Wes Bos on Why Design’s Making a Comeback in 2026

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In this RedMonk Conversation, Wes Bos, co-host of Syntax, chats with Kate Holterhoff about why he predicts 2026 is the year design makes a comeback. They explore why the design of exceptional websites like landonorris.com can be a critical differentiator in the digital space, particularly as AI tools simplify the creation of visually appealing websites. Wes emphasizes that while the baseline for web design has improved, the challenge now lies in creating unique and engaging user experiences that stand out in a sea of similar-looking sites. He highlights the importance of usability and the need for developers to invest time in thoughtful design, moving beyond cookie-cutter solutions to create memorable web experiences.

Sentry is a RedMonk client, but this is an unpaid content.

Transcript

Kate Holterhoff (00:04)
Welcome to the MonkCast. You see what I did there, Wes? My name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at Redmonk. I have Wes Bos, co-host of Syntax, with me today. Wes is an accomplished developer and educator, and I am super stoked to have him here on the pod. So, Wes, welcome.

Wes Bos (00:20)
Hey, thanks lot for having me. Excited to be

Kate Holterhoff (00:22)
you know, it’s January Everybody, all the thought leaders, they’re out here with their predictions. You and Scott Tolinski did one, I was on board, you you talked about CVEs You mentioned some of the React issues this past year, RPCs, all this stuff, super important. But what interested me the most from your predictions was the design thing. So you argue design’s making a comeback. I wanna hear more about that. Why is that, you know, your first prediction?

Wes Bos (00:43)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, the design world, I feel like the last couple of years, it kind of shifted. It was very important early on because people were putting out sites and apps that were, not usable. Design is very important in making sure that your application is usable and friendly and people get the most out of it. And then also just in terms of brand, how you portray yourself on the internet.

And we had, I feel like we had a couple of years where a lot of these UI frameworks came out and a lot of people could just put together very good looking websites. And now that we have AI being able to generate a lot of the code, they’re cranking out like very usable, very decent looking websites. think that those are, it’s very important. And now we sort of like have this like baseline of

with very little effort, you can make it fairly usable. can NPM install, shed the end, or grab some tailwind components and tweak them a little bit. And it looks like half decent, like pretty usable, which is great that the baseline for everything is no longer just awful. The baseline for everything is pretty good. So.

But now we’re at a spot where it’s like, but like, what’s your differentiator? If it is so easy to get a baseline of doable, how can we now explore, there’s kind of two sides to it, right? There’s a usability side of now that it is not so hard and not so much work to do this basic stuff, which is just styling it up, I think we have a bit more time to spend on.

the usability. So like I could spend a whole bunch of time in like, what does this photo picker upload UI look like? Or this drop down filter where I can multi-select other things. Like that might have been absolutely massive undertaking in the past where now it’s a little bit more doable. So people are starting, at least what I’m starting to see is like the products that are like.

better are starting to put a lot more time into the UX usability design of their actual product. And then you have like the other side, which is like this, Lando Norris website that came out a couple of months ago. And it was just absolutely showstopper, jaw-dropping amazing. There’s just like, it’s absolutely full of cutting edge web stuff, 3D stuff you have never seen on the web before. And

And that aspect is it’s a differentiator, right? Because if everything on the web starts looking exactly the same, I don’t necessarily know if there’s too much wrong with everything looking exactly the same, right? Like if you open up Twitter, you open up threads, you open up Instagram. Sometimes I forget which app I’m on because they all look exactly the same. And I think a lot of people like that because it’s familiar to me. I know how to use it.

But from a brand perspective of like, we need to have a show stopper. You need to stop people from scrolling. You need people to go to this website and check it out and enjoy it. I think that’s a huge way that people can differentiate themselves, which is just these beautiful next generation websites. And I feel like we’re starting to see a lot more of that.

Kate Holterhoff (04:11)
Yeah, okay, I really appreciate that rundown. So for RedMonk’s website, I’ve written a little bit about the Shadcn issue and the fact that a lot of these AI tools where you can crank out a website real quick, lovable.

And even UI component libraries all have Shadcn under the hood. And the reason is that this library allows you to cut out snippets of code. And so it’s just like this revenge of copypasta models have access to this and so they’re able to just import them very easily. But I suspect that there’s more going on than just the rise of Shadcn and the fact that it’s under the hood of all these.

