Common Mistakes With Vibe Coded Websites
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Enterprise Innovators
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18 Video Views·Mar 11, 2026
As no code design tools become more common, so do the pitfalls. You know what they look like - the purple gradients, annoying hover effects, sections that fade as you scroll. So how do you avoid a site that feels vibe coded while still taking advantage of these new tools? In this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein is joined by Visiting Partner Raphael Schaad, the founder and designer of Cron (now Notion Calendar). Together they’ll review user submitted sites with an eye for how to leverage these tools and avoid the common vibe coding mistakes.
Thanks to the companies that submitted their sites for review.*
2.58 - Nunu.ai
9.25 - Rosebud AI
13:30 - Getcrux
19:12 - Sphinx
25:43 - Build0
30:30 - Zarna
It's easier than ever to design with AI tools,
but that doesn't mean you should always accept all changes.
So today I'll be joined by Raphael Shad to look at the good,
the bad, and the ugly of AI-assisted design
and sort through how to use these superpowers to stand out.
Welcome to another design review.
All right, today I am thrilled to be joined by Raphael Shad,
one of the newest visiting partners here at YC.
And Raphael was the co-founder of Cron, a modern calendar tool,
which you sold to Notion a while back
and are also one of the top designers that I know and have worked with.
So Raphael, it's an honor to have you here
and it's an honor to work together now at YC.
Yeah, super fun to be now back in YC
and helping founders, next-generation founders, build iconic companies.
Well, you're the perfect person to have on here
because the topic that we're going to be talking about today
is AI design trends.
On the negative end, there's the AI design slop.
And on the positive end, there's a lot of AI design trends
that now are easier to build for anybody,
even if they're not a designer.
So what are some of the common things that you've seen recently,
a lot of the top AI design trends that are standing out
that you'd want to call out for the audience
before we jump into some sites?
Yeah, sure.
This all kind of started when I had a late night thought
and tweeted that I see a lot of dumb hover effects
on landing pages of startups these days,
presumably white-coded.
And so I was kind of curious to peel the layer back there.
It's like, how did these, what I thought were dumb effects,
how did they make it into LLMs?
And why are they everywhere now?
A couple other trends that we then identified
was kind of like purple gradients.
All of a sudden, all startup websites had purple gradients everywhere.
Or these sections that kind of fade as you go in,
as you scroll, and they fade in and fade out.
Yeah, and it's not so much that those inherently are bad.
It's not purple gradients are bad and nobody should ever use them.
It's that now they're just so ubiquitous everywhere
that they kind of lose all meaning and specialness and originality.
Totally.
And one of the key things was when there was a good website
kind of establishing a trend,
it took a while in the old world for others to kind of copy these trends.
But now with LLMs, if there's a good website with a purple gradient,
it makes it into the LLM
because the LLM gets trained on the good examples
that get linked to a lot.
And then all of a sudden, like the next week,
all the startup websites look the same.
Yes.
And so this is both good and bad
if this power is used in the right ways.
So we've got a bunch of YC companies
that have submitted their websites
that were all built with AI coding tools.
So this should give us good grounds to figure out
ways that they have been used really, really well
and things that we would do differently
if we were designing it ourselves.
So let's dive into some examples.
Let's have a look.
All right.
Okay.
First up, we've got Nunu.ai.
Solve your game testing with AI agents.
Save countless hours of manual game QA
by using AI agents performing end-to-end tests at scale.
Purple gradients.
It's the first thing that jumps out.
It's a very purple site,
which we were just talking about.
That's one of the most common things that you see.
So it's interesting.
Like pre-LLM day,
I think I would have looked at this and gone like,
wow, this looks really nice.
And now I look at it and I'm like,
they used AI to design this.
Maybe they didn't,
but like that's what it screams to me.
Okay.
So one thing that's interesting as we,
as you start scrolling here,
we've got this line that's following us up and down.
And it's interesting because
I actually find this line to be a little distracting.
