it to last and thus did not invested deeply in their product.
Deeply flawed unfortunately.
For example - and I know it may not map cleanly back to software, but it’s worth thinking about - some of the best food is served in restaurants with plastic chairs and tables where the decor is an afterthought.
I honestly don't think this is bad. For anyone who is not a frontend engineer / designer, using tailwind gives good defaults and better LLM support.
Frameworks were always about lowering the bar for entry with cost to genuine new design. The alternative is worse than this. I honestly prefer this over a backend engineer using WordPress / static site generators / other no-code platforms.
I know this may be a bit dismissive, but I think the need to ask that is the problem. AI can definitely build a design for you. But is no substitute for design skill.
The best way to figure out how to prompt an LLM is to develop design skills so you know what to tell it.
I’ve been in the industry a long time. Even before LLMs, I think web design would get stuck in cycles. So I just want it to spit out something that looks novel and interesting, which pushes me to coach it even better.
This might sound like a joke but it’s a surprisingly good take. RSCSS provides a great set of principles to structure and isolate against unintended change. Open Props can be added for design tokens and Open UI has some great examples of components.
I don’t think tailwind or its templates are the issue (and believe me, I am the furthest thing from a tailwind advocate).
Just shipping a tailwind template is lazy and trite. But LLMs are made to optimize for the lazy and trite. They can only choose the lowest-common denominator.
LLMs don’t really know how to give designs personality. Most of the time I see attempts to improve the situation that basically just boil down to vibe-coded slop that’s prettier. I’m sure better designs exist, but the ones that do exist are almost certainly about the person who drove the LLM, not the LLM itself.
I think we only notice this 'sameness' because we're swimming in it all day. I recently helped a non-tech friend with a vibe-coded site for his cafe. He had the pure enthusiasm of a kid showing off a drawing. He didn't care that it looked like a thousand other Tailwind sites.To him, the magic was simply that he had nothing, and now he has a website.
I think it's slop to many of us, but to a general user, they just aren't seeing it as slop.
uh, that aesthetic was there long before tailwind, they didn't have a monopoly on rounded corners and that spaced out look lol. Much more ability to adapt than say trying to re-skin a bootstrap template back in the day.
the entire industry has always been converging toward "cookie-cutter" ui, and tailwind is just this cycle's flavor and now on steroids with AI. Honestly for 90% of the stuff out there that's literally fine and probably better. There was a time when being extra creative in FE work was rewarded. If your product is very brand dependent then yeah maybe try to find your "voice" but for the vast majority of them, esp dev focused, they just need to work on other things and not try to re-invent solutions to solved problems.
i know we all like to pretend our meticulously engineered button and drop shadow animations are actually moving a needle, but you're optimizing the last few percent at that point. most saas FE devs should be solving other problems like the UX and performance and not worry about more creative landing pages.
And then there's folks that see the prevailing trends, do their best to make something similar because it looks "pro" and get accused of being slop. Sometimes I want to just make an abomination of HTML 2.0 humanslop for the authenticity :)
Tailwind just happens to be a common way to write CSS.
If Tailwind didn't exist people would just be writing the same article about {{ insert most common css tool here }}
Most people create generic similar looking websites, and most people that making a new website today use Tailwind. Correlation is not causation, and linking the two in any meaningful way is just a pointless discussion.
Tailwind is just the latest iteration of people trying "real" CSS, discovering that it still sucks, and coming up with something with better abstractions than the last iteration of attempts to replace CSS.
Everything else is just people using a default configuration instead of building their own.
I agree there is a "sameness" that you get from tailwind.
Tailwind has a unique benefit in that you can change the CSS of the page and just that page. There is no chance that you make a change that breaks the rest of the site because you wrote a rule wrong. In some environments/applications this is a big deal.
But honestly that's the only credit i'll give it. The class names are still confusing to me and you do get more flexibility with CSS. And i'd rather be writing classless css and targeting custom HTML elements anyway.
I don't really think it's tailwind. I use tailwind for everything, and it doesn't look like this. They're utility classes, you can do absolutely anything you want with them. LLMs just choose to do this.
The big gradient fonts came from Apple Keynote, i thought. At least that's where i first saw templates like that.
Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" framework even though they were capable of writing the CSS from scratch. Now LLMs have trained on this boring cookie-cutter UI work so no one should be surprised that this is what comes out.
Bingo! People mustve forgotten about the bootstrap era
> Tailwind is the latest bootstrap
Bootstrap ships components. AFAIK you need another library if you want that in Tailwind.
Here's the discussion we had about bootstrap 10 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287413
(The underlying webpage is no longer around. But the HN discussion is.)
The underlying webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20160325181748/http://adventureg...
But the point of the comment is that both Bootstrap and Tailwind are facilitators when you don't know/want/care about getting your hands dirty with CSS. Tailwind happens to be a little less abstract than Bootstrap, but still you're not fiddling with "low level" CSS.
That abstraction is what brings the "sameness" factor in play, though.