Wes Bos (04:41)
Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (04:48)
tools that are allowing us to have baseline UI experiences across a lot of different websites. You mentioned Raycast, for instance, on Syntax. So I guess, is there anything else that I’m missing that has led to the homogenization of these websites historically, beyond Shadcn?

Wes Bos (05:06)
Um, I think it’s just like develop developers don’t want to change things. Um, and, and we’ve seen this, this is the Shadcn is it’s not new with Shadcn, right? We had it with bootstrap. We had it with foundation. had it with jQuery UI. Uh, we had it with a lot of the Tailwind stuff, which is why a lot of the AI stuff is generated purple. Um, it’s just that like a lot of developers who don’t necessarily have an eye.

Kate Holterhoff (05:22)
Yeah.

Yeah

Wes Bos (05:33)
for design, you make something and you just make a bigger mess and it doesn’t look good. And it’s much easier just to slap this thing in there. And the funny thing is that all of these tools that we’ve had for these UIs, they’re meant to be able to change. They’re set up so that you can have a basis, but you can change it. But almost nobody tweaks them.

too much where you can almost just see what a website is using off the bat. So to answer your question, your question was like, there, is there something else to this type of thing? I think it’s just simply like people, there’s limited time for these types of things. And if you can slap this UI on it, it actually looks pretty good and it’s significantly better than what,

Kate Holterhoff (06:09)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Wes Bos (06:23)
like what a developer would have just scratched together themselves. So I think that that’s the important bit there.

Kate Holterhoff (06:29)
Yeah, that makes sense. so. I don’t know if you are subscribed to the Pragmatic Engineer, but Gergely Orosz’s latest.

newsletter came out and was actually talking about design systems. And I loved the example that he used in there where if you don’t use something like that, your app will look like a college project. There’s a certain feel if you don’t have everything unified across the site and that it meets these expectations that the user has. But yeah.

Wes Bos (06:53)
Yeah.

It’s all just bodged together. And on the podcast, we often talk about like rot as well, or things that drift. If you don’t have like a design system or something in place, then all of a sudden you’ve got, you’re like, oh, this looks good and this will look good here. And then, I don’t know, over two or three years, start like your UI starts to drift, it starts to rot. And then you’ve just got this mishmash of different styles in there.

Kate Holterhoff (07:22)
Yeah, that’s so true. and it seems like as apps are created in this more ephemeral way as we move into this AI, whatever’s coming down the road, that that’s probably gonna become more and more true. Very interesting. Okay, so you mentioned the Lando Norris website. For folks who haven’t seen it, and you’ve done a ton of great videos and,

content around this already. definitely check out the Syntax, YouTube channel and things where you’re talking about this website. But for folks who just don’t have the time, what is the TLDR? Why is it such a cool web experience?

Wes Bos (07:57)
Yeah, there’s a lot of neat ways that they portray all the information that needs to get across, right? So like they have a gallery of all the helmets and just like the shape around the helmet, the way that it reacts when you hover over each of them. The races have like a 3D track modeled, so it’s like kind of spinning around. And it’s just this immersive experience that makes you want to stay on the site and just kind of

keep scrolling around, going through all the different little bits. And like certainly he could have just put together a very basic website, but that’s not the brand of Lando Norris, right? He’s the absolute best and everything that he does is extension of his brand, right? And…

every little bit from the little card hover, the Bezier curves, the easings, the edges, the we hover over a link and the text has a really neat effect. All of that stuff took a ton of time, like simply just the one thing of hovering over a text effect like we recreated ourselves. And it probably took at least an hour or two hours to absolutely nail. Right. And that’s just like one percent of it. So obviously a lot of care.

Kate Holterhoff (09:15)
Wow.

Wes Bos (09:18)
went into this website and everybody talked about it. It worked. It did exactly. I’ll tell you right now, I don’t watch racing. I had no idea who this guy was. And obviously people are like, oh, this is Lando Norris. He’s huge, absolutely massive. You’re an idiot if you don’t know who he is. But that just goes to show that his brand

Kate Holterhoff (09:24)
Yeah.

just wondering if you’re an F1 fan. Yeah.

Wes Bos (09:44)
pushed outside of his circles even further. And now I know who he is. I saw his toy at Costco the other day. I hear about him on TV. It obviously worked, right?