I'm paying more attention to the line
than I am the things that I think
that it wants me to pay attention to.
It's almost like something that
it's kind of like probably hard to implement for a human.
And you would have never thought to actually code this up
before AI.
And just because we now can,
just because LLMs are kind of like good at these types of like SVG,
you know, buildups or transforms,
doesn't mean that it's actually a good design
and helps you convert potential,
you know, visitors into customers, basically.
Yeah.
I don't know anybody that's like,
we need a line that goes through here.
Let's start coding that from scratch.
Like you would only implement something like this
because it was so easy to do.
But I don't think it actually adds value.
If anything, I think it distracts from the rest of the page.
I can't recall anything from these sections based on this.
Okay.
So now we're down to everything in one place.
I find this hard to read.
It's very light.
Maybe I'm just old.
Yeah.
Contrast could be improved there a little bit.
So these cards are interesting, right?
This is cool.
This is actually pretty good.
This is probably something that would have been
maybe too expensive to do
or only like the very best or like website designers
would have kind of gotten to the lengths
of doing something like that.
These hover animations for the cards.
But AI is so simple to do.
And this is actually like a pretty tasteful way
of using leveraging the powers of LLMs
to build more compelling websites.
Yeah.
What's cool about it is it feels like
it helps establish the brand
and it's unique and it's creative and it's fun.
And it's actually trying to, you know,
multiplayers like two controllers
with lightning connecting them.
And it actually helps reinforce the points
that I think that they're trying to make here.
And this is a great example of, you know,
where the line that was following you down the page
didn't add much value.
This would have been really hard to do.
And now you kind of get it for free.
You don't have to go from scratch
building a lot of this stuff.
One of the things I want to try out is up here.
So we here have the main navigation.
One of the things that jumps out here
is that as you hover,
you generally kind of want to make things pop,
but here it actually kind of disappears.
So instead of inviting to click, to talk to them,
it kind of like goes into the background.
Same here.
It kind of fades out
as you activate one of these menu points.
This is something that I think a designer
would almost never choose to do.
And now in the default of browsers
also doesn't work that way.
And now LLMs just somehow decided
that that's a good hover kind of like effect,
but it makes no sense.
Think about it that way.
Like the browser already has
like a built-in hover effect for free,
even without CSS.
It turns the cursor into a hand, right?
So that already indicates like I can click here.
So just leaving it white in this case,
so just kind of like the bright purple
and then having the hand already tells me
like I can click on this thing.
So if you want to add a CSS effect,
then make it maybe like a little pop,
maybe make it like one shade lighter or more active
or add like a little glow around it,
but don't make it go away.
Yeah.
Do you have any rules of thumb
when you're designing something
and you're trying to come up with hover effects?
Like what are your goals
when you were trying to come up
with the right hover effect?
Yeah, make it sort of like clickable.
Steve Jobs famously said,
he wanted to make things lickable
with the Aqua interface back in the day.
I think make things clickable,
kind of like inviting to click.
Stick to sort of like pretty standard.
Again, I think the hand indicates
that something is clickable.
And so I wouldn't go much beyond that.
Another thing that I see hover being used
is a lot to kind of like reveal additional information.
So not just kind of like a hover effect
to make the UI more feel alive.
Like hover is great
to kind of make UIs feel more alive, right?
But I see it increasingly used
to kind of like disclose additional
and critical information or functionality.
And I don't think that's the best use for hover.
This whole trend that maybe like kind of like macOS
kind of started to over the years,
get more and more into kind of like very clean interfaces,
get the functionality and the tools
and the buttons all out of the way.
So there's all this space for content.
I don't want to have my computer to be just like all content.
I actually want it to be, you know,
a bicycle for the mind, the tool.
And so I'm revealing additional functionality
only on hover.
And you have to go hunt
for what the tool can actually do.
I think it's kind of like an anti-pattern.
Yeah.
Not to mention that, you know,
there isn't a concept of hover on mobile as well.
