Your generated site has a tell, and clients are learning to spot it

Recreate this board

Paste this into your AI design or build tool to reproduce today’s visual system.

Design a single self-contained HTML page styled as a Kanban project
board, the kind Linear, Trello, or Jira uses to track work.

PAGE ARCHETYPE: a project tracker. Top app bar with a wordmark and two
nav links. Below it a board header: a small monospace breadcrumb line
(number, date, read time), a large board-title headline, a one-line
description, and a label legend of small color dots. Under the header,
the board itself: three equal vertical lanes side by side.

COMPONENTS: each lane has a header (an uppercase monospace title and a
count badge with a colored dot) over a stack of cards. A card is a tight
unit: a row of small label chips (each a colored dot plus a monospace
word), a linked headline, one or two lines of context, and a meta footer
with a source domain, a date, and a right-aligned arrow. One lead card
carries a flat-color cover image at the top. Below the board, full-width
panels for a prompt block, a short field note, and a numbered sources
list. Lanes stack to one column under about 920px.

PALETTE: cool slate board #E9ECF2, faint lane panels #E2E7F0, white cards
#FFFFFF, ink #171A21, secondary #565E6E, one flat cobalt accent #2B49E6
for links and the lead label, with teal #0E7C66 and clay #B4541E only as
label dots. No purple-blue gradient, no neon, no glow, no green-on-black.

TYPE: Bricolage Grotesque for the board title and card headings; Hanken
Grotesk for body and UI; DM Mono for labels, counts, dates, and source
domains; Literata italic for one editorial line only.

GUARDRAILS: body text at least 18px with about 1.6 line height and WCAG
AA contrast. Cap card radius near 13px, lane radius near 18px, chips near
7px, and vary radius with purpose. Label dots are the only circles; do
not pill-shape chips or buttons. The count badge and legend are
informational, not buttons, and there is no fake search field. Use one
tight card shadow on hover, not a shadow on every surface, and no colored
left-border stripe. Give cards and links honest hover and focus states
with ~160ms easing, and disable transforms under prefers-reduced-motion.
No readable text inside the generated cover image.

The bottom line

When the generated look gets consistent enough to package as a component library, the tell is not the model. It is the defaults nobody replaced.

“The way out of the AI look is to hand the agent your system before it reaches for its own.”

Field desk, Art Direction Daily

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