Designer Fund's Blumenrose: AI website design nearing human-level 'taste'
Ben Blumenrose, co-founder of venture firm Designer Fund and a two-decade design veteran, says AI-generated website design has improved roughly fivefold in the past year. He still notices telltale AI patterns like pill-shaped buttons, floating dashboards and heavy gradients, but expects those distinctions to nearly vanish within six months to a year. Designer Fund has backed Framer, a no-code website design platform, as part of its bet on this shift.
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As AI closes the aesthetic gap with human designers, the value professional designers provide may shift from execution to judgment, curation and the harder-to-automate sense of 'taste.' Investors betting on no-code and AI design tools, like Designer Fund's stake in Framer, are wagering that this convergence will reshape who gets paid to build digital products.
- AI-generated web design has improved about 5x in the past year, per Blumenrose.
- Human designers may become indistinguishable from AI output within six months to a year.
- Designer Fund is investing in tools like Framer that ride this AI design wave.
Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger — If AI can now churn out passable layouts, the human edge is taste s and this book is a crash course in it. Refactoring UI breaks down spacing, color, hierarchy, and typography into practical rules you can apply whether you're designing from scratch or editing what a model spit out.
See Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: fastcompany.com, 2026-08-24
Published there as: “The remarkably human task of giving AI ‘good enough’ taste”
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