I’ve started to see (and react negatively) to a kind of “Claude design”. Apps, slides, images share the same aesthetic, and even after aggressive prompting it reverts to a the mean.

I even create these things. But that aesthetic has started to imply a kind of throwaway, low value thing

What will be interesting is if models can create more diverse styles than the neutral Claude default we see everywhere

I think that this is also a matter of organisation that people can get better at if they understand a bit of how things come into place. If you start by creating a stable theme, with the spacings you want, the colors you want, fonts, sizings, etc, even using an AI, then you can "customise" in full the look of a web-app.

The html there's not really many places to be creative, a navbar with 3 sections, 5 links, a text card, a hero image, etc, all those are the same across thousands of projects - they're structured, there's not really many ways you can be creative about it. So in part seeing that "middle ground" design is indeed a filter for the lowest of the low effort (or not understanding how to prompt properly, or how the final thing comes together).

If you just want to prompt models and have them come up with more diverse styles that's also quite, or more, lazy - it would help if you understood (not you in particular) how the look of a web page comes together, because then you can direct the model properly - and if needed tweak the lose ends because at some point it's just easier and faster to edit the output yourself but you need to know what needs change and how. If you know how an html page comes together into the thing you see in the browser you can spec the model properly.