{"id":22980,"date":"2026-08-03T08:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T08:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/the-ai-aesthetic-jim-nielsens-blog\/"},"modified":"2026-08-03T08:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T08:30:09","slug":"the-ai-aesthetic-jim-nielsens-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/the-ai-aesthetic-jim-nielsens-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"The AI Aesthetic - Jim Nielsen\u2019s Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms.<\/p>\n

For example, there\u2019s the hamburger menu<\/a> (\u2261) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to the constraints around screen size. It has since spread to many other parts of software interaction design and will likely remain prevalent for a long time as a terse way of indicating \u201cmore menu-type content here\u201d.<\/p>\n

As another example, before AI what were the connotations of the sparkle emoji ? Personally, I don\u2019t know, but now it means AI. (AI = sparkles and rainbow colors \u2014 it\u2019s funny when you think about it. They should\u2019ve just thrown unicorns in there for the trifecta. AI = sparkles, rainbows, and unicorns . Apt.)<\/p>\n

Some patterns are very specific to the interactions inherent to the nature of AI as a technology. For example: streaming text. This is a pattern made for and refined by chat interfaces, so it may not have tons of utility for reuse across other software interaction paradigms.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Then there are other patterns that\u2019ve been refined by AI interfaces and are starting to spread to other places in software. For example, the \u201cshimmering text\u201d which in AI land implies a kind of \u201cthinking\u201d but is being repurposed to indicate any kind of asynchronous task (thinking, fetching, computing, etc.).<\/p>\n

\"Animated<\/p>\n

Then there are other influences my subconscious is picking up on. For example, a lot of AI apps use tiny icons. These are most obvious (to me) in desktop Electron apps because they clash with the system-level grain of applications<\/a>. Take a look at this screenshot, where you have desktop AI apps on the left (Claude, Codex, Cursor) and macOS apps from Apple on the right (Finder, Photos, Mail). You can see how the AI apps all have much smaller, thinner icons than their native counterparts.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Are tiny icons our collective future in interfacing with computers? (Personally, I hope not.)<\/p>\n

There are other aesthetics my brain associates with AI, like beige\/cream colors, orange accents, and serif typefaces<\/a> as well as whack-a-mole UI controls (you know, the ones where you click the toggle and the entire UI repaints and you have to move your mouse somewhere else in the UI to click the toggle again? The non-determinism of AI\u2019s grain has seeped into its UI\/X).<\/p>\n

It all makes me wonder what other aesthetics are being born out of this AI moment and how many will spread, take seed, and become part of common software interaction paradigms for years or decades to come?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms. For example, there\u2019s the hamburger menu (\u2261) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to the constraints around screen size. It has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":22981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}