Kate Holterhoff (09:53)
Yeah, that’s funny. Yeah, and I’m curious about this. how, so you mentioned that the internet kind of blew up around this site. I definitely saw a few things. How do you keep up on what’s considered good design? I mean, I know there’s like newsletters and stuff, but like, how did you find this?

Wes Bos (10:08)
I keep my ear like pretty close to the ground on like design Twitter. just what’s going on. I find if you interact with a lot of design Twitter, your, the algo will start feeding you a lot more of it. people tag me in it. That’s, that’s maybe not necessarily a great tip for the audience, but,

Kate Holterhoff (10:12)
Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Wes Bos (10:30)
There’s also like awards. I know like I think Framer’s coming out with awards. There’s several websites that will have like web design awards. And it used to be a really big thing in like the CSS world. And for a long time it just turned into this like here’s a photo of like someone wearing Nikes and then a button over top and like there’s a beautiful website. It was just big photos and buttons over top of them for a long time. But

Kate Holterhoff (10:55)
Yeah.

Wes Bos (10:59)
The web’s getting computers are getting better. Now people are really pushing into this 3D space. And basically, think any time something is really cool, you’re going to you’re going to hear about it.

Kate Holterhoff (11:05)
Yeah.

Okay, okay, yeah, I didn’t know if you had any recs in terms of like, newsletters or things where folks are just like following this and… Yeah.

Wes Bos (11:17)
People always ask me that and I say, I am the source. Listen to Syntax, follow me. Because I’ve got all these different feeds of software updates and whatnot and then I have a lot of people I follow on Twitter but at least I, it’s hard to keep up and my recommendation is follow somebody who does that as their job so that you can just be mama birded all the stuff.

Kate Holterhoff (11:29)
Yeah.

Fair enough. Okay. Well, I mean, that helps though. Like social media, it sounds like is a big way of doing this. Okay. Very cool. All right. So this gets to my second point, which I think…

Wes Bos (11:48)
Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (11:53)
is so interesting. So you had mentioned the fact that a lot of developers aren’t interested in really thinking about the design thing. Like they want to be handed a system or they just feel like that’s not where their talents lie or they want to work on like, I don’t know, the business logic or something. But that’s not always the case. There’s a lot of front end engineers, especially who think of themselves as sort of designers. So Wes, I’m interested, do you self identify as a designer?

Wes Bos (12:17)
Yes, I would say so. Yeah, I love design and for people who are like actual designers, they don’t like that. But like I’ve been like I started my career off doing design. I would do t-shirts and album art. was doing print very early on and like I consider myself primarily a developer, but

Kate Holterhoff (12:19)
love that. Yeah, I’ve had.

no.

Wes Bos (12:44)
everything I build out, do all the design for as well. it’s certainly not like there’s a, there’s another level to it of like somebody who is spending time doing UX research and all of that. There’s, another level of like, it looks cool and it’s extremely usable. think there’s another level I’m not at there, but I do consider myself a designer and I love to enjoy a nice user interface.

Kate Holterhoff (13:09)
Yeah, no, and I think that comes across not only with your feelings about like choosing whether to use dark mode or light mode on a website, which I found very interesting, but also.

Wes Bos (13:20)
Ha ha ha.

Kate Holterhoff (13:21)
Yeah, mean, could just, your enthusiasm for the design of these web experiences just comes across really clearly to me. And I think that’s really exciting because I feel that way too. But I think another thing that’s interesting, so back when I was a front-end engineer, if the engineering team was overextended, the designers would sometimes spin up their own websites on like Webflow. And we’re talking like five years ago, so this is ancient history. But now that we’re in this AI vibe coding era,

I know that this is only gonna be happening more and more and it’s evolving. So I think that we’re seeing these roles really smush together in exciting ways. Yeah. But at the same time, I think what’s so cool too is that now that we have these AI tools to do a lot of the thinking for us, we’re able to use more sophisticated tools. So you had said

Wes Bos (13:56)
yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (14:09)
on this predictions podcast about becoming a mathematician in order to use some of the new tools and AI will do that for you now. So it just opens up all these new aesthetic opportunities that, you know, designers and front-end engineers weren’t able to access before.

So I think that’s just like really cool where we have this meeting of not only just, know, ooh, this is pretty, this is just the superficial wrapping on, whatever is actually happening in the back end, but also like, you know, this is hard, this is difficult stuff, and now we’re able to do it in ways we couldn’t before.

