Generative UI Notes

I’m really interested in this emerging idea that the future of web design is Generative UI Design. We see hints of this already in products, like Figma Sites, that tout being able to create websites on the fly with prompts.

Putting aside the clear downsides of shipping half-baked technology as a production-ready product (which is hard to do), the angle I’m particularly looking at is research aimed at using Generative AI (or GenAI) to output personalized interfaces. It’s wild because it completely flips the way we think about UI design on its head. Rather than anticipating user needs and designing around them, GenAI sees the user needs and produces an interface custom-tailored to them. In a sense, a website becomes a snowflake where no two experiences with it are the same.

Again, it’s wild. I’m not here to speculate, opine, or preach on Generative UI Design (let’s call it GenUI for now). Just loose notes that I’ll update as I continue learning about it.

Defining GenUI

Google Research (PDF):

Generative UI is a new modality where the AI model generates not only content, but the entire user experience. This results in custom interactive experiences, including rich formatting, images, maps, audio and even simulations and games, in response to any prompt (instead of the widely adopted “walls-of-text”).

NN/Group:

A generative UI (genUI) is a user interface that is dynamically generated in real time by artificial intelligence to provide an experience customized to fit the user’s needs and context.

UX Collective:

A Generative User Interface (GenUI) is an interface that adapts to, or processes, context such as inputs, instructions, behaviors, and preferences through the use of generative AI models (e.g. LLMs) in order to enhance the user experience.

Put simply, a GenUI interface displays different components, information, layouts, or styles, based on who’s using it and what they need at that moment.

Credit: UX Collective

Generative vs. Predictive AI

It’s easy to dump “AI” into one big bucket, but it’s often distinguished as two different types: predictive and generative.

	Predictive AI	Generative AI
Inputs	Uses smaller, more targeted datasets as input data. (Smashing Magazine)	Trained on large datasets containing millions of sample content. (U.S. Congress, PDF)
Outputs	Forecasts future events and outcomes. (IBM)	New content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos. (McKinsey)
Examples	ChatGPT, Claude	Sora, Suno, Cursor

So, when we’re talking about GenAI, we’re talking about the ability to create new materials trained on existing materials. And when we’re talking specifically about GenUI, it’s about generating a user interface based on what the AI knows about the user.

Accessibility

And I should note that what I’m talking about here is not strictly GenUI in how we’ve defined it so far as UI output that adapts to individual user experiences, but rather “developing” generated interfaces. These so-called AI website builders do not adapt to the individual user, but it’s easy to see it heading in that direction.

The thing I’m most interested in — concerned with, frankly — is to what extent GenUI can reliably output experiences that cater to all users, regardless of impairment, be it aural, visual, physical, etc. There are a lot of different inputs to consider here, and we’ve seen just how awful the early results have been.

That last link is a big poke at Figma Sites. They’re easy to poke because they made the largest commercial push into GenUI-based web development. To their credit (perhaps?), they received the severe pushback and decided to do something about it, announcing updates and publishing a guide for improving accessibility on Figma-generated sites. But even those have their limitations that make the effort and advice seem less useful and more about saving face.

Anyway. There are plenty of other players to jump into the game, notably WordPress, but also others like Vercel, Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, Lovable, and Reeady.

Some folks are more optimistic than others that GenUI is not only capable of producing accessible experiences, but will replace accessibility practitioners altogether as the technology evolves. Jakob Nielsen famously made that claim in 2024 which drew fierce criticism from the community. Nielsen walked that back a year later, but not much.

I’m not even remotely qualified to offer best practices, opine on the future of accessibility practice, or speculate on future developments and capabilities. But as I look at Google’s People + AI Guidebook, I see no mention at all of accessibility despite dripping with “human-centered” design principles.

Accessibility is a lagging consideration to the hype, at least to me. That has to change if GenUI is truly the “future” of web design and development.

Examples & Resources

Google has a repository of examples showing how user input can be used to render a variety of interfaces. Going a step further is Google’s Project Genie that bills itself as creating “interactive worlds” that are “generated in real-time.” I couldn’t get an invite to try it out, but maybe you can.

In addition to that, Google has a GenUI SDK designed to integrate into Flutter apps. So, yeah. Connect to your LLM provider and let it rip to create adaptive interfaces.

Thesys is another one in the adaptive GenUI space. Copilot, too.