Yeah.
And long press, which is kind of the equivalent of hover,
never really caught on mobile.
Probably because it's so hard to discover.
Yeah.
You don't want to sit there long pressing all the time
to try to figure out if there is any additional functionality.
Now think of a desktop interface,
a tool where you have to hover around everywhere
to discover where this stuff actually lives.
You know, the disclosure arrows or like hiding something
or getting to a dot, dot, dot kind of menu
to get to extra functionality.
If that's all hidden behind hover,
then, you know, you're just not as efficiently communicating
the functionality of your software.
Yeah.
Overall, I think this is a very nicely designed site.
I think it's easier than ever using AI design tools
and LLMs to get a professional looking site.
There's almost no excuse for not having it now.
Yeah.
And especially as we're reviewing YC applications,
if you look at a demo and that demo does not have
a base level of quality design,
it seems like the person just didn't even try.
Yeah.
Because it's so easy to do it now.
So NuNu, really cool site
and some really interesting applications of using AI here.
So well done.
All right.
Next up, we got Rosebud AI.
Create games with AI.
And once again, like you start to see the trend.
Here we've got the purple gradient again.
We've got a very similar kind of pinkish purple accent color
up here.
And that's why like in isolation with one of these,
like it looks cool.
It looks modern and everything.
But, you know, one after the other,
they all start to kind of look the same
and it takes away a lot of the core brand and originality
and things like that,
that I think most founders want for their site.
So let's dig in here.
This is the first time we're looking at these live.
Yep.
So Rosebud AI, create games with AI.
And there's a prompt to game kind of interaction,
I would assume.
That's cool.
There's something you can instantly play.
Yeah.
Let's try it.
Whoa.
It's like a 3D game in the browser.
That's cool.
There's a person walking around.
Can I use the arrows?
There we go.
Oh, W-A-S-D.
We have an old school gamer here.
All right, you can jump.
All right.
Let's escape out of this.
But cool.
Definitely kind of like engaging.
I wonder whether this is actually their product code
running on the website here.
I would assume that it is.
Or this is like a byte coded sandbox environment.
Yeah, I would assume that this is the type of thing
you can create with their product.
But that's an interesting point is that
they don't really tell us.
It doesn't say like, play a game made with our product right now.
It's interesting.
Is this following us?
Yes.
Yeah.
These are just anchors jumping vertically around.
Yeah.
So what's interesting is I didn't realize this at the time.
But when we went to that one, we were just playing.
That was under modify games.
And so what I wonder is if this is a game
that has already been created that we can modify in real time.
And that's what they're trying to show off
rather than the creation part.
Yeah.
So maybe kind of like a thing to take away here is that
using this non kind of like non-standard navigation
is tripping us off a little bit on how to use this website.
Another thing that kind of jumped out here at the top
is like I don't think anyone would think of combining
a red logo with purple as an accent color necessarily.
It's not necessarily complimentary.
And I guess whenever I see the use of emojis,
even though they're not the system emojis,
I feel like it's a little lazy.
And so I feel like LLMs kind of take the easy path
because they don't have any IP really themselves.
They're just like big models kind of cobbling things together.
They use like these standard icons everywhere.
And it's just immediately kind of like a tell.
Yeah.
I think we could just use more context up here too.
And the name of the company is here.
It looks like it's almost part of the headline
rather than I would expect it to be up here by the logo.
Yeah.
And then the value prop kind of being more clear,
you know, create games with AI, something, something.
So it's kind of like what's important for the H1
is typically kind of, you know, what is it?
Who is it for?
And to what end?
Why should that person that it's for care?
And if those three things plus a call to action
are not kind of above default,
then it's a harder time to convert visitors.
Yeah.
Okay.
We've got some, I guess, examples of games.
Yeah.
So games created with Rosebud AI.
Okay.
So there's another effect here.
You can see the light following my cursor around the edges.
And yeah, this is the kind of thing where, you know,
you're like, hey, it costs nothing to do this.
