Ethan Marcotte — "I love what I do, but I feel like I have to work hard — hard — to produce something I can be proud of. And I couldn't stand the idea of a visitor looking at my work, and just assuming I'd pressed a button to make it happen." Source
Chris: Turned the take directly into a LinkedIn post (published 2026-07-15, logged in Workbench). Full text:
Web design and not falling into traps.
I follow a number of web designer blogs. I find it delightful that most web designer blogs have a simple design. They aren't over the top. They are just enough.
Ethan recently redesigned his blog (and it looks great). He wrote a post about the whole redesign process and noted this:
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I'll also say that a new kind of worry crept in this time, one I'd never dealt with before. Just this week The New Yorker wrote a piece on the emerging aesthetic of LLM-generated websites, which all seem to be settling into a smear of same-y markers: of "beige- and cream-colored backgrounds, rusty orange-hued accents, and large serif typefaces."
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While the AI-aesthetic was not the impetus for redesigning the Classic City site to look like a video game, the timing of it was absolutely perfect. The other day, I heard from a client (who didn't know me before we worked together) that the whole reason he wanted to work with Classic City was because our website evoked emotion.
Let's look at this from a very simple lens: The bar you have to jump over to not feel like every other AI website out there is TEXTURE and CONSISTENCY.
Put pieces of yourself and your personality into the design. It's OK if it looks a little like a scrapbook. I spent a couple hours the other day drawing squiggle lines to use on a client's website as a divider. The site was very grid-like and it needed an element to break that up. That small detail is what excited him AND it will be a mental "+1" to a customer of something they aren't expecting.
Your design doesn't have to be complicated. It just needs the right touches in the right spots. And because AI can handle the "easy stuff" for us, we can now spend more time on the details that matter.