Killing AI Design Slop
20 articles in series
Twenty articles on beating generic AI design — the purple-gradient, Inter-font, four-card median every vibe-coded site ships. How design skills overwrite an agent's default taste before a line of CSS, layer by layer: frontend taste, motion, image and video, AI-product behavior, and the visual feedback loop. Mapped to the curated design skills in the Designs category.
Motion That Doesn't Feel Cheap: The Emil Rules
The hard motion rules that separate senior animation from slop: durations, easing, exits faster than entrances, transform-only for 60fps, and reduced-motion respect.
Give Your Agent Eyes: The Visual Feedback Loop
The single highest-leverage move in AI design: let the agent screenshot the rendered page, compare to a reference, and iterate. Without eyes you trust a blind model.
Commit to One Extreme: Picking an Aesthetic Direction
Blended design is dead design. Why committing to one extreme — brutalist, editorial, luxury, maximalist — beats the safe middle, and the skills that force the commitment.
Banning Inter: Why Font Defaults Are the Slop Tell
Inter, Roboto, Arial, Space Grotesk — the fonts models default to and why they read as AI-generated. What committed type pairing looks like instead.
Don't Install 45 Skills. Stack These Four.
You don't need a pile of design skills to beat AI slop. You need four: a taste base, motion, tokens, and a visual feedback loop. Here's the recipe.
The Six-Layer Anti-Slop Stack
AI design slop lives on six layers, from frontend UI to trust and orchestration. Here's the full map and the skill that fixes each one.
What a Design Skill Actually Is (and Why It Beats a Prompt)
A design skill is a plain-markdown SKILL.md the agent loads on every turn. Here's why that beats a one-off prompt, plus the three ways to install one.
AI Design All Looks the Same. Here's the Tell.
Every vibe-coded site has the same signature: purple gradient, Inter, four cards, one weak hover. Here's why models ship it and how to overwrite it.