Then maybe you're like, yeah, sure.
Let's throw it in.
It's fun and it's playful.
But if you had to spend a week coding this
and, you know, getting it to work right,
you'd be like, oh, it's not worth it.
Okay.
So we've got a lot of game examples.
And it looks like maybe this is just the rest of the site here.
Okay.
And then we hit a footer.
There's a create...
Is this like remixing?
Yeah.
Okay.
So some of the projects you can remix
and then it kind of puts up the conversion wall.
Okay.
That would go beyond sort of like landing page.
Very cool.
Awesome.
Well done, Rosebud.
Okay.
So next up, we've got Get Crux.
And one of the first things that I noticed here
was kind of the fade in.
It was this automatic fade in.
Oh, and another thing that I noticed
is my scroll is hijacked here.
Yeah, it's maybe a little hard to see on screen,
but there's only some scroll jacking logic going on.
And there's also like a state where you see
both the detached and the fixed header menu,
like both at the same time,
like right around here.
So typically kind of like they should just smoothly...
I like the sticky header,
but it's just like smoothly transition one to another.
And here you see sort of like that.
You know, they're clearly two distinct menus
that just happened to kind of be the same.
I'm sorry.
I'm so distracted by the button
that's chasing me around the screen here.
Yeah, I almost feel like it's hard
to get the button to click on it
because it's constantly moving.
Does it make you want to talk to the founders more or less?
It makes me distracted, I would say.
I'm not paying attention to what they do.
I'm just, I'm like,
why is this button following me around?
It definitely got my attention, I would say.
One of the other things that I noticed first too
is almost these like meteors
that are shooting down from the angles.
You can kind of see them over there.
That's another kind of thing
where like it doesn't feel like
it actually adds a lot of value to the product.
And again, if you had to build that from scratch,
it would never be worth your time.
But it's so easy to do it that people are like,
yeah, let's throw that in.
It looks cool.
But I actually find it a little distracting.
I don't think it adds value to the product here.
And the hero screenshot here is,
I guess, a poster image for a video.
And it goes into what looks like
a completely different video.
Yeah, that was confusing.
And the poster image is very blurry here.
I don't know whether this is like an artifact
of like using AI or not.
But just as a general design principle,
I think all your assets should be high res, high quality.
And this just looks like something very blurry.
Yeah.
And again, back on the button too,
because I still see, even when we're down here,
it's like still chasing us around.
You know, this is another example of the type of thing
that you would only do because it's easy.
But just because something is easy
doesn't mean it's worth doing.
There's a lot of things that are now
at your fingertips with AI
that anything imaginable is possible
just because something is possible
doesn't mean you should say yes to it.
Here we're kind of like hitting a little bit
on just a lack of visual consistency.
Like this looks like an entirely different visual language
than anything we've sort of seen above.
Where do you think that comes from?
I wonder.
Maybe different sections of the website
being made by different parts of the tool.
Maybe it's also just kind of like a function
of like this year looking very different
than sort of like the website content.
Yeah, sometimes just like a clear image
with a little bit of text,
maybe a headline and then some subtext goes a long way.
Yeah.
And I got to say, we're like halfway down the page right now.
And if you asked me what they did,
I would not be able to tell you.
Let's go back up to the top and remind ourselves.
AI creative strategists to make ads that work.
Okay, so it's something to make ads, it seems like.
It's interesting.
They do kind of have like a visual style to it
with a lot of these,
it's almost like a vertical motion blur or something
on a color gradient that we see in some of these images,
like these right here.
And we saw the same thing in these here
and these here and these here.
But it's constrained to some of these elements
and it feels like, you know,
it's maybe a little overused here
because it's hard to read these
and this feels like more like a rainbow
rather than calling the attention to it.
But up here does not have that style at all,
which was maybe, you know,
the point that you were making earlier.
And I could see something where the background here
is more reflective of this type of style
and then that might carry it through
all the way through the rest of the page.
