Terminal Blog #002: Feeling creative and artsy - embracing the renaissance.
Terminal Blog #002: Feeling creative and artsy - embracing the renaissance.
You know those nights when you’re working on a few things and then you suddenly think about 1 thought that leads to just more questions? Yea, I initially had AI revise my blogs but they were so terrible. I kept saying I’d go back to revise the grammar and styling… I mean, since these are all on Github with version control anyway, but, what I realize now is that the AI slop writing was so bad that even myself refused to read half of it.
AI is great to get ideas out quickly and allowed me to journal, ask questions, and read/review the questions with answers in 1 post but lead to just soooo much dense material that had no flavor or personality to comb through.
Anyway, here’s my second “Terminal Blog” - straight from the terminal, no word processor with most minimal grammar updates.
Changes will be reflected in the post so it’s raw but not messy.
All night I’ve been re-designing an app I’ve been building starting with the most important intricate little details, the color theme and artistic style. I was exploring what AI mocked up but frankly and while it is stunning in the fine lines and details that would’ve taken a designer weeks to get it to scale and perform the way they intend. Now, AI is able to design such beautiful sites and apps but they all have that AI slop look. A lot of them have the cyberpunk vibe and colors to it, or the newer gradients I’m noticing using subtle dynamic “orbs” moving slowly behind the page - I kind of like that look a lot frankly. Regardless, it’s amazing how many ideas one can mock up today just based on an abstract artistic vision and clear expression of that abstract concept into words. That, honestly, is really difficult sometimes unless you draw it down as a wireframe first and perform the proper planning because when it comes to explaining art and design, I think that’s one of the more challenging things I’ve faced when trying to communicate with my AI agent. Usually it makes pretty good guesses on things that are more technical and science, but art and music - wherever or whatever is responsible for sparking that neuron in my creative brain is gnarly.
I went through probably 300 different iterations and design changes in the last 2 days just because I’d later go back and say, nooo- it’s not good enough, it’s too generic, or it’s too AI influenced and now I’m writing this blog because I think I finally have a muse.
At first, I thought well.. If the Ikea’s Billy Bookshelf Index is a decent indicator of the market trends, then theoretically by looking at Apple’s historical timeline progression of all iOS wallpapers over time paints a decent enough picture of where it’s going. Couple that up with Apple’s recent TikTok campaign introducing Neo and you can see that the Y2K classic gradient and old colorway from the original colorful mac PCs with those shells are back.
What I didn’t realize until as I’m typing this and looking at the marketing photos of the Macbook’s wallpaper is that the old school gradients from 2000s are making a comeback. I was following a forum thread about Y2K Futurism and there seems to be a movement and push for traditional digital art as AI is killing the cyberpunk vibe really quick with all the same looking aesthetic. What excited me the most is that Bryce renders and the same grunge tech abstract art that I loved to make when I was a kid is making its comeback!
Now, I really don’t think it’ll be completely like the old designs because let’s face it, some of the designs were a bit too “chaotic” or noisy with way too much brush packs and layers. Who knows, I could be completely wrong. I do notice is that gradients are back, and pop art styles as well.
I am guesstimating that the probability of the future of UI/UX for the next 5 years we’ll be seeing based off of my “Apple Wallpaper Index” is that we’ll be seeing more gradients, chrome, maybe chromatic gradients, mixed with glass. Sort of like a “neo Y2K bubble pop” - if that’s even a thing. Spheres and orb designs were really popular in the 2000s because it was the easiest thing to render in Bryce or 3D Studio Max (and yet would still take HOOOOOURS to render). Now with three.js we can ask AI to create even more realistic objects through vibe designing with javascript as the paintbrush and it’s near instantaneous. Because AI is so much faster to use for making designs, I know it will empower digital artists to create their masterpiece quicker than doing it pixel by pixel, layer by layer, and then rendering it and waiting days on dial-up.
I’m just excited to see where other artists who embrace AI to help express their inner creativity and see where the UI/UX of apps and websites head to next. Of course this is also a great time for all artists as the world is seeking for true genuine human emotion and creative expression through their works in the age of the AI Renaissance. After all, the Renaissance did occur following a period of rediscovery of old books that were once lost which sparked society to see the world very differently, leading to arts, inventions, and more.
How sure am I about any of this? Well, I’m familiar with the open source project from a Chinese student who made millions building what most of us who manage and orchestrate large swarms of agentic AIs do already. He was just wise to showcase it and got the right investor. 10 days… yea, that’s where all the money is going into these days.
I already had a smaller scale version of a swarm orchestrator that spins up agents, except just not to that scale. You can do this at a small scale using any AI model if you just feed it the proper data, the adequate amount, and yea. It identifies the appropriate subject matter experts, automatically identifies the teams necessary, and uses math to statistically calculate the minimum and maximum numbers to ensure the agents each took turns to converse in the quorum following psychology’s collective intelligence - not merely the sum of individual IQs, but heavily determined by the group’s interaction patterns, specifically how individuals talk and communicate. A high collective IQ is better predicted by the group’s collaboration process than by the average intelligence of its members.
See: Quorum
This goes to show that as long as you have the passion and the creative mind to do something, it’s possible, even more now than before. The barrier to entry has been leveled but this also means the ability to be creative, think abstractly, and be an artist is even more in demand while also knowing one’s own limitations and gaps in knowledge.
P.s. I had an AI run the predictions and it says in 10 years apps will be using the “humanism” design. It’s interesting because the aesthetic is similar to some AI apps and themes now. I always thought those color schemes were off but now I wonder if they ran a prediction model way before going live and were like “yep! Trust the fortune teller that knows stats and probabilities from data.”
None of this was edited, not even planned… I’ll upload the page the AI built when I asked it to predict what artists and designers would be building in 10 years.
P.p.s. I also started drawing and sketching in my journal the other night. I was very shocked at how decent it turned out! I haven’t sketched in forever! Probably since AP Art in HS honestly. Drawing ideas is so much easier to retain than writing sometimes.
Now For The Harder Questions
Will the “Neo Y2K Bubble Pop” just be another trend again?
I wonder if DaVinci stopped to think “Hmm following this crazy plague, I shall call this the Renaeesancehe.” (jk, idk how old Italians would pronounce it then.)
View the prediction page the AI built: POST-CYBERPUNK — The Human Web Returns