References

• Figma Sites
• “Do Not Publish Your Designs on the Web with Figma Sites…” (Adrian Roselli)
• “Generative UI: LLMs are Effective UI Generators” (Google Research, PDF)
• “Generative UI and Outcome-Oriented Design” (NN/Group)
• “An introduction to Generative UIs” (UX Collective)
• “A Simple Guide To Retrieval Augmented Generation Language Models” (Joas Pambou)
• “Generative Artificial Intelligence: Overview, Issues, and Considerations for Congress” (U.S. Congress, PDF)
• “Generative AI vs. predictive AI: What’s the difference?” (IBM)
• “What is generative AI?” (McKinsey & Company)
• “Introducing: Webbed Sites” (Heydon Pickering, Video)
• “Publish your designs on the web with Figma Sites” (Figma)
• “Figma Sites on Starter and Education, with more ways to share, customize, and expand your reach for Sites” (Figma)
• “Improve the accessibility of your site” (Figma Learn)
• “Accessibility Has Failed: Try Generative UI = Individualized UX” (Jakob Nielsen)
• “Hello AI Agents: Goodbye UI Design, RIP Accessibility” (Jakob Nielsen)
• “The People + AI Guidebook” (Google)
• Project Genie (Google Labs)\
• “Get started with the GenUI SDK for Flutter” (Flutter Docs)

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Generative UI Notes originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Experimenting With Scroll-Driven corner-shape Animations

Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about and experimentation with scroll-driven animations. It’s a very shiny feature for sure, and as soon as it’s supported in Firefox (without a flag), it’ll be baseline. It’s part of Interop 2026, so that should be relatively soon. Essentially, scroll-driven animations tie an animation timeline’s position to a scroll position, so if you were 50% scrolled then you’d also be 50% into the animation, and they’re surprisingly easy to set up too.

I’ve been seeing significant interest in the new CSS corner-shape property as well, even though it only works in Chrome for now. This enables us to create corners that aren’t as rounded, or aren’t even rounded at all, allowing for some intriguing shapes that take little-to-no effort to create. What’s even more intriguing though is that corner-shape is mathematical, so it’s easily animated.

Hence, say hello to scroll-driven corner-shape animations (requires Chrome 139+ to work fully):

corner-shape in a nutshell

Real quick — the different values for corner-shape:

corner-shape keyword	superellipse() equivalent
square	superellipse(infinity)
squircle	superellipse(2)
round	superellipse(1)
bevel	superellipse(0)
scoop	superellipse(-1)
notch	superellipse(-infinity)

But what’s this superellipse() function all about? Well, basically, these keyword values are the result of this function. For example, superellipse(2) creates corners that aren’t quite squared but aren’t quite rounded either (the “squircle”). Whether you use a keyword or the superellipse() function directly, a mathematical equation is used either way, which is what makes it animatable. With that in mind, let’s dive into that demo above.

Animating corner-shape

The demo isn’t too complicated, so I’ll start off by dropping the CSS here, and then I’ll explain how it works line-by-line:

@keyframes bend-it-like-beckham {
  from {
    corner-shape: superellipse(notch);
    /* or */
    corner-shape: superellipse(-infinity);
  }

  to {
    corner-shape: superellipse(square);
    /* or */
    corner-shape: superellipse(infinity);
  }
}

body::before {
  /* Fill viewport */
  content: "";
  position: fixed;
  inset: 0;

  /* Enable click-through */
  pointer-events: none;

  /* Invert underlying layer */
  mix-blend-mode: difference;
  background: white;

  /* Don’t forget this! */
  border-bottom-left-radius: 100%;

  /* Animation settings */
  animation: bend-it-like-beckham;
  animation-timeline: scroll();
}

/* Added to cards */
.no-filter {
  isolation: isolate;
}

In the code snippet above, body::before combined with content: "" creates a pseudo-element of the <body> with no content that is then fixed to every edge of the viewport. Also, since this animating shape will be on top of the content, pointer-events: none ensures that we can still interact with said content.

For the shape’s color I’m using mix-blend-mode: difference with background: white, which inverts the underlying layer, a trendy effect that to some degree only maintains the same level of color contrast. You won’t want to apply this effect to everything, so here’s a utility class to exclude the effect as needed:

/* Added to cards */
.no-filter {
  isolation: isolate;
}

A comparison:

Left: Full application of blend mode. Right: Blend mode excluded from cards.

You’ll need to combine corner-shape with border-radius, which uses corner-shape: round under the hood by default. Yes, that’s right, border-radius doesn’t actually round corners — corner-shape: round does that under the hood. Rather, border-radius handles the x-axis and y-axis coordinates to draw from:

/* Syntax */
border-bottom-left-radius: <x-axis-coord> <y-axis-coord>;

/* Usage */
border-bottom-left-radius: 50% 50%;
/* Or */
border-bottom-left-radius: 50%;

In our case, we’re using border-bottom-left-radius: 100% to slide those coordinates to the opposite end of their respective axes. However, we’ll be overwriting the implied corner-shape: round in our @keyframe animation, so we refer to that with animation: bend-it-like-beckham. There’s no need to specify a duration because it’s a scroll-driven animation, as defined by animation-timeline: scroll().