You absolutely have to know how CSS layout works to do anything even marginally complicated with Tailwind. It's not a replacement for building flexbox layouts or dealing with Z-indexes or knowing how to compose elements for different viewport sizes. All it's actually separating you from is (most of) the "Cascading" part and having your styles separate from you elements.
>Bootstrap ships components.
I haven't used it in ages, but it used to be that Bootstrap also shipped drop-in CSS that would give you decent-looking styles on all the common elements, so a single minified style sheet would give you that classic "2010s startup" look.
I miss that 2010s startup look
That lobster font we all used for our startup names was legendary
lobster.ly
Writing CSS from scratch sucks. I'm glad we've left those days far behind.
Also let's not pretend like typical efforts were not buggy as hell with oversights or tricks that didn't work in every environment.
Modern CSS is actually really quite pleasant.
These pages look fine. I'm not seeing the problem. Most landing pages don't need to be creative statements; in fact, I'd wager the majority are hurt by creativity; real creativity is risky! Which of these applications want an artistic statement on their brochure pages?
Brand differentiation, not art
Quick, pull up VictoriaMetrics.com and Honeycomb.io. Tell me how the design differentiates the brands. Sell me on the idea that anybody picks one over the other based on these web designs.
Terrible examples - they're both ugly. The honeycomb one is particularly bad because it's covered up with a cookie popup on the left and the chat widget on the right.
Yes they both have the same overall structure as the Stripe landing page but if you can't tell the difference between the level of execution of those three, then you're just arguing for mediocrity.
That’s not the point. The point is that when I visit a website that exactly matches XYZ pattern, and am encountering sites exactly like it multiple times every day, I’m left wondering whether the sites are trying to say something new and interesting. What ends up happening: the many slop variants have poisoned my opinion on all of them. I can instantly identify certain AI slop Claude designs, and I instantly remember the many flashy, yet buggy sites I’ve encountered.
The “vibe” of a product is absolutely important. Do logstash and datadog have similar vibes in their log viewers? Fuck no. I can instantly tell I’m using something related to that tool because of its design language. That helps it stay sticky. If you’re datadog, you don’t want users thinking the product feels and looks exactly like all the other log viewers. You want them to think it’s unique and the best or whatever. Marketing sites extend that, and are absolutely a component of the “vibes” you get from a product before doing a strict engineering breakdown.
>I'd wager the majority are hurt by creativity; real creativity is risky!
yes, and who wants creativity and risk when everything can look like the interior of a McDonalds. I'd much rather look at someone's terrible and scuffed attempt at designing their own page, because it at least signals that there is a human who isn't afraid to try something out rather than the Instagram filter version of a webpage.
There are times and places where I want to see a lot of humanity and imperfection in transactions, and there are times I don't. You're dunking using McDonalds as an example, but there's a reason they all look like that, and it's one of the most successful businesses in the world.
If you're building the application equivalent of JP Graziano or La Chaparrita Taqueria, make it human, scuffed up even. I'd like JP Graziano less if it looked like a Cheesecake Factory. Right there with you. But if you're building a tool, for developers, one that will mostly be used to conduct some kind of business? Boring competence wins hands down. Users and customers are scouting for competence. Most of the time, their antennae are not in fact up for individual artistic expression.
> Boring competence wins hands down. Users and customers are scouting for competence. Most of the time, their antennae are not in fact up for individual artistic expression.
but even that doesn't really hold any more. The great slopification has made it so that people don't even associate that kind of thing with reliability. Instead it's gotten a kind of ca the year 2000 "thing out of a Chinese factory" vibe to it. Even on practical grounds you might as well give it your own shot now because that stuff is poisoned.
As a concrete example, if you wanted to make a Github competitor ten years ago you tried to look like Github, now you're better off trying to look like sourcehut or codeberg because you don't look like the thing that dies every five minutes.
It's not my argument that competent web design is a reliable signal, only that nobody is looking for incompetent design when they're shopping for a used Camry or a new rotary sander.
When Stripe or Braintree or Paypal deliberately mess up their designs so they can signal their humanity to customers, I'll check back in with this idea. Maybe companies will start introducing dumb bugs into their code, too, because if it's too perfect everybody will know a robot wrote it.
Everyone says that but in aggregate they don't act like they believe it. Having "personality" means some people will love it and others will hate it, rather than everyone finding it acceptable and moving on to the actual content.
Not every landing page needs to be a creative exercise, since bootstrap we have landed on common patterns that reduce cognitive load and that is a good thing
For all the complaints like this that I see about AI generated websites, the complaints rarely come with counter examples of what a good human generated alternative should look like.
The authors blog design is perfectly functional, and I'm not suggesting that it needs any changes, but it also isn't a particularly impressive piece of web design.
I'm a fan of vaporwave and dithering, myself.
The unstated assumptions are a) a cookie cutter site is always vibecoded b) cookie cutter marketing site always means the person left it to last and thus did not invested deeply in their product.
Deeply flawed unfortunately.
For example - and I know it may not map cleanly back to software, but it’s worth thinking about - some of the best food is served in restaurants with plastic chairs and tables where the decor is an afterthought.
