There is a recognisable look to machine-generated design right now. It is not that it is ugly — it is that it is average in a very specific way. These are the four tells we found and what we did about them.
1. Uniform vertical rhythm
Generated pages tend to give every section the same vertical padding. Human designers vary it constantly to signal importance. We now assign a weight to each section and derive spacing from it.
2. Palette by formula
Sampling hues at even intervals around a colour wheel produces palettes that are technically valid and visibly synthetic. We sample from curated palette families instead, then perturb within a bounded range.
3. Type pairing from the same five families
Model output gravitates to a handful of very common typefaces. We maintain an explicit pairing set with usage weights, deliberately under-weighting the obvious choices.
4. Copy that describes rather than says
The strongest tell is language. Generated copy defaults to describing the category — 'quality solutions for your business' — rather than saying something specific. We constrain generation to require at least one concrete, checkable detail per section.