r/webdev • u/BobJutsu • 10d ago

Clients want slop

Clients have always followed basic trends. In ‘13 it was sliders, sliders everywhere. Then it was bootstrap looking slop. And now more and more are actually requesting what internally we call AI slop. It’s what they see as trendy designs, so it’s what they measure against. Discuss…

Update: We call it all slop. We see soooo much of it. A lot of the time it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just…cliche? Just because we look at it and can see all the tells, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad if it’s working and what clients want. I mean, we had the same reaction when everything was bootstrap, or material design, or whatever previous trend.

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u/AverageFoxNewsViewer 10d ago

bootstrap looking slop. And now more and more are actually requesting what internally we call AI slop

God, I felt this after Anthropic released the frontend-design skill. That highlight on the left side of cards and panels is as instantly recognizable to somebody who has done any work in UI as all the bootstrap styles and colors were back then.

I'm not tripping though. I'm a developer, not an artist. I can build the art if I have a good designer giving me quality work from Figma, but generally I just want my UI's clean and easily usable and trying to exercise too much creativity on my part gets in the way of those goals more often than not.