Yeah.
Let me quickly reload the page and try something.
So we see all these sections kind of like fading in.
And here again, it's just like fading in.
And one of the things that I noticed,
I just don't see the advantage of having these things,
not just right there as I scroll,
because scrolling already like is the motion.
Why does it have to like also then kind of like fade in?
And one of the things that you get is these weird,
for example here, right?
We said, we're here to answer all your questions.
And then there's one question.
And we braked here earlier and I was like,
wow, that's a lame FAQ.
If there's only like one Q and one A.
But then I was like,
it just hasn't come in yet.
And so not a fan of that pattern.
Yeah.
What bothers me with the fade ins a lot of time,
and I'm not sure if this does it or not,
is when they're on a timer,
sometimes I'm scrolling really quickly
and I'll get all the way past the section
as it's starting to fade in up at the top
and I miss the content altogether.
So I'm curious to try that here and see how they do this.
So like if I'm just kind of zooming down.
So these seem to fade in
at least when it's at the bottom of the page.
But it still feels like going through molasses
because it's all scroll check.
Right.
Like hijacking the sort of like
actual native browser scrolling
to do some fancy thing with JavaScript
to actually have the hooks to do all these animations.
Yep.
All right.
Super interesting.
Very creative.
So well done, Get Crux.
Okay, next we got Sphinx.
Your last compliance hire.
All right.
We've got some animation thing going on here.
I think one of the trends that we've seen so far
is just like way more animation these days
than there were three years ago probably
because these AI design tools make it so easy to do this.
Let's really talk about hierarchy here.
So we start with a logo type,
kind of a stylized version of the name of the company.
Sphinx, right?
That's cool.
Top left, pretty standard.
But then we have the H1 is also good
and the subtext,
but also we have like this kind of like weird
in between like fourth style, right?
Not something that I typically ever saw designers
or engineers kind of come up with their own landing pages.
There's only something kind of like
these many, many styles mixed
is something that I increasingly see kind of LLMs do
because like somehow the LLM thought
it's clever to have like an extra label here
and an extra style meet Sphinx.
But we already have the company name.
We already have three different styles.
Basically, if you count this year,
it's like four styles.
This just adds a fifth,
complicating the hierarchy,
not really adding.
It adds a bunch of vertical space.
Like we could just like move the H1 a little bit up
and then the value didn't trust it.
Logos would already be like a little higher.
So this is something that I increasingly see
kind of like LLMs dream up
that isn't really tight information hierarchy
and graphic design.
Yeah, I think going through these,
I keep coming back to the concept of like,
it's easy to do anything.
You really have to be opinionated
as the human that's in the loop in designing these
around what you think is the right thing,
not just kind of saying, yes, accept all changes.
Yeah, you're now the editor.
Yes, yes.
And another thing that I'm noticing happening here
is this section on the right,
it just keeps swapping around.
If we watch this animation here for a second,
this button over here,
the big star kind of button,
yeah, like moves around and now it's a circle button.
I think that's a button.
Yeah, I guess that's clickable.
And then it's going to come back over to the left side
and it's going to be a big round rectangle kind of button.
And so we have a lot of different button styles.
I'm not sure why things are moving like this.
And it's very confusing.
It's actually not a button.
Like, yes, it shows the hand,
but that's a head fake.
Because if you click it, it doesn't really,
well, I guess it's kind of like a next button,
but then also on auto advance.
Yeah, this is very confusing to me.
I'm not sure what it's showing.
And I can't tell what's happening in this animation either.
It seems to be some kind of workflow.
Actually, you can just click anywhere and it advances.
So it's not even like this button
or the whole thing is a click target.
Yeah.
This is, again, one of those things
where it's hard for me to imagine a human
just being like,
let's have three different style buttons
that every time you click it,
they all reorient and shift.
And it feels like the type of thing
that an AI design tool would have suggested.
And you would have said, sure, that seems cool.