Wes Bos (14:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, the AI is really allowing people to get out of their lane. You’re able to like eat off other people’s plates. And designers love that because like it’s designers hate having to interface with like a grumpy a dev who just like won’t implement their crazy idea that they had. So now that they can push a little bit more into that. And then like I feel the same way as well, like the amount of like like C# or C++ I’ve been writing.

Kate Holterhoff (14:48)
like that.

you

Wes Bos (15:10)
In the last year or so doing hardware projects, I’m dipping into Swift, some code I’ve never written. It’s really broadening the areas that anyone is able to dip into. Which I think a lot of people don’t necessarily like that because it’s like, I’ve spent my entire career understanding how this

like memory management in the browser works. And this is what I’m an expert in. I think there’s still space for those people as well. But for people who just want to get stuff done, these tools are so great for being able to expand past your lanes.

Kate Holterhoff (15:47)
Wow, I like that metaphor. Makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, I think it’s so interesting how I’m seeing roles evolve and morph into new ones. gosh, I don’t know, who knew that the word vibe coding was gonna stick around so long, but I mean, I don’t know, we’re all just vibing now. And being able to use like nano banana to like also like illustrate a lot of our.

Wes Bos (16:03)
Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (16:12)
I don’t know, ideas. It’s extending into everything. It’s PowerPoints, it’s the whole thing. So, yeah, so we’re all becoming designers is what I’m saying. Whether or not you self-identify as one, the capabilities is, I don’t know, it’s opened up.

Wes Bos (16:25)
Yeah, though the one thing that is not there is is creativity and taste. Like those those things are cannot be AI’d I think like the AI can help you come up with ideas and maybe push into areas you weren’t necessarily thinking about. But at the at the end of the day, it’s not going to be good if you don’t know why it is good. And the people that have that creativity, like the Lando Norris,

Kate Holterhoff (16:33)
That’s good. Yeah.

Wes Bos (16:55)
the devs behind that and the designers behind that, and then the people that have just good taste. Whether you’re designing an API or whether you’re actually designing something that’s visual.

Kate Holterhoff (17:07)
Right, okay, yeah, super interesting. I wanna hear more about the performance issue with the Norris website. So one of the things I think was so interesting is historically when we would see these interactive, unusual sort of experiences, JavaScript heavy websites, they would be very laggy.

And that is just not the case with the Lando Norris website. And you spend some time talking about that. I think it’s interesting, too, that you sort of made the offhand comment that there’s no, it’s not using a framework. It’s not using React. There’s a of libraries. I was wondering if you consider that like a signal. Because we always talk about how laggy, especially on old devices, a React website is, a spa, right? And here we have something that is

Wes Bos (17:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (17:54)
not using a framework at all, isn’t laggy, and is doing something completely different. How do you, I don’t know, can you square that? what, does that tell us anything about where we’re going with spas in the future?

Wes Bos (18:05)
I don’t think so. Cause like, like the Lando site is a spa. And I think if the Lando site was done in React, it would still have been fast. The reason the Lando site would be fast. And the reason why sites are laggy is generally not because of the framework that it’s, it’s built in. If people love to like throw it on copious amounts of JavaScript and whatnot, but like that’s typically not the problem. The problem typically is

Kate Holterhoff (18:07)
Okay.

Okay. Yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

Wes Bos (18:34)
is at like a rendering. You can make a website slow at many things, right? It could be network sensitivity. It could be like responding to inputs. But the folks that made the Lando site really understand, in their case, it was mostly rendering performance of like, how do you paint this thing to the screen?

Kate Holterhoff (18:39)
Mm-hmm.

Wes Bos (18:57)
in order to make sure that it is as fast as possible. like one thing that Lando site does is you’ll see there’s not there’s not drop shadows on anything. If you put a drop shadow on absolutely everything, the browser needs to compute that opacity. You know, you’ve got things stacked on top of things. And now and now it needs to figure out there’s two different layers and I have to rerender both of them. What does it look like when it’s when it’s peering through, you know, or is there a bunch of blend modes that are happening between the two’s?

Kate Holterhoff (19:13)
Mm-hmm.

Wes Bos (19:27)
How often are you re-rendering these things? Caching, assets, all of that type of stuff. the reason why the Lando site is fast is simply just like the devs behind it are like really good. They know a lot about performance and they spend a lot of time fussing with it.

Kate Holterhoff (19:48)
Yeah. Did you reach out to the team that built it?

