The Website Is Ready. But Is It Right?
AI has made it easier for almost anyone to build a website. Just describe what you want and within a day or even less, you get your website live and ready for your users to visit. Its truly remarkable how simple it is, and we often forget to think about that.Here’s what has changed for me personally as a designer. For most of my career, my work ends at hand-off. This meant the weeks spent crafting a design system, getting the typography right and ensuring the visual language is coherent and intentional, and then I would hand it over to a developer and hope. Hope that the design spacings, color palette and even typescales would land well on the codebase. Sometimes it did, but often something got lost.
AI has definitely closed that gap quite significantly. One thing worth praising AI for is that designers can now take their work to the finish line. But with that shift came a new responsibility as a designer, because AI left without direction, will hand you a finished website, but is it complete?
It skips the foundation
The first thing we as designers look for before any website goes live is whether it’s based off a design system, which brings the consistency of color, fonts spacing and structure to the surface. It's what the observer sees and experiences. In my books it's important to define every color, every spacing value, every type size, named and referenced throughout the variables in a design system. Designers call these design tokens They are the foundation that make the website look and feel coherent rather than random.Without guidance, AI doesn’t build this by default. It often starts off with a structure (tailwind, shadcn components etc) but loses the essence and moves into using hex values directly or raw values on to code. Ask for brand color change, and you're suddenly hunting through hundreds of lines of code to just adjust those values that require changes. (sure! AI can do this for you but this will burn through your credits. Why waste credits when you can save ‘em eh?)
The type hierarchy lives within this same foundation. It’s not only about picking fonts and setting it to random sizes, it's about building a deliberate scale that tells a reader where to look first and what matters the most. There might even be an instance when you need to break the set hierarchy on a page, to ensure the user is guided well within a screen. But when all of this is defined at the start everything that follows inherits it seamlessly.
This isn't a detail you try fixing at the end. It's the first thing that should be locked in so that you can focus deliberately on the experience the rest of the time.
Design language has to come before the code
When I look into my work approach, the reason I think it matters so much is that the visual direction is agreed upon even before developers begin. This means the client has seen it, experienced it, responded and signed off on it. The color palette, typography, spacing and the overall tone were deliberate decisions made to reflect the clients vision, not just generated defaults.
This is a step easier skipped than done, especially since AI is so fast at it. But skipping it may have its drawbacks. The homepage feels different from the about page or buttons are almost the same but not quite.These aren’t really bugs, these are the result of building without a foundation, and the first to point these out would be the clients.
Some things still do need human eyes
Structural consistency can be audited, design consistency has to be seen not reviewed on code.
Clients notice when something is off, the users notice it, maybe not with the same vocabulary to name it precisely, but they know something's off. They can feel it. These are the moments that separates a website that was built from a website that was designed.
Responsiveness is where it shows off the most. Its all about what your initial intent for the website was that the AI will lay it out for you. For example, the typography that reads well on a large screen, becomes cramped on a small one. These aren't edge cases, these will be the primary experience of a significant portion of the site's visitors.
Fixing them requires someone who isn’t just checking whether it's working but rather whether it’s right.
AI has completely lowered the barrier to building a website or even systems for that matter. Especially for designers, it’s removed a layer of dependency and added more responsibility to make sure everything designed is reflected, even when working with developers in your team. It has definitely sped up my work.
But the things that make a website worth arriving at, such as clear visual language, a coherent system or designs that hold together across all screen sizes and all pages, those still require deliberate decision to come to life. The gap between a generated website and a designed one isn't technical. It's intentional.
