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How AI Ruined My Favourite Colour

 |  8 min read

Contents

  1. Preface
  2. What purple used to mean
  3. The Adam Wathan moment
  4. The flattening
  5. Other casualties
  6. Reclamation
  7. Coda

Preface

Since the dawn of time, every sorcerer wore robes of it. Every threshold between worlds glowed with it. Every cosmic horror, every gateway to the abyss aligned with it. Always somewhere on the spectrum between violet and indigo. Purple was the colour of mysticism, of the void between stars, of the in-between place neither day nor night nor good nor evil nor this world nor the next. It was the colour of outer worldly beings.

And then, sometime around 2024, almost every product I touched started looking the same. Open Claude, ask it for a landing page: purple gradient. Spin up a v0 project: purple gradient. Generate a hero section in Lovable, scaffold a marketing site in Cursor: purple gradient. The colour of the abyss became the colour of a "Try it free for 14 days" button.

What purple used to mean

Before we get to what AI did, let's dig a bit deeper into its history.

Purple is a colour with one of the longest semiotic ranges in the Western imagination. Tyrian purple, the original, was extracted from the murex sea snail in coastal Phoenicia, and it took something like 250,000 snails to dye a single robe. It was widely recognised as the most expensive pigment in the ancient world. By the time of Justinian, only emperors were legally permitted to wear it. The phrase "born in the purple" (porphyrogenitus) meant born into legitimate imperial succession. Purple was the colour of being chosen.

One of my biggest inspirations Raven Roth from Teen Titans, the 2003 cartoon. A half-demon teenager raised in a parallel dimension, perpetually deadpan, who wore a deep purple cloak and used dark magic and refused to speak louder than necessary. To me, she was the correct aesthetic answer to the question "what would a teenager actually be like if they had magical powers". She was my muse and inspiration for my doodles and drawings during my school days.

Anyway, that's the colour. Royal, mystical, transgressive, mournful, cosmic.

The Adam Wathan moment

In August 2025, the creator of Tailwind CSS, Adam Wathan, posted this on Twitter:

"I'd like to formally apologize for making every button in Tailwind UI bg-indigo-500 five years ago, leading to every AI generated UI on earth also being indigo."

The tweet got over a million views. It was treated as a joke. The reality is much darker.

Here's the actual chain of events. In 2020, when Tailwind UI shipped its first batch of paid component examples (buttons, cards, navbars, landing pages), Adam picked indigo-500 as the default accent colour for the demos. It was a deliberately unopinionated choice: a placeholder. Something neutral and inoffensive that showcased the component's structure without implying a brand. Same reason designers use Lorem Ipsum.

The thing he didn't anticipate, is that Tailwind UI's examples became the most copied snippets of CSS on the internet between 2020 and 2024. By the end of 2024 a substantial fraction of all the new SaaS marketing pages on the visible web were tinted indigo, not because anyone thought it was the right brand choice but because nobody had bothered to override the default.

Then the LLMs got trained. GPT-4 in early 2023, Claude 3 in March 2024, Gemini, Llama 3. All trained on internet-scale corpora that include vast amounts of front-end code scraped from GitHub between 2019 and 2024. The statistical truth those models learned: a "button" in a "modern landing page" is bg-indigo-500. So when you tell any current AI "build me a landing page", you get a button that's bg-indigo-500. It's not aesthetic preference. It's not even default behaviour. It's the median of the training data, faithfully reproduced.

A single design decision, by one person, in one component library, in 2020, became the colour of a generation of AI-generated software five years later, after laundering through a training corpus.

The flattening

So the colour got popular, but trends come and go...However, the reason that this is different is because of what gets lost when AI does the popularising. When a colour spreads through culture organically, e.g. minimalism inheriting it from Bauhaus and hip-hop inheriting it from Prince, the colour keeps its meanings. It picks up new ones along the way. The semiotic range expands.

When AI spreads a colour, it does the opposite. The same purple that used to mean Raven's cloak, Prince, the void, dark magic, the threshold now means "a generic startup that launched today". The colour didn't gain a meaning; it had its meanings taken. If every product you see is purple, then purple no longer marks the unusual. The unusual is the median. The signal of otherness becomes the signal of generic.

This is exactly the mechanism I wrote about in the Karpathy primer post: LLMs predict the median of their training data, not a creative choice. They were never going to give you something specific unless you forced them to. And what they pick to be the median becomes, by sheer volume of output, the new median for everything downstream.

Other casualties

Purple isn't the only one. Once you see the pattern, the aesthetic signature of AI-generated software is recognisable on sight:

Every one of these is a small example of the same large thing: AI doesn't create an aesthetic. It collapses existing aesthetics into a median, then exports the median back into the world at scale, until the median has eaten the meaning of everything that fed into it.

Reclamation

The blog you're reading right now is lavender. The accent colour is #c7b8ff in light mode: a specific tone, light, warm, slightly bluish, slightly pink. My main site, zaakir.io, in the much bolder #9d86ff cosmic shade. Both of these are deliberate. Neither is bg-indigo-500.

I'm aware of the irony. The colour that I was once deeply fond of is the colour AI ruined, and my response is to keep using it anyway. But that's actually the point. The answer to "AI is making everything look the same" isn't to abandon the things AI is replicating; it's to stop letting AI choose for you. If anything, it places a higher onus on you to think creatively and intentionally about what you want to achieve.

Coda

The fix to the AI-purple problem isn't picking a different colour. It's to be more intentional and deliberate with your decision making process, to really focus on fleshing out your ideas and in the process placing a higher emphasis on creativity.

Every AI default, colour, font, layout, punctuation, represents a small surrender of authorship. The system picked, you accepted, and what you ship is the median of a corpus you didn't curate. Multiply that by a million people doing the same thing and you get the visible result we have now: a software landscape where everything looks like everything else, in the same shade, with the same gradients, the same shadow depths, the same em-dashes.

The way out is not technical. There's no tool, no Cursor rule, no Claude Skill that fixes this for you, because the problem isn't AI giving you bad colours; it's you not having opinions about what colours mean. The fix is older than computers: care about the small choices.

AI, Design, Opinion

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