Design Taste Can Be Reverse-Engineered
Design Jam Season 3
Everyone can generate an interface now, so everything looks the same. Ask for a landing page for a fintech app, a coffee subscription and an AI note-taker, and you get one page three times. The model answers with the average.
A reference moves it off the average. Taste is knowing which reference to pick and what to take from it.
In this session we show four steps off the average, each ending on a prompt you can copy:
Steal. Find a reference worth studying and name the decisions behind it. Clone to learn, never ship the clone. Then train your taste: save the decisions you've named in one file, and Claude, Codex, Cursor, Grok or any other AI can work from the same taste.
Twist. Change three of those decisions until the result is yours. Tune by feel, then keep the numbers.
Systemize. Write it into a kit an AI agent can follow. One design.md is not enough for a large site or app, so each file in the kit does one job. Borrow structure, keep your taste.
Extend. Build more pages from the kit, and audit them for drift before you trust them.
Who it's for
Designers, founders, marketers and engineers. Steal and Twist are for anyone whose generated pages look like everyone else's. Systemize and Extend keep pages and campaigns consistent as a product grows.
Format
A 60-minute talk, then an hour of Q&A on your own product, stack and references. There's no hands-on building this time, and you won't need a laptop. The slides are shared with every prompt in them, so you can listen instead of photographing the screen.
About Pizza Yap
Pizza Yap is a designer and builder with 18 years in product design. Pizza built product experiences and led the design team and owned the design system at LottieFiles, ShopBack and Grab.