In the @keyframe animation, we’re animating from corner-shape: superellipse(notch), which is like an inset square. This is equivalent to corner-shape: superellipse(-infinity), so it’s not actually squared but it’s so aggressively sharp that it looks squared. This animates to corner-shape: superellipse(square) (an outset square), or corner-shape: superellipse(infinity).

Animating corner-shape… revisited

The demo above is actually a bit different to the one that I originally shared in the intro. It has one minor flaw, and I’ll show you how to fix it, but more importantly, you’ll learn more about an intricate detail of corner-shape.

The flaw: at the beginning and end of the animation, the curvature looks quite harsh because we’re animating from notch and square, right? It also looks like the shape is being sucked into the corners. Finally, the shape being stuck to the sides of the viewport makes the whole thing feel too contained.

The solution is simple:

/* Change this... */
inset: 0;

/* ...to this */
inset: -1rem;

This stretches the shape beyond the viewport, and even though this makes the animation appear to start late and finish early, we can fix that by not animating from/to -infinity/infinity:

@keyframes bend-it-like-beckham {
  from {
    corner-shape: superellipse(-6);
  }

  to {
    corner-shape: superellipse(6);
  }
}

Sure, this means that part of the shape is always visible, but we can fiddle with the superellipse() value to ensure that it stays outside of the viewport. Here’s a side-by-side comparison:

And the original demo (which is where we’re at now):

Adding more scroll features

Scroll-driven animations work very well with other scroll features, including scroll snapping, scroll buttons, scroll markers, simple text fragments, and simple JavaScript methods such as scrollTo()/scroll(), scrollBy(), and scrollIntoView().

For example, we only have to add the following CSS snippet to introduce scroll snapping that works right alongside the scroll-driven corner-shape animation that we’ve already set up:

:root {
  /* Snap vertically */
  scroll-snap-type: y;

  section {
    /* Snap to section start */
    scroll-snap-align: start;
  }
}

“Masking” with corner-shape

In the example below, I’ve essentially created a border around the viewport and then a notched shape (corner-shape: notch) on top of it that’s the same color as the background (background: inherit). This shape completely covers the border at first, but then animates to reveal it (or in this case, the four corners of it):

If I make the shape a bit more visible, it’s easier to see what’s happening here, which is that I’m rotating this shape as well (rotate: 5deg), making the shape even more interesting.

This time around we’re animating border-radius, not corner-shape. When we animate to border-radius: 20vw / 20vh, 20vw and 20vh refers to the x-axis and y-axis of each corner, respectively, meaning that 20% of the border is revealed as we scroll.

The only other thing worth mentioning here is that we need to mess around with z-index to ensure that the content is higher up in the stacking context than the border and shape. Other than that, this example simply demonstrates another fun way to use corner-shape:

@keyframes tech-corners {
  from {
    border-radius: 0;
  }

  to {
    border-radius: 20vw / 20vh;
  }
}

/* Border */
body::before {
  /* Fill (- 1rem) */
  content: "";
  position: fixed;
  inset: 1rem;
  border: 1rem solid black;
}

/* Notch */
body::after {
  /* Fill (+ 3rem) */
  content: "";
  position: fixed;
  inset: -3rem;

  /* Rotated shape */
  background: inherit;
  rotate: 5deg;
  corner-shape: notch;

  /* Animation settings */
  animation: tech-corners;
  animation-timeline: scroll();
}

main {
  /* Stacking fix */
  position: relative;
  z-index: 1;
}

Animating multiple corner-shape elements

In this example, we have multiple nested diamond shapes thanks to corner-shape: bevel, all leveraging the same scroll-driven animation where the diamonds increase in size, using padding:

<div id="diamonds">
  <div>
    <div>
      <div>
        <div>
          <div>
            <div>
              <div>
                <div>
                  <div>
                    <div></div>
                  </div>
                </div>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

<main>
  <!-- Content -->
</main>

@keyframes diamonds-are-forever {
  from {
    padding: 7rem;
  }

  to {
    padding: 14rem;
  }
}

#diamonds {
  /* Center them */
  position: fixed;
  inset: 50% auto auto 50%;
  translate: -50% -50%;

  /* #diamonds, the <div>s within */
  &, div {
    corner-shape: bevel;
    border-radius: 100%;
    animation: diamonds-are-forever;
    animation-timeline: scroll();
    border: 0.0625rem solid #00000030;
  }
}

main {
  /* Stacking fix */
  position: relative;
  z-index: 1;
}

That’s a wrap

We just explored animating from one custom superellipse() value to another, using corner-shape as a mask to create new shapes (again, while animating it), and animating multiple corner-shape elements at once. There are so many ways to animate corner-shape other than from one keyword to another, and if we make them scroll-driven animations, we can create some really interesting effects (although, they’d also look awesome if they were static).

---

Experimenting With Scroll-Driven corner-shape Animations originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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