Thoughts about thegrid.io

I bought a beta access to The Grid because I was impressed by the idea that artificial intelligence could design my next website. Their promo video looked really sexy too, so I went ahead and supported their campaign.

By now I feel like it’s the worst $100 I ever spent on a website related product. The development took much longer than I expected, but that’s absolutely fine, if they can deliver once it goes live. It’s not like I want to hurt anybodies feelings, but until now it has been very disappointing.

Having no login or passwords seems like a futuristic idea, but it only held me back. I just wanted to create a simple blog for my sister, who’s spending 6 months in africa and since I payed for The Grid, it seemed like a solid choice. But how would I share my account with her? I can’t create a seperate login. I can’t even give her my login, because there is none. I’d need to share my Gmail account information with her and that’s just something I don’t want to do. Besides it’s not really possible either, because I use two factor authentication.

So, how do the designs look? Awful, just bloody awful. Maybe I got the 1998 AI doing my designs, but I feel like this must be a joke. No sane person would ever dare to show me a design like this and expect me to like it.

But that’s not a problem, right? There must be some kind of redesign feature! And there is. The Grid essentially asks you if you like the layout, color and typography of the current. You can even rate it on a scale from 1 to 5.

So, you rate the layout and The Grid will go ahead and guess a new one if you don’t seem to like it. The process is actually very straight forward, but the results disappoint me every time. Why can’t I just choose from a list of templates or layouts that I like? How is any AI on this planet able to produce a layout that I like, purely based on a layout that I don’t like? That cannot work. It’s not like the layout is a yes or no question.

For color settings they seem to agree with my opinion. So, they give me a list of color palettes that I can choose from.

It might be possible that I’m the least imaginative guy on this planet, but I simply cannot picture what the website is going to look like, when I see any of these palettes. I’ve been selecting the ones I like for a solid half hour and the resulting pages just look terrible. Why can’t I get little previews of what the website will look like instead of these meaningless color palettes?

For typography it’s the same as it is with the layout. “Do you like the current typography?” If not, The Grid will guess a new one. I would’ve been fine with simple Helvetica, but The Grid recommends fonts that I simply cannot take. I don’t know what the AI is doing, but it feels like it’s randomly going through the list of vintage Windows fonts.

After you selected these three settings The Grid will magically calculate your new design. Sadly this process takes forever. I’ve to wait 2 to 5 minutes every time I want to change anything. That’s just unacceptable.

Very often something goes wrong and instead of any designs I’m just getting a “400 Bad Request” Page.

They also have this feature where they intelligently style and crop your images. The Grid tried this with a few screenshots of applications that I coded. As you can imagine, green tinted GUIs where some part of it was cut off didn’t look so good.

So in the end, I’m sitting here regretting every penny that I spent on The Grid. I really should’ve just bought a $10 wordpress theme.