Slop Grenades, a Warming UX Job Market, and the New Bar for Designers

Dear Reader,

It's officially autumn, and the air is crisp with the sound of falling design career norms.

Here's what you need to know from the last two weeks...

How to turn your AI into a world-class designer

In this guest post for Lenny's Newsletter, Anshu Chimala really shared the sauce on how to get AI to do the kind of high-end web design that could only previously be done by someone with a septum piercing and gigantic baggy jeans.

I kid...but pay attention because I think this process will soon become the new bar for design.

The piece attacks what you already knew: that AI designs dead average web sites. But Anshu shares some tricks he has for getting around that, and it's the most practical thing I've read about AI design this year.

He even uses three of the stages of the Double Diamond to explain his process (he skips develop cuz...yeah AI does that now).

Here are some things that stood out:

Seed strings: He uses random strings of letters and numbers to force the AI to think outside the box
Ambitious briefs: Get crazy creative with your direction, like pixel art or an isometric 3D city instead of resorting to "make it modern."
A separate critic: Use a second model to critique your work as you go and keep going until you get 9 out of 10.
Real images and motion: Use a separate tool to generate the images, videos, and animations rather than letting the model use code to generate assets.
Remove AI tells: Find and replace the AI tells that don't make sense...usually the gradients, rainbow colors, and redundant text. (use this article to learn about the 7 biggest tells)

Why does this matter?

If a product manager can get a website to look like an agency did it, every designer better at least be that good.

The article is behind a paywall, but the free part is enough to inspire you to start thinking differently about how you use AI in design. Read it on Lenny's Newsletter

Randomizer prompt from Anshu Chimala

This is the best prompt in the Lenny's Newsletter piece we mentioned earlier. This should get your AI working outside of the average.

I want you to build me a landing page for [project].

Follow this procedure:

- Generate a long, random alphanumeric string using a shell script.
- Define the creative direction (color scheme, layout, typography, etc.) based on the string.
- Look beyond the surface for subpatterns, special numbers, anything that inspires you.
- Use your judgment to bring this direction to life and make it look great.

- Don’t reveal the string in the design. It’s only for your inspiration.

Source: Anshu Chimala

In other more depressing news...

This one hurts...a designer on r/UXDesign posted that they were asked to design the design system that ultimately replaced them. They did the work to make AI more useful, and it cost them their job. Woof. Read the thread.

That one colleague...

Source

Slop Grenades

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke dropped an amazing term in an interview: slop grenade. A slop grenade is when someone uses AI poorly, barely checks the result, and ultimately forces someone else to clean it up.

Slop grenades are often dropped on more junior employees. That AI slop powerpoint deck that took the manager 10 minutes to make but the designer two days to fix is a slop grenade. The 40-page research report full of AI-generated text is a slop grenade just waiting for someone to pull the pin. Managers may not realize it, but there is always someone that has to clean up the shrapnel.

The real question is: are you receiving or making slop grenades?

Stop doubting yourself

If you're reading this, you're one of the intelligent ones. Push harder for your ideas.

Paul Bakaus turned his portfolio into a boss fight

Paul Bakaus rebuilt his portfolio as a game where he fights the Jirasaurus in a retro video game style. He used Claude to create it over ten days. When portfolio-making gets cheaper, designers are gonna innovate! Read the write-up and play the game.

The UX job market: hot or not?

Hmmmmmm...warm?

AcademyUX has a website that tracks US job postings and layoffs, and their September update shows some interesting intel:

Design Engineering postings (which includes AI Product Designer roles) went up 23.2%.
Product Design postings went up 5.7%.
UX Research postings fell 18.4%.
Tech layoffs fell 36% from the month before
Remote roles are up to 31.8% of postings.

Looks like companies are interested in designers that can add engineering and AI. They're also expecting you to create your own insights. So...you gotta be the whole product trio, basically. Cool, cool, cool. See all the warm charts.