Wes Bos (19:50)
Yeah. yeah. Yeah. So once I posted the video, I got a couple of DMs from the different devs on it. we did try and have them on the podcast, but the, they had to go through the Lando team and get approval on it and nothing really came of that. But, yeah, they gave me a lot of little insights as to like why things were like that. Part of it was just like, this is just the restraints that we had. And then part of it was just like, yeah, we know.

Kate Holterhoff (20:10)
Ugh.

Wes Bos (20:17)
We spent a lot of time fussing with the performance of how these things work.

Kate Holterhoff (20:21)
man, well that’s very cool. I didn’t realize that, but that makes sense. I know some other folks got on the bandwagon and tried to like rebuild it, vibe code, Lando’s sites, see how far they could get, things like that. But yeah, I mean, it was clear that you would really dug into some of the specifics, the libraries.

Wes Bos (20:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, like one thing that they did, I remember talking to them is on on iOS with WebGL, that’s the 3D stuff on iOS. You’re able to send a lot of the models right to the graphics chip on the phone, which has much better performance, apparently, than actually running it like in just in WebGL directly with like like PNG images.

Kate Holterhoff (20:46)
Yeah.

Wes Bos (21:04)
So like when it is supported, they had this special file format that they were able to send directly to the chip, you know, and that kind of like trickiness is generally packaged up into like a framework that would just take care of that, like lower level heavy lifting for you. So we’ll probably start to see frameworks and whatnot that that take care of that for you, because like I think your your average dev is not going to go to the length of

Kate Holterhoff (21:04)
Yeah.

Wes Bos (21:32)
Like the the helmet animation alone is like six or seven different layers all on top of each other in 3d space, right? And then you would have to have double those because they’re different formats for iOS versus other browsers

Kate Holterhoff (21:49)
So I guess let’s maybe talk a little bit about the money part of this. I can’t remember where I had heard this, but somewhere I saw the number that the Lando Norris site was like a $50,000 website. Was that, did, can you confirm that? Is that, am I just making that up?

Wes Bos (22:03)

I, I never got any numbers from them.

Kate Holterhoff (22:08)
Okay.

Okay, that’s fair enough. We could leave him vague.

Wes Bos (22:10)
But like, I’m just thinking like 50 grand,

that’s a lot of money, but it also seems kind of low. like they had, like imagine, I think they probably had like five devs on it, you know? And if you’ve got five devs at, I don’t know what, even if they’re $100,000 a year, which is probably low for a developer of this caliber, probably very low.

Kate Holterhoff (22:17)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Wes Bos (22:35)
You know, like that 50 grand, that’s, that’s just a couple of weeks of dev. And I kind of doubt that that would go that it probably is more, but this is a extremely huge, build, you know, like it, this is not just like a landing page that has like a cool animation. like there’s many pages into this, many different features, there’s a store, you know, like all kinds of, all kinds of stuff there.

Kate Holterhoff (22:35)
Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, okay. I’m trying to find it here where I saw that. I feel like it was a YouTube video, Well, regardless of the figure, obviously, he invested a lot of money into this, or his team did at least. yeah, there were lots of corners that could be cut that weren’t. I mean, it’s a work of art, right? It really is like, it demonstrates that investment. So my follow-up question to you then is,

Wes Bos (23:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (23:28)
you know, in terms of the prediction that, you 2026, we’re gonna see this, the pendulum swing away from just cookie cutter websites to things that are a little more bespoke as that differentiator. What would you say would be the business case for that? Like how are companies going to explain the ROI? know, talk to me about that.

Wes Bos (23:47)
Yeah, that’s a hard one, right? Because for a lot of people spending 50 grand on a website, you’re never gonna see that back, right? Honestly, I always bring it back to it being a brand play. Not versus, he’s selling more t-shirts or whatever, but more of like…

Kate Holterhoff (23:51)
Yeah.

Wes Bos (24:12)
this is just a huge extension of his brand. And if he’s spending however much every single year advertising, your company is spending money on commercials or billboards or whatever, this is certainly a good avenue to have an extension of your brand. I don’t past that. How do you do the ROI on this type of thing? It’s.

Kate Holterhoff (24:36)
Mm-hmm.

Wes Bos (24:37)
It’s a tricky thing, right? Because design is a really hard thing to have ROI on because you certainly could have put this all as just text on a page and you would have gotten the same information across. if that’s what you’re trying to do, I don’t know that there is an ROI for that. But if it’s a brand play and you’re really trying to like cement this is who we are, then I think that that’s where you got to look.

