Good Day. There is a particular blue button I keep meeting. It sits beneath the same centred headline, above the same trio of feature cards, on a layout I have now seen ten thousand times. It is not that designers have stopped trying. It is that the tools have started deciding, and the tools have only one taste, which is the average of everything they were ever fed.
I have spent two decades in this work, and I have never watched convergence move this fast. A generation ago, sameness was a slow drift: everyone borrowed from the same handful of sources and eventually began to rhyme. Today it is instant. A machine can generate a complete, competent, utterly anonymous website in the time it takes to pour a coffee. The herd no longer drifts together over years. It is assembled together, overnight, at scale.
I want to be careful here, because I am not standing outside this. I use these tools every day. I also hand-code a great deal of what I make, and I let the machine move me faster only where I am comfortable letting it, and nowhere else. That distinction is the entire craft. The machine serves my judgment; my judgment does not serve the machine. The moment those two reverse, you get speed, and you get the herd.
Because faster is not always better. This is the quiet heresy of the moment. We have confused the speed of production with the quality of the result, as though a thing made in a minute and a thing made in a week were the same object at different prices. They are not. The minute-made site is fluent and empty. No photograph that is truly yours, no decision that could only have been made by you, no soul a person on the other side of the screen could feel. It is design-shaped, the way a stock photo is friendship-shaped.
Here is the cost, stated plainly. When a machine builds your website from the same average it built your competitor's, you do not merely look generic. You disappear. You are folded into a herd of businesses that are all, technically, fine, and a customer's eye slides across every one of you and remembers none. Invisibility is the most expensive thing a business can buy, and right now it is being sold at a discount, dressed up as efficiency.
The way out has not changed, even as everything else has. It was always judgment, and judgment is now the only thing left that cannot be copied. One real photograph, taken in your actual shop, of your actual hands. One sentence only your business could honestly say. One structural decision, not a colour but a decision, that reflects how you genuinely think. A machine can execute all of it beautifully, once a human has decided it. What the machine cannot do is care what it is for.
I believe we are about to learn, collectively and the hard way, that taste is not a luxury layered on top of the work. It is the work. When production becomes free, the only thing of value left is the judgment of what to produce, and that judgment is stubbornly, expensively human. The studios that understand this will look like nothing else on earth. The ones that do not will look like everything else, which is the same as looking like nothing at all.
So the question I leave with you carries more weight this year than it did last. If a machine can build, in sixty seconds, a website indistinguishable from yours, then what, precisely, was yours? Answer that honestly, and you have found the only thing worth building around. Everything else is just the blue button, waiting for the next person to press generate.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton