What if we could replace the process of designing UIs with, well, bots? What if you could have an infinite amount of UI designs to choose from — would that lead to new directions that you wouldn't otherwise explore?

Uibot is an experiment on how far one could automate the generation of visual designs, what kinds of advantages it would lead to and what issues one would face.

Uibot is inspired by declarative design tools by Jon Gold from a few years back and Programming Design Systems by Rune Madsen. The Twitter feed for the procedural-generation blog is quite inspiring as well.

Inspiration for the style of the designs came from Tailwind CSS, a Coinbase Clone made using Tailwind by Adam Wathan. The analytical approach in Refactoring UI book was an inspiration, too. And I browsed through some dashboard designs on Dribbble as well.

The implementation uses a name generator by Thomas Konings for generating company names and the color library for color manipulation. Profile pictures have been selected from Pravatar.cc by Simon Asika. Uibot is built using React and Styled Components.

Some different ways to take this further came into my mind, although I’m not sure if I will have the time to work on them:

1. One would be a ’genetic’ UI, where the user could mix designs easily.
2. Another would be to have a chat interface for customizing a UI.
3. And a third would be to use the generated layouts as training material for AI:s — so that the AI would learn to distinguish key features of designs, such as accent colors and layout types.
4. And perhaps also a hot-or-not UI, where the visitors could rate the designs easily, could be interesting.

Any comments, suggestions or feedback? You can find me on Twitter.

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