30 tells that say a robot made it.

We keep a list of visual tells that make a website read as generated rather than designed. It runs to 30 entries. Here's the part that matters more than the list.

Every tell is the same disease: decoration used to fill space where there is no real content.

Gradients, orbs, bento grids and three-across cards all exist to make thin material look substantial. That's why they cluster together, and why removing one usually reveals that the section underneath was empty.

The corollary

If deleting a treatment leaves the section looking bare, the section was bare. The fix is content.

A sample, with what to ship instead

• Harsh gradients → flat fills from the client's own palette. If a surface needs depth, use a photograph.
• Purple and black → a palette pulled from the logo, the signage, the van. Purple is what gets picked when nobody picked.
• 3 feature cards in a row → 2 columns with a real photograph on one side. The three-across exists to make three thin sentences look like content.
• Drop shadows everywhere → hairline rules and tonal steps. Shadow only where something genuinely floats: a sticky header, a dropdown, a modal.
• Checkmark bullets → plain bullets or sentences. A checkmark implies a comparison the page isn't actually making.
• Stock photography → your crew, your truck, your room. This is the single biggest difference and it isn't close.

The one about fonts

Inter gets blamed a lot. Inter is a good typeface. The tell is default weight, default tracking, and a default size ramp: 3 settings nobody touched. Fix the pairing and the scale and the same font stops announcing itself. This site is set in it.