

Show HN: Website themes designed by machine - diminish
https://www.resimit.com

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armandososa
They are terrible! which is good because that means I'm not getting obsolete
anytime soon. On the other hand, I'd love to see this AI get better and make
me obsolete. How are you training it?

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victoriap
:-) I'm sure good designers will never get obsolete. I responded with
technical details to some sister comments.

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victoriap
Hi everyone, this is our second iteration of machine designed website
templates. Currently we're only generating WordPress themes, but we're also
testing static & Drupal templates for a given design.

Our goal is to do creative visual design using machine learning and AI
algorithms and to provide diverse creative elements with minimal configuration
or customization.

It's a bit hard to separate sample content from theme characteristics, and
we're aware we must show fancier preview content.

Anyway, I appreciate any feedback on what we're doing, what we've done, and
what we could do better.

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LaurensBER
I love the idea! What metrics do you judge to automatically judge the quality
of the templates in order to improve the algorithms?

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victoriap
Initially we made a statistical analysis of 10K web sites on particular design
choices such as layout, color scheme snd colors, fonts, decorational elements.
We also made a rating review with 500 people to judge themes with some
ratings... Then we backpropagate the ratings to suppress some parameters and
produce newer themes with more of the good ones..

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nobodysfool
From what I've seen, it looks like it's not quite working. As far as I can
tell, it takes a range of numbers, picks something random in between, and
calls it a day. Most of those themes that I saw make me want to hire a
designer because they look like something I could do myself (and I am awful at
design).

I think the issue is that your machine learning doesn't seem to know what goes
together and what doesn't. It may focus in on a small subset, but then it
mixes and matches elements that don't go together. Like it's not seeing the
whole picture, more it's taking certain elements from 'good pages' and
jumbling them all up. If it randomly produces a good design, how are you sure
that it's not an exact copy of one of the training designs?

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victoriap
Check this for instance:
[https://resimit.com/?rc=aujgxsxj](https://resimit.com/?rc=aujgxsxj) Do you
think it's something a non-designer could do?

The integration algorithm merges orthogonal dimensions based on human
feedback. For example, a monotonic color scheme with 3 columnar layout, flat
design and no borders could be a few of the orthogonal parameters. Final
feedback comes from humans, and I guess that ll ensure an overall harmonic
result.

With newer iterations and more feedback it's getting better indeed.

Edit: I appreciate your critical thinking.

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theoh
Here are some thoughts based on my experience with graphic design (not so much
web design.)

First, you might find it interesting to look into Shape Grammars. While shape
grammars are a dead end from a creative design point of view, they can capture
layout strategies that work but can be varied parametrically. One crucial area
that the theme you posted falls down on is balancing negative space around
images and panels. Using a shape grammar which constructed the layout with
border elements, centered elements, etc. could fix this.

Another thought is to consider the fact that letterpress printing is often
taught to design students before computer tools, because it enforces a great
degree of discipline in laying out elements. Students move on from that to
design with a grid system. The theme "abdvbjtx" on the resimit front page as I
look at it is missing a sense of alignment and grid structure, although it is
impressively complex in terms of layering. The typographic and rational side
of things needs work, basically to bring visual order to all the elements. I
think some kind of generative grammar is probably the only practical way to
achieve this.

As far as typeface choice goes, that seems to be a weak point but it is such a
complex and emotional thing that I doubt it can be automated beyond specifying
serif fonts for old-style centered layouts and sans serif for more modern,
left-aligned layouts.

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lbotos
You should take a page from heroku's book and use "real names" (cryptic-
waters-994,foaming-sands-234,etc) instead of just a hash for the theme name.

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victoriap
Thanks for the great hint.

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nobodysfool
When you say 'machine designed' I imagine a designer going through and
intelligently choosing colors, photos, font sizes and dimensions because they
went to school, they know what looks good, they have a good education. What
designers have worked in your toolkit to produce these, and where did you
learn design? If this is intelligently designed, I would like to know more
about the process. From what I can see, I understand why designers get the
money that they do.

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victoriap
I responded to a sister comment with more details. By machine, i mean machine
learning algorithms... Yes i agree that hiring a good designer might produce
excellent designs.. That's our challenge, to iterate till we pass a point of
neat, elegant designs..

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catshirt
a few minor things will go a long way (consistent padding, alignment, better
colors). but this is awesome

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drprep
It would be helpful to understand why a particular template might work... why
the algorithms landed on a particular design.

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victoriap
We backpropagate the user feedback about a particular theme to its design
element parameters. Then we use new parameters to produce better themes.

