Spend just five minutes scrolling through the socials, and you’ll find yourself in a sea of sameness: slick gradients, 3D blobs, rounded corners, and friendly sans-serifs floating in space.
Good indistinguishable design that brings safety and security but is devoid of personality.
Its not new, its been that way for ever, and now its getting worse with Ai assisted design and thats the challenge.
Generative AI, trained on trends simply replicate those same trends overwhelming the creative scene with endless variations of… the same. Templates create more templates. It is a design cycle that repeats itself with aesthetic details polished in Figma.
All the skill doesnt account for taste and personality. It’s not about the ability to make something look good, but rather the judgment to recognize what’s actually good.
Design is not just decoration. Design means making decisions, context, clarity, tension, and restraint. It’s solving real problems for real people in specific moments, not just checking boxes on what looks right.
We dont need tools that just produce more stuff; but instead ones that help us make better informed choices.
At Toasty Labs, we of course use AI, but we don’t idolize it. Speed and scale have no value without good judgment for us. A model can remix a thousand layouts which we sometimes need, but it can’t determine which one works best or why it does so, that takes experience that sometime cant be explained immediately in words, thats human insight. It comes from the willingness to explore and revise, to rebuild, and to ask the tough question: What is this really for? Can it be done in a better way that maybe hasn’t been done before?
Great design doesn’t come from having an unlimited number of options. It comes from clarity, conviction, taste and personality – things you can’t automate, at least not yet.
At the end of the day, design needs to make technology accessible to us humans, and surprise surprise, we still need humans for that.
