You know the look the moment you land on it. The hero gradient nobody chose. The three identical feature cards with three identical icons. The stock photograph of a team that does not exist, smiling at a laptop that is not on. A site that is technically finished and spiritually empty.
This is the house style of fast software, and it is spreading. As building gets easier, the average site gets blander, because the easiest path through any tool is the one everybody else also took. The machine is not making ugly sites. It is making the same site, over and over, with the logo swapped.
We are designing against that on purpose. Not by hiding that UOVA uses AI — we are proud of it — but by refusing to let the AI flatten the work. The goal is a site you could not pick out of a line-up of human-made ones. Here is what that takes.
1. Real type, set with intent
Generic sites all reach for the same friendly sans at the same comfortable size. Designed sites treat type as architecture: a real display face, a real scale, leading that is too tight to be safe, contrast that takes a position. Typography is the cheapest way to look expensive and the first thing a template tool gives up. We do not give it up.
2. Imagery that looks photographed
The fastest tell of an assembled site is its pictures — flat, hazy, anonymous. We push every image toward a photograph: one light source, real depth of field, grain, a point of view. An image should look like someone stood in a room and decided. When the imagery is believable, the whole site inherits the credibility.
Generic is not a style. It is the absence of decisions. Design is just decisions, made on purpose.
3. Motion with manners
A generic site is either dead still or animated like a slot machine. The designed middle is harder: reveals that feel like the page exhaling, hovers that reward attention, a single considered transition between views. Motion should feel authored, never decorative. Restraint is the whole trick.
4. Space, and the courage to leave it
Bland sites are crowded sites — every pixel justifying its rent. Confident sites breathe. White space is not emptiness; it is the frame that tells the eye what matters. The willingness to leave a section nearly bare is the clearest signal that a human, not a fill-the-grid algorithm, was in charge.
The point
None of this is nostalgia for doing things the slow way. UOVA builds fast on purpose. The argument is only that fast and generic are not the same thing — that you can have the speed of a machine and the taste of a studio at once. That is the entire bet of this company. Every template we ship is an attempt to prove the look is a choice, and we keep choosing against it.
