EN 29. Oktober 2026

A Design Style Is a Name Your LLM Already Knows

Collage of six versions of my homepage with identical content: the current design, Swiss Style, Bauhaus, Tufte Style, Dieter Rams and Glassmorphism

A design style is a name your LLM already knows.

That came up last night at the Java User Group Frankfurt, while we were talking about Semantic Anchors. Names like Swiss Design and Material Design came up, and it clicked: they carry a whole design vocabulary, the same way "TDD" or "arc42" carry a whole method. On the train home I asked Claude to add them to the catalog. Now there's a new category for UX and visual design.

Then I wanted to see it work. So I took my homepage and gave ten Claude sessions the same prompt:

"Redesign this website in the style of {ANCHOR}. Keep the content unchanged."

Only the name changed. The sessions got no description of the style and no reference images. Each one ran once and checked its own screenshot. I didn't reroll anything or pick the best of several tries. (The actual prompt was in German, like my homepage: "Gestalte diese Website im Stil von {ANKER} neu. Die Inhalte bleiben unverändert.")

The first image is my current site. The other ten are Swiss Style, Bauhaus, Material Design 3, Neo-Brutalism, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, GOV.UK Design System, Tufte Style, Dieter Rams' 10 Principles, Bento Grid and Glassmorphism. Same text in every one of them, it's basically the makeover montage from an 80s movie, minus the soundtrack.

My current homepage, the starting point: white background, blue accents, Inter font, portrait photo on the right of the hero section, followed by the About section
My current homepage
Swiss Style redesign: my name set as a huge black sans-serif block on a strict grid, a black-and-white portrait, red accents and asymmetric columns
Swiss Style
Bauhaus redesign: cream background with red, yellow, blue and black geometric shapes, my photo in a black circle, lowercase headings and a numbered section badge
Bauhaus
Material Design 3 redesign: soft lavender surfaces, rounded cards, pill-shaped buttons and tonal chips
Material Design 3
Neo-Brutalism redesign: bright cyan and pink, thick black outlines, hard drop shadows, an uppercase name, a pink star and a yellow quarter-circle
Neo-Brutalism
Apple Human Interface Guidelines redesign: a dark hero with a large centred name and a big colour portrait fading into the black background, then light content cards
Apple Human Interface Guidelines
GOV.UK Design System redesign: a black header bar, bold sans-serif headings, a green call-to-action button with an arrow and plain left-aligned text
GOV.UK Design System
Tufte Style redesign: an ivory page with a serif typeface, my photo and the skill tags moved into the right margin as sidenotes, small caps and italic section headings
Tufte Style
Dieter Rams redesign: a light grey page where my portrait sits inside a Braun-style radio front, complete with a dotted speaker grille and three small control dots, an orange button on the left under the intro text
Dieter Rams' 10 Principles
Bento Grid redesign: the content split into rounded tiles of different sizes, a dark name tile next to a large photo tile, a lime tile highlighting 25 years of experience and a coral tile
Bento Grid
Glassmorphism redesign: a vivid pink, purple and blue gradient background with frosted, translucent cards and a glowing orb behind them
Glassmorphism

What surprised me is how much each name pulls in. Swiss Style didn't just pick a sans-serif font, it set my name as a huge black block on a strict grid and added a red square. Tufte moved my photo and my skill tags into the margin as sidenotes. The Dieter Rams session built a Braun radio front around my face, speaker grille included. None of that was in the prompt.

That's the idea behind Semantic Anchors. A well-known term activates knowledge the model already has, so you don't have to spell it out. It works like telling a colleague "make it look like GOV.UK" instead of handing over a ten-page brief.

Which one should I ship? 😄 I'm leaning towards the Rams radio.

The catalog: Semantic Anchors

LinkedWild