Tailwind and slop apps

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Attributing this to tailwind is pretty dumb imo. You could make this case for something like shadcn.

I still prefer bootstrap

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 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.

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 the 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.

What backend are all these slop apps using for the paid tiers?

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.

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.

https://impeccable.style/slop/ is a great approach to identifying slop

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.