Designing My Website by Dialogue
An engineer's experiment with AI-assisted design
My personal website needed a refresh. Years of minor updates had created technical debt, and the content no longer reflected my current work.
I'm not a designer; I'm an engineer who appreciates good design. The solution came from an unexpected combination: artificial intelligence and anime.
For a long-time Emacs user, switching to Cursor - an AI-augmented IDE - felt like a betrayal. But its integration with Claude promised something different: real-time design collaboration directly in the editor. What would typically be weeks of design iteration and implementation took just a couple of hours.
I'd been inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion's typography, particularly its compressed serif typefaces in title cards and interfaces. The show's stark treatment of type — mechanically compressed, white-on-black, with dramatic scale changes — created an aggressive and distinct visual language.
In Cursor's agent mode, I fed examples of this typographic style to Claude. The process became rapid design exploration. Claude generated stylesheets; I refined them. “Compress this title more.” “Simplify this hover state.” “Make this tighter.”
Our first attempts went too far into sci-fi aesthetics — glitch effects, diagnostic displays, interface chrome. The site needed to reference these influences without mimicking them.
The breakthrough came through reduction. We stripped everything back to core typographic treatments: compressed Times New Roman and Helvetica, dramatic scale changes, white space.
The technical implementation needed modernizing. The new stylesheet uses CSS custom properties for theming, modern layout techniques, and proper dark mode support. The content structure better represents my current work.
There's an irony here. As a former front-end engineer, I took pride in crafting precise, efficient CSS. That expertise — understanding the cascade, the subtleties of different properties — gave me the confidence to step back and let Claude work. I could evaluate the generated code with an engineer's eye without micromanaging every declaration.
What I learned from this process is that expertise sometimes means knowing when to let someone (or something) else take the wheel. The site works. The code is clean. The rest is style.
Just don't call me a designer. I told an AI what I liked, and it did the rest.