In May, several people looked at this site and asked, “Oh, Claude designed that, right?” They recognised the cream paper, ink drawings and journal typography as an AI default that I had chosen on purpose.
The journal followed an earlier terminal aesthetic that the April log called an extremely unoriginal reflection of me. I then asked for something outspoken and “not a cookie cutter standard template looking site.” E. H. Shepard gave the brief a visual reference. I grew up with his pencil work in the original Winnie-the-Pooh books, where a few coarse strokes could carry a whole bear. Claude redesigned the site around cream paper and ink drawings.
I tried to rescue the journal over several rounds, often from my phone. The first project message is a paragraph about Shepard’s pencil strokes. Later, one complete message reads, “One text. One copy button. Go.” By then I was giving instructions six words at a time.
One rescue attempt returned yellow paper with illustrations that looked nothing like Shepard. My log says, “It’s a three year old’s work.” Two of the other options looked the same to me. The next prompt asked to remove the paper, yellow and typefaces that people associated with generated sites. The result kept the same look in a sicklier colour. I wrote, “We can let the field journal go,” and asked for a completely different direction. The next result was still 100% “LLM generated tell” look, just slightly more orange.
I had already had the same fight with the writing. At the start of February I wrote a style file that told the agent to assume a university level of literacy and to “not ‘skip’ when ‘elide’ is apt.” Three weeks later I read a post I had co-authored with it and hated the short, punchy constructions such as “you try it. the illusion shatters.” In May I was again getting the default pattern I had asked the generator to remove, this time in the site design.
I typed a new instruction: “So try to go for scandinavian architect inspired instead. Strong bold colors, shapes, big font types.” The options used large sans type, saturated colour fields and photographic blocks. I picked the Stockholm Design Lab direction. It produced the hard edges and white space used here now.
Only after choosing it did I connect the result to Rotterdam. I grew up there in the 1980s and 90s, in a centre bombed flat in 1940 and rebuilt with modern architecture, public art and saturated colour. My mom took me to museums and to works outside, including the Gabo beside De Bijenkorf. As a child I had no explanation for the hard edges and bright fields.
I chose Stockholm Design Lab because it was strong and unlike the generator defaults. Rotterdam came back to me later, while I was trying to explain why the colour fields felt familiar. I may be retrofitting the connection because I made it decades after the museum visits.
One useful rule survived the journal design. Article images should look as though they were made on the page being read. Borders and objects cannot end at the image edge because that separates the illustration from the surrounding type. The current images use that rule with saturated colour instead of yellow paper.
The front page now opens with one large word on a colour field, and the article images keep the page rule without the yellow paper.