Every AI design starts from the same defaults
Models reach for the same fonts, the same gradients and the same little labels because those choices were safe in their training data. This course teaches you to name what you see, spot the defaults, fix them, and then give a design a direction of its own.
Learn the vocabulary
You cannot direct a model, or a designer, toward something you cannot name. These twenty terms cover type, layout, color and motion. Each one comes with what it means and why it shows up when you work with AI.
Spot the slop
Slop is what happens when every choice is a default. None of these twenty patterns is wrong in itself. Each one becomes a tell when it appears without a reason, and when it appears alongside four others.
They are grouped by where they live, so you can scan a screen one layer at a time.
Notice that dithering, ASCII art and gradients also appear in lesson 6 as ways to make a design richer. That is the whole lesson in one contradiction. A technique is slop when the model chose it for you, and craft when you chose it for the subject.
The same card, before and after
Here is one feature card for an imaginary coding agent, written the way a model tends to write it. Switch views and compare. The numbered dots mark each indicator from lesson 2.
Shown without the web fonts the course loads online. This site loads nothing from outside, so the default card's Instrument Serif headline falls back to a system serif and the rest of the page to Arial, Georgia and the system monospace.
Plans first. Acts second.3
Our powerful AI-driven planning engine lets you seamlessly see the plan before any changes are made, empowering you to edit, reorder, or reject it with confidence.6
Read the plan before it touches a file
The agent lists every step and the files it will change. Edit a step, reorder it, or reject the plan and nothing runs.
✓ find the race in session refresh
→ patch auth/refresh.py
add regression test skipped by you
What changed
- Section numbering and eyebrow. "02 · PLAN" restates the headline and implies an order the reader does not need. Removed.
- Filler pill. "New" says nothing about the feature. Removed.
- Periods, random italics, Instrument Serif, tight kerning. Replaced by one specific sentence in a face chosen for the product.
- All-caps subtitle. Three adjectives nobody reads. Removed.
- Code breadcrumb. Mono used as decoration. Mono now appears only inside the real plan, where it is code.
- Verbose copy. Thirty words became twenty, with the outcome stated plainly.
- Two equal ghost buttons on a gradient. One solid call to action, one quiet secondary link, on a calm ground. The plan itself is shown as the product.
Twenty ways to fix it
The fixes fall into four moves. Most of the work is subtraction. The rest is choosing one thing to make important, then building a small system so the rest stays consistent.
Give it a direction with three colors
Removing slop gets you to clean. Clean is still forgettable. The fastest way past it is to commit to a world: a dark ground, a light, and one signal color, each pulled from the subject itself. Type and imagery then follow the palette.
Three studies from the source videos, each a fictional brand.
Northern Time
A mechanical watch brand, lit like the aurora
- Ground
- Black with a trace of blue, like a night sky
- Light
- Ice white for text and the steel case
- Signal
- Aurora green, used only in the light trails
- Type
- A high-contrast serif with wide-tracked small caps, luxury watchmaking's own vernacular
Three Days Louder
A music festival that wants to feel like a crowd surge
- Ground
- Lime, loud enough to read from across a field
- Light
- Near-black for heavy display type
- Signal
- Hot pink as confetti in the photo
- Type
- A fat, chunky display face set huge and tight, poster style
Still Waters
A silent retreat in Kyoto, golden hour on water
- Ground
- Brown, warm and low like wood
- Light
- Pale gold for quiet text
- Signal
- Glowing gold as light rays on the heron
- Type
- A refined serif with generous tracking and lots of air
These three use italics, wide-tracked caps and serif display faces, which lesson 2 flags. They work because every choice belongs to the brand's world and repeats with discipline. That is the test to apply to any rule in this course.
Name the feeling
One sentence about a place or moment. "Aurora over a watch dial." Avoid adjectives like modern or clean.
Pick three roles
Ground, light, signal. The signal color covers under 10 percent of the screen.
Let type follow
Choose a face the subject would use on its own signage, packaging or poster.
One hero image
An image that carries the idea and uses the palette. The product, ideally.
Backgrounds with texture
Flat fills read as unfinished, and a purple gradient reads as AI. Texture is the middle path. Every swatch below is drawn live in your browser with a few lines of canvas code, which also means a model can generate each one for you if you can name it.
Audit a design
Open something you or a model made and tick what you see. The panel tells you where to start fixing, ordered so the cheapest high-impact fixes come first.
Make it a skill
Each prompt below is ready to paste into a skill builder (Claude's skill-creator works well). Each produces one focused skill. Start with the audit and the unslop pass, since the other four build on them.
These six now ship with this repository, as capabilities of the unslopper smart tool (unslopper audit, unslop, direct, tutor, texture, antislop) and as Agent Skills under skills/. The prompts stay here for anyone who wants to rebuild them elsewhere.