Yeah, it feels like the visual manifestation
of LM hallucinations.
Let's quickly look at the menu here.
All right.
Pretty standard stuff.
I never like when the menus can go away,
like in between.
Like there's the gap and then something goes away.
What's happening on the right side of a couple of those?
There were two of those
and there's kind of a grid on the right side.
Yeah, with an icon.
Is that interactive or anything?
Or is that?
Nope.
It's just something the LM thought was cute.
How about if you hover over on...
Okay, so it's just giving a different icon.
No, the icons are actually kind of cute.
This seems somewhat original and on brand here.
I would just never thought to do this little...
Like if you want to make a point
that on board is like four circles
in the square arranged in that way.
Like if that was important,
which it doesn't seem like it,
like you probably just put the icon here
kind of back to the,
like why reveal stuff as you hover,
that is essential,
but it's probably not essential.
So it can probably just like leave it out.
What happens when we go further down?
So we've got that line following you
down the page pattern again.
And now we're scroll jacked.
We're locked into this position here of the website
in order to build up this animation.
And I wonder what he wants to tell me.
Like, why is it important to capture me here
on this point to like build out this animation
versus just like showing it
already built in the build out state?
And I find the animation
is getting all of my attention
rather than what it says
all the way over here on the left side.
So I'm not even noticing any of this.
And this is not on the right side.
It's not giving me enough visual information
to communicate something valuable
about what they do or how the product works.
So I just kind of miss everything over here on the side.
The animation is too distracting.
Yeah.
It's also if these was these landing pages
that kind of like build up
and then keep you in a section for a little while.
It's really hard to know
when you're like how far into the book you have read.
Yeah.
Right.
Like if you have a physical book,
you're kind of like, oh, halfway through here.
It's kind of like, I don't know.
It feels like we're halfway through,
but maybe it's going to keep me
for another 15 seconds
on some really rich build out of a landing page.
So the scroll indicator
is a really important tool, I think,
kind of like to get a grasp on the landing page.
And here it's completely failing me.
Kind of like, where am I in the website?
All right.
Overall, visually, I think it looks nice.
It looks modern.
There's a theme that there,
you know, you've got the orange accent color.
You've got the black
is kind of your primary brand color.
You've got the line that's kind of following you down.
And my hunch is that
that is sort of reproducing what the product looks like.
Because we keep seeing all these workflows
with orange lines in the product itself.
And I think that's what they're trying to communicate here.
And so, you know, that makes sense to me.
Their headline up at the top,
I think, does a great job of explaining what it is
and who it's for.
So I think they really nailed that.
Awesome.
Sphinx, great work.
Next up, we got build zero.
Let's take a look here.
Build custom internal apps with AI.
So right off the bat, we got some purple gratings.
Yeah, there we go again.
And let's see here.
So the menu nicely morphs.
Ooh, and then my pet peeve, dumb hover effects.
It just doesn't add anything.
This vertical movement is just distracting and not cool.
It pushes also.
There's another thing where because of the effect,
it kind of horizontally shifts the whole menu,
which kind of just seems like a bug.
And then here's another effect.
The arrow has to move somehow vertically.
Why?
The arrow at least should go to the right also.
Yeah, it goes backwards.
This hover effect here, I don't mind.
It's a black and white button.
And then it turns into the primary brand color,
in this case, kind of purple.
Like, that's not a bad hover effect here.
This here, pretty bad.
Then what else have we got?
We've got a little interactive element here.
Can click through it.
Ooh, OK, there seems to be some bug with the selection here.
If this was hand-coded, no way someone
would have not noticed it.
I almost wonder if you just one-shot landing pages,
do you actually go and really use it
with the same attention detail as if you had built it
from scratch?
And then because you don't,
you just ship things that you wouldn't have
because you don't even notice the little bugs
that the LLM makes.
Go back to the Engineers tab here.
Now, if this is their product,
one of the other things that stands out to me
is this kind of dashboard
that's got like the red, green, blue, purple
kind of call-outs up here.
