The tells
Generated pages have a look. Seven tells, all of them fixable in an afternoon, none of them requiring design ability.
Your generated page may not look broken at all. The problem is that many of its choices are defaults.
It is defaulted. Many decisions have been filled in with common patterns rather than choices made for this particular page: a purple gradient, one radius on everything, low-contrast grey text, centred layouts, divs instead of semantic elements, placeholder copy and emoji used as icons.
These are not mistakes. They are the average of a very large amount of tutorial code, which is what the average of tutorial code looks like.
Switch them off one at a time below and watch the page stop looking generated. Notice how little each fix requires.
Seven tells, and the page underneath them
7 still showingLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Get StartedSed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore.
Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore.
Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore.
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This is roughly what comes back from "build me a landing page". Nothing is broken. Everything is defaulted. Switch one off and watch how little it takes.
Then look for all seven on your own page. You may find most of them. Fix what applies. None of this requires extraordinary design taste; it just requires you to make the decisions deliberately.
This is where Phase 00 changes direction. Up to this point you have mostly been producing. From here, you start judging the output, and Phase 01 develops that skill much further.
You should now be able to
- Recognise the seven markers of a default page
- Say why each one happens rather than just that it does
- Find all seven on your own page
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