Kate Holterhoff (24:48)
Yeah.

I feel that. Yeah, I mean, I’m kind of on the fence with this. Oh, and by the way, I I found it’s Life of Guarez is the YouTube channel that said it was a $50,000 website, unless I’m, there’s a lot of zeros there. Yeah, I think I’m getting that right. Anyways, so we can neither confirm nor deny that that is the amount that the team’s spent on there.

Wes Bos (25:14)
Okay.

Kate Holterhoff (25:24)
But yeah, I am suspect of this, but I think it’s interesting, 2025, there was a lot of investment put into design in terms of dev tools. So I’m thinking of like a Figma IPO-ing. We also saw just a lot of movement. mean, I’m a big Canva user, and so Canva added a bunch of features. And then, like the Nano Banana, I mentioned them already. So there does just seem to be a lot of…

energy put into design. Clearly, it’s something that we all want, it makes us feel good. But I, I’m concerned that about this. And I think part of it is like, I mentioned being on an interactive team myself. And so I just, I’ve seen what good designers can do. Like the designers that I worked with were so talented. They did stuff I wouldn’t even think of, they had such a, a huge corpus of

Wes Bos (26:07)
Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (26:14)
experience and they just, they really created some killer stuff that like, if it was just left to the front end engineers, like that would never have happened. I mean, God, the head of our engineering department had this like basically an HTML hyperlink website that she would always share when she was like, this is the perfect website, right? It was just like the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. Right. So, so you definitely don’t want the engineers to be in charge of this. We, I feel like we can all agree with that, but also, yeah, I don’t know.

Wes Bos (26:30)
Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (26:41)
I guess I just hear lot of like concern about that. it’s a tough one Wes. I’m nervous for my friends, know, we’re all worried about losing our jobs. Yeah.

Wes Bos (26:47)
Who are designers? Yeah, it’s it’s a tricky thing because like as someone who doesn’t like make his money for design, I love that people use Canva now because the everything every single thing that like our teachers make every single like church picnic poster. It’s decent. And it’s the same thing with like the Shadcn components is that like we went from like this like

Kate Holterhoff (26:56)
Yeah.

Wes Bos (27:15)
Microsoft Word typed up thing to like half decent looking things and it conveys the information and I’d argue that’s better than the alternative. But then there’s like that there’s that like whole another level which is like yeah that’s just that’s that’s your table stakes and now how do you push that even further to get good design.

and make a beautiful site and all of that. yeah, it is a very tricky thing. And especially when you’re trying to convince somebody who’s holding the money of like, hey, no, like I know that you just like typed into that box and something half beautiful came out, but like that’s not the end of it, right? There’s UI, there’s interaction, there’s brand, there’s so much more to

Kate Holterhoff (27:52)
Yeah.

Wes Bos (28:08)
good design than just like what it looks like.

Kate Holterhoff (28:10)
For sure, for

Canva too. Have you used Affinity? That was the one, they bought that last year.

Wes Bos (28:16)
yeah, I was an Affinity user years ago. I tried to make the switch from Adobe products. I ultimately cannot and didn’t, but yeah, it’s kind of exciting what they’re doing there.

Kate Holterhoff (28:20)
Okay.

Yeah, I have not tried it yet. I’m just, I’m a basic person using the regular Canva stuff, background remover. I don’t know, I need to branch out, I guess. Although I will say my experience with their AI and the chat features has not gone well. I’ve kind of written those off. Yeah, I think that was maybe pushed to market a little too quickly.

Wes Bos (28:41)
Ha

Yeah, I think people people realize as well when like when everybody’s using Canva and you see something that’s not done in Canva and go, how did you do that? That’s beautiful. I like that. That makes me feel good. You know, like our like basis for what is good and what you enjoy changes. And that’s why people are always trying to just come out with these big shockers like the Lando Norris website that goes

Kate Holterhoff (29:01)
Yes.

Yeah.

Wes Bos (29:19)
Whoa, I wasn’t expecting that. That’s sick. You know?

Kate Holterhoff (29:23)
so if we’re talking about beautiful websites, do you think there’s also an impulse to make 2026 the year of like weird web experiences? You know, everyone talks nostalgically about, the old days, the old web, right? I mean, is that part of this conversation?