That's one of the Hallmark classic things
that a lot of AI design tools will actually create.
Yeah, every fake dashboard looks basically
like something like that.
They've got the icons that are a darker version
of the lighter background color.
It's usually like the Google colors.
You know, it's like red, yellow, green, blue.
So that we tend to see a lot.
Yeah, and these kind of like bento boxes
is not a bad pattern,
but it's also very non-original.
And so this LLMs oftentimes kind of come up with these,
just like icon at the top,
and then a bit of text.
And in this case, kind of like a three by two,
that's, yeah, quite common.
Yeah, we've got some quotes.
We've got the purple gradient.
We've got some frequently asked questions
and then more gradients.
Yeah, you know, we're, I don't know,
a few into reviewing these now.
And I think we just keep seeing
a lot of these common patterns,
which I think just highlights
how ubiquitous they've become.
And how it almost like takes away
from the brand and originality
that I think most of these companies want to create.
When it has elements that every other site
and every other product has too.
Yeah, look, I think the really cool thing
about AI tools is that it kind of frees you
from having to kind of like, you know,
fiddle with like the technical details.
So it can really work on the hard kind of questions
of your offering of your product of your company,
such as like, what are we making?
For whom?
Why is this valuable to them, right?
And that's the cool aspect.
But if you then can like just use it to create
what we sometimes call like AI, AI slop.
I think this idea of having sort of like,
you know, all this power that you should use responsibly
gets a little bit wasted.
And so that's the fine line to walk,
I feel for builders in 2026.
Yeah, there's nothing inherently bad about this.
You know, it's just that we've been through a few
and we've seen this before.
You know, that's kind of what it feels like
is I've seen this before.
And for anybody else in the audience,
like you lose a little bit of credibility, I think,
you know, when your customers are viewing your product
and they're saying like,
eh, this looks like a bunch of other things I've seen.
They probably just use AI to build this and design it.
If that's the case, like how good is the actual product?
You know, or are they vibe coding that too?
Use AI to build this by any means,
but just kind of like, you know,
really then evaluate the output
and use AI to make it even better and more original
and spend the time that you saved one-shotting it
or whatever to then really think about your messaging
and, you know, designing a wonderful product
that you can then showcase, et cetera.
Yep, that's great advice.
Awesome, build zero.
Thank you.
All right, next up we got Zarna,
AI associates for private capital markets.
Oh, we're scroll jacked again.
Oh yeah.
It's 10x everything, all the things.
Unlocked IRR.
This site, yeah, it feels like I'm in molasses.
It just feels so clunky to use.
Not to mention there just isn't a lot of information.
I feel like even this is deal volume 10x.
Everything 10x just feels made up
and it feels like there's just so much space.
It feels like I have to scroll through this molasses forever
to get to anything that helps me understand what this is.
Yeah, one of the things I personally like,
if we go to the top,
right now the sort of background here
uses 100% of the vertical space,
which kind of almost visually locks me in.
And then there's nothing more.
And I hate when people can put scroll down to see more
because of course we're on a website,
of course I know how to scroll down.
So one of the things that I personally kind of like
to interrupt the visual a little bit
is kind of like to start a landing page
maybe like this.
Now I have kind of like something here at the top,
but I know there's more good stuff down here.
The good stuff better be good
because close better deals faster doesn't tell me much,
but maybe there's like 10 pixels
of like an awesome hero image
kind of like peaking up or something like that.
That would be cool.
And then I immediately without any indicators
like no one wants to kind of like scroll down
and discover it, right?
Well, we've stopped at the perfect point here
because you cannot see anything in the top navigation bar.
You better know what's in the background
and if there's a dynamic background,
such as a video playing,
which might have all sorts of bright colors,
all of a sudden your bright menu isn't readable anymore.
Okay, so this is interesting.
So here we picked it up.
Yeah.
So it's smart,
but it's not smart when there's video behind it.