Tbf when you dont care about ui-as most backend devs do- Claude creating UI is perfect
Imo UI is bifurcated. Its either not impressive(most websites) or there was immense effort put into it(like posthogs site).
So for a small project where im focusing on shipping speed and feature building, yeah tailwin is being used because I dont want to do motion design rn
Attributing this to tailwind is pretty dumb imo. You could make this case for something like shadcn.
I still prefer bootstrap
I honestly don't think this is bad. For anyone who is not a frontend engineer / designer, using tailwind gives good defaults and better LLM support. Frameworks were always about lowering the bar for entry with cost to genuine new design. The alternative is worse than this. I honestly prefer this over a backend engineer using WordPress / static site generators / other no-code platforms.
Anyone have good lines to include in a prompt to direct LLMs from their default tailwind/Linear/etc. design modes on the first shot?
I know this may be a bit dismissive, but I think the need to ask that is the problem. AI can definitely build a design for you. But is no substitute for design skill.
The best way to figure out how to prompt an LLM is to develop design skills so you know what to tell it.
I totally hear what you’re saying.
I’ve been in the industry a long time. Even before LLMs, I think web design would get stuck in cycles. So I just want it to spit out something that looks novel and interesting, which pushes me to coach it even better.
Oh definitely. I don’t think bad design is something created by LLMs. LLMs just amplify the problem.
I include either "use reset.css" or "use bootstrap" on the prompt. And even say "use fontawesome 6" and it follows.
Same as you have to be explicit about instructions to humans.
Even humans use their default assumptions w/o clear directions
Not a prompt, but the Tailwind team have a separate product under development that aims to solve this problem: https://ui.sh
"No dependencies. Vanilla HTML/JS/CSS".
This might sound like a joke but it’s a surprisingly good take. RSCSS provides a great set of principles to structure and isolate against unintended change. Open Props can be added for design tokens and Open UI has some great examples of components.
It'll just rewrite tailwind badly...
I don’t think tailwind or its templates are the issue (and believe me, I am the furthest thing from a tailwind advocate).
Just shipping a tailwind template is lazy and trite. But LLMs are made to optimize for the lazy and trite. They can only choose the lowest-common denominator.
LLMs don’t really know how to give designs personality. Most of the time I see attempts to improve the situation that basically just boil down to vibe-coded slop that’s prettier. I’m sure better designs exist, but the ones that do exist are almost certainly about the person who drove the LLM, not the LLM itself.
I think we only notice this 'sameness' because we're swimming in it all day. I recently helped a non-tech friend with a vibe-coded site for his cafe. He had the pure enthusiasm of a kid showing off a drawing. He didn't care that it looked like a thousand other Tailwind sites.To him, the magic was simply that he had nothing, and now he has a website.
I think it's slop to many of us, but to a general user, they just aren't seeing it as slop.
uh, that aesthetic was there long before tailwind, they didn't have a monopoly on rounded corners and that spaced out look lol. Much more ability to adapt than say trying to re-skin a bootstrap template back in the day.
the entire industry has always been converging toward "cookie-cutter" ui, and tailwind is just this cycle's flavor and now on steroids with AI. Honestly for 90% of the stuff out there that's literally fine and probably better. There was a time when being extra creative in FE work was rewarded. If your product is very brand dependent then yeah maybe try to find your "voice" but for the vast majority of them, esp dev focused, they just need to work on other things and not try to re-invent solutions to solved problems.
i know we all like to pretend our meticulously engineered button and drop shadow animations are actually moving a needle, but you're optimizing the last few percent at that point. most saas FE devs should be solving other problems like the UX and performance and not worry about more creative landing pages.
And then there's folks that see the prevailing trends, do their best to make something similar because it looks "pro" and get accused of being slop. Sometimes I want to just make an abomination of HTML 2.0 humanslop for the authenticity :)
https://impeccable.style/slop/ is a great approach to identifying slop
What backend are all these slop apps using for the paid tiers?
Tailwind just happens to be a common way to write CSS.
If Tailwind didn't exist people would just be writing the same article about {{ insert most common css tool here }}
Most people create generic similar looking websites, and most people that making a new website today use Tailwind. Correlation is not causation, and linking the two in any meaningful way is just a pointless discussion.
Tailwind is just the latest iteration of people trying "real" CSS, discovering that it still sucks, and coming up with something with better abstractions than the last iteration of attempts to replace CSS.
Everything else is just people using a default configuration instead of building their own.
I agree there is a "sameness" that you get from tailwind.
Tailwind has a unique benefit in that you can change the CSS of the page and just that page. There is no chance that you make a change that breaks the rest of the site because you wrote a rule wrong. In some environments/applications this is a big deal.
But honestly that's the only credit i'll give it. The class names are still confusing to me and you do get more flexibility with CSS. And i'd rather be writing classless css and targeting custom HTML elements anyway.
I don't really think it's tailwind. I use tailwind for everything, and it doesn't look like this. They're utility classes, you can do absolutely anything you want with them. LLMs just choose to do this.
The big gradient fonts came from Apple Keynote, i thought. At least that's where i first saw templates like that.