Wes Bos (29:38)
Yeah, weird is kind of cool, but also just like when you come upon an app that is slightly different, it just shows that there was some thought and care put into this thing. I can’t tell you how quickly I close apps when I can just feel that this thing is vibe coded. I don’t trust it.

Kate Holterhoff (29:54)
Mm-hmm.

Wes Bos (30:02)
Um, if it’s got like the purple gradients and these buttons and like all the same stuff that you’re seeing all day long, there’s, there’s an element of trust that is it just immediately lost when you’re, you’re on these things. So you land on something now and if it, if it interacts, it acts, not necessarily interaction, but if it just looks a little bit different and catches my eye, I immediately think in my head, Oh, there’s people behind this. This is an actually an app that I can use and not just something that somebody

Kate Holterhoff (30:08)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Wes Bos (30:30)
vibe-coded and spit out and it’s not gonna be working in six months or I’m gonna upload my bank statements to it or something crazy like that.

Kate Holterhoff (30:39)
Yeah, yeah, I know when you say you don’t trust it, I’m like, is this just like a matter of like, well, I’m choosing between two products and this one looks like their marketing website was not vibe coded or is it like, yeah, it’s going to, it’s going to steal my credit card.

Wes Bos (30:49)
Yeah. And same thing with like, like even like model photos on websites. If if I’m looking at like a shirt and it’s it’s clear that they’ve used. AI to put the shirt on somebody, I think in some regard, that’s OK. But then in other words, I just immediately like, this is probably some print on demand scam company, you know, or they’re drop shipping some crap to me. Whereas if it’s.

Kate Holterhoff (31:16)
Yeah.

Wes Bos (31:17)
something that’s not like that. go, Oh, it’s a legitimate company. put some care into that. So it’s a delicate balance.

Kate Holterhoff (31:25)
Yeah, such a point. I just watched a demo video today for product and it was so clear that the individuals in this like fake company were all just AI generated people, like just the lighting, the whole thing. And yeah, I was like, this is disappointing. I’m already bored. Like I, you know, I know where this is going.

Wes Bos (31:37)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s exciting for a couple of months until everybody starts doing it. And then again, our baselines change.

Kate Holterhoff (31:48)
And I actually think that you have implicitly pointed to that ROI thing. Like you are more likely to spend money at an e-commerce site, because it appears like somebody put some thought into it, that they actually hired models to try on the shirt, whatever. Yeah, I feel like…

Wes Bos (32:05)
Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (32:07)
there’s this move away from the, I don’t know, the uncanny valley feel of these AI experiences, perfect as they are. So yeah, it’s almost this combination of like design and weird and a move away from what? Perfection, beauty, like everyone looks like an anime character. I don’t know. Ooh.

Wes Bos (32:16)
Yeah.

Yeah. TikTok did that. Right. Like TikTok.

Everybody turned into these like beautifully presented camera on a tripod like like professional mic. And and then brands caught on and then brands started doing that. So what the what happened to TikTok was that people are holding mics with their hand. They have a shaky camera.

It’s lower quality. They’re not framing it correctly. And now we’re at a point now where people are like intentionally eating to make it look like they are like less prepared, you know, like like people are trying to fake being less prepared and things like that. It’s just this pendulum that just keeps swinging back and forth because people are looking for more real and raw because like I said, I can I can do it within the first like

Kate Holterhoff (32:47)
Mm-hmm.

Wow.

Wes Bos (33:16)
10 milliseconds of a TikTok where if I hear the voice or I can see like an animation come on screen, I immediately swipe because I’m just like somebody’s trying to sell me something here, you know? But if someone’s like standing in their garage holding their phone, I’m like, I’m gonna check this out. This is real.

Kate Holterhoff (33:26)
Yeah, I am mercifully not in the TikTok So I don’t use that as my use case of choice, but I, yeah, that is such a good example though. So thank you for sharing that. it’s so hard because we’re living in this post-ZIRP economy. You know, we’re hearing about layoffs. Things kind of seem out of control.