Ah, you're right.
That is the nuance.
Okay, these I can't click on.
I would have expected that I could click on any of these.
Maybe the chevron.
Oh, I don't know what just happened.
Okay, now I can click on those.
Yeah, some of it is clickable
and some of it is not, it appears.
And also it's like jumping me up and down on the screen.
It seems to just be moving on its own timer
and not letting me do anything, which is confusing.
And again, this is one of those things
where it feels like you wouldn't
intentionally design it to work this way.
Instead, you just, it created a component
and you went like, yeah, that seems cool.
And it does sometimes work.
Only on those nested ones.
If you try the other ones, it doesn't do anything.
Yeah, and this beta label here is super hidden.
There's sometimes a chevron, sometimes not.
Yeah, this feels maybe like a little bit sloppy.
Yeah, one agentic layer, generate an investment memo.
Yeah, even the little bits of motion here
is the kind of thing that like AI
will just give you that for free.
And you're like, yeah, okay, let's go with that.
But you would never create yourself.
Yeah, I can't even tell what I'm supposed to do
with any of this.
It hovers and expands a little bit,
but like nothing is clickable.
We got some fade-ins.
It just feels like it's lacking a lot of
like useful information presented in the right ways.
And at least not purple though.
You got a lot of blue.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Fit and finish as well as kind of like meaty content.
Yeah.
Like clear messaging is maybe lacking a little bit.
The visual style, if I didn't have to scroll through it,
is actually kind of fresh.
Yeah, like it reminds me of Lovable or things like that,
that kind of have that like grainy,
zoomed in kind of picture in the background.
Not sure what these boxes here represent in the background.
Yeah, some weird artifact.
All right, Zarna, thank you.
Okay, well, thank you everybody for submitting your sites.
And Rafael, we've seen a bunch of them now.
What are some of your takeaways here?
Yeah, I think definitely lots of purple gradients.
And in general, kind of like a lot of kind of like
the same patterns.
You know, we see animations kind of like for animation sake,
just because it's possible now.
I would have killed to have these kind of like AI superpowers
when I built my first website.
So I think it's wonderful that we have them.
But you are still kind of like responsible
to outsource your thinking to LLMs.
And actually just use them as tools
to get your brilliant ideas, designs, novel,
maybe kind of like interactions out on the web
to dazzle your customers.
And I think that's what a landing page should do.
In the end, it's kind of like
a customer acquisition channel, right?
This is not your product.
This is not a web site,
as in kind of like a cool thing on the web.
There's space for that as well.
But these are like startup landing pages
and they're basically customer acquisition channels.
So that's how I would really use these tools.
I totally agree with all of those.
A couple others I would add.
You know, one, I think it's really important
that you QA everything.
It's very easy to create something,
but we went through and we found, you know,
some quirks or bugs or things like that here or there,
things that were confusing.
Ultimately, you know, you, the founder,
you, the human need to be the one that goes through
and make sure that, you know,
the interactions and everything else work right.
The other one is, you know,
it's important that your site and your brand,
they come through as the thing that you want
to represent your company in that originality
and something that feels different.
And it's very easy using the same tools
that everybody else is using to end up in the same place.
You have to be intentional
about ending up in a different place.
And so rather than start from what does the AI spit out
and then let's tweak that,
I would start from, you know,
what color palette do we want to use
and what is our brand
and how can we feed that into the system
and use that to make sure we end up
at an end goal that represents us
rather than just going with, you know,
whatever the AI spits out there.
We've seen a lot of people do that.
And I think, you know, like you said,
one of the most powerful tools ever
to create incredible designs
and do things that would have been impossible
or taken forever that you can do just like this.
And so to use that for ways
that actually help you move the lever upward
and make the sites more engaging and convert better
is one of the most powerful things that you can do.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much for joining, Rafael.
It's been amazing to get your perspective on all of these.
And thank you to everybody that submitted websites.
Thank you.
We will see you on the next design review.