It’s our friends that have labored at the top of the stack that feel particularly vulnerable. And yet, it’s these experiences that are so relatable and that are like the first thing that folks are gonna see. And it’s moving so quick. And so you want the smartrest minds on this particular problems. But yeah, all these real world examples. I think what’s interesting,

to me, you mentioned Tailwind CSS already, sort of in passing. And so like when we think about, I don’t know if you saw, Adam had posted this thing about not wanting the LLMs to be able to read the docs there, because he was explaining that in order to close his PR because he wants folks to go to the docs so that they then buy the paid.

product I did, think I’m describing that pretty well. Yeah, exactly. And of course, you know, folks are mad, whatever. So I can link it in the show notes here. But I think what was interesting to me about it is that when I did my first forays into vibe coding, every little app that I created not only had some framework, but also would always use Tailwind CSS rather than just vanilla, know, CSS, JavaScript, HTML. Lately,

Wes Bos (34:39)
Yeah. Yeah. That’s how his business works on traffic to the website. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Kate Holterhoff (35:08)
I have seen that not be the case all the time, but it was fascinating to me that he would say that because I feel like all VibeCoded apps were using way more libraries than was necessary. Like, you know, a stupid little app, you could totally do it just using primitives. And it defaulted to these like heavy, ways of doing something simple. So yeah, it seemed like there was this disconnect here, but all of that is to say, people are concerned about who’s making money.

Wes Bos (35:27)
Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (35:35)
today, especially folks who are laboring in the front end space, folks who are thinking about the visual experiences, the UI. What was your take on all that?

Wes Bos (35:45)
Yeah, yeah. But Adam’s a good friend of mine, so I’ve been talking to him about this for a couple of months before him. But it’s just that. It’s such a weird thing that he’s created this thing that is incredibly successful, and it’s just rocketing up in usage. And because of the way that people use it via LLMs, they’re not visiting.

Kate Holterhoff (35:54)
What’s the Tea then? Here, hit us.

Yeah.

Wes Bos (36:11)
the docs anymore. And that was the business to be able to pay the people to work on it. Right. You sell a certain number of those people a premium product. You make the money. You can pay more people to work on the open source project. So thankfully, Syntax sponsor, fifty thousand dollars. Many, companies kind of stood up and go, wow. Like, yeah, this is this is kind of a problem that like this main thing that we do is maybe not able to

Kate Holterhoff (36:17)
Right?

Wes Bos (36:40)
to be worked on because we ate its lunch. So it’s a frustrating thing. Because a lot of the other comments were on it were like, this is just not a business that can work in the AI space. But I think that there’s a lot of stuff like that. My whole business was just like, I wrote hundreds of blog posts over the years. I put tons of content out over the years. And the LLMs just

Kate Holterhoff (36:42)
Yeah.

Right.

Wes Bos (37:08)
gobbled it all up and now people don’t necessarily need that. it’s a frustrating thing. And I don’t know what the answer to all of that is. Can we give Tailwind a penny every time that it generates like thousand glasses or something crazy like that? This token, can we build it in? Certainly people have tried that in the past with like…

BAT like basic attention token where like, yeah, you have running an ad blocker, but you’re you’re putting 10 bucks every month into your browser. And then based on the sites that you visit, we’re going to divvy that 10 bucks up to the different people. Maybe that’ll work like journalism is another really big one as well. You know, if if people are blocking ads for this type of thing. So maybe that is a way down it.

we will see, but I think there’s a lot of questions around these companies stealing all of this stuff. Not to say that it will ever stop, and I use it myself as well, and I think these tools are great, but it’s crazy that they’re able to just gobble it all up and then give it to you for free.

Kate Holterhoff (38:23)
just, feels like there’s a lesson there about, nice to haves versus things that you can’t get away from paying for, know, server space, for instance, and I feel like it’s gonna come at the folks who are working at the top of the stack first. And I’m worried about that. I am. Because I also want this to be the year, Wes. This is it. This is design’s year. We’re, you know.

Wes Bos (38:44)
Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (38:45)
We’re gonna make it a thing. I want all the pieces in place to make it happen. All right, so let’s go ahead and wrap up. Where are you directing folks to follow you? I’ve mentioned your fantastic podcast already, your YouTube channel. Where else are you sharing your musings these days?

Wes Bos (39:03)
Yeah, I either wesbos.com links to all my stuff. I’m on Twitter @wesbos Instagram, TikTok. we have Syntax YouTube channel. I have my own personal YouTube channel. So those are the probably the best spots right now, but I’m around. You’ll see me.

Kate Holterhoff (39:21)
All right, fantastic. Been a pleasure speaking with you today. Again, my guest is Wes Bos from Syntax. My name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you’re watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.

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