How Ujas was made · Research and critique

The brief was a real estate website with real motion and real taste, made overnight, that does not look like a coding agent made it. This page is the working: what I looked at, what AI sites look like right now, the four directions, the critique against the best sites in the category, and the list of things I would still fix.

What I looked at

Fifteen sites from the Awwwards real estate collection and a few motion studios, captured at six scroll depths each, plus Pinterest searches for real estate web design, concrete houses at dusk, Indian courtyards, jaali light and Swiss architecture posters.

The pattern under every strong one: the photograph is the page and the text is small. Motion comes from the subject (a facade, an arch, an object building itself), never from a template. Everything is slow. The site has one memorable move, not five. And the copy is specific: an address, a stone, a number.

Pinterest was useful the other way round. Its web design results are mostly concept shots ("ABOVE THE REST" over a desert villa), which is exactly the look to avoid. The taste was in the architecture photography and print: one light source, a lot of shade, one word set huge.

What an AI-built site looks like in 2026

The first wave is easy to spot: Inter, a purple gradient, a centred hero and three icon cards. The second wave is the dangerous one, because it looks tasteful. Once everyone banned purple, the anti-slop prompts settled on their own default: a warm cream background, a terracotta accent, an oversized italic serif headline, a tiny label above every heading, "01 / 02 / 03", film grain and lines between every row. A luxury real estate brief walks straight into it.

A default build of this brief	Ujas
Cream #F4F1EA background with a terracotta accent	No fixed background. The page takes the light of the hour each section belongs to, from cool dawn to night
"Where light lives" in italic Instrument Serif	"Twelve courtyard houses in Shela, Ahmedabad, planned around the path of the sun." Zodiak, upright, light weight
Three amenity cards with icons	A sun study you can use, with a measured shade figure
Fade-up on every block	The only thing that moves is the sun, and what it touches
"Not just a home. A way of life."	"Walls are 450 mm thick and the windows sit deep in them, so the low morning sun lights the reveal and not the room."
Stock testimonial from "Priya S."	No testimonials. There are no residents, so there are no quotes

Four directions, one chosen

I wrote one brief and answered it four ways: Sun path (light is the product), Unbuilt (show the project being made), Threshold (the site is a walk through doorways) and Monsoon (sell the house that is beautiful in July). Each board has a live motion study, a palette from real materials, its type, references and its risks.

Sun path won because it is the only direction where the motion and the selling point are the same thing. In Ahmedabad a courtyard house is a machine for deciding where the shade falls. The other three each gave it one idea: the white model became the sun study, the doorways became the way photographs open, the monsoon became July.

Critique, round one

After the first build I put my screenshots next to Lenval, Loam House, Azimute and Igloo and wrote down where mine was weaker. Then I fixed it.

The jaali shadow read as a chessboard

First version: a regular checkerboard of light and shade across the whole wall — Before

Second version: small sheared openings of warm light inside a bounded shadow, with a strip of open sun — After

Half light and half shade with hard edges looks like a texture, not like sun through brick. Real jaali light is mostly shade with small bright openings, the openings shear into diagonals as the sun drops, the edges soften with distance, and the shadow has a boundary because the screen does. The new shader does all four, from the real sun angle. The text also moved onto the shaded part of the wall so it stays readable.

The sun study looked like a grey demo

First version: a pale model on a mid grey background with controls over it — Before

Second version: the model on a dark stage with long December shadows and controls below — After

Compared with Igloo, mine had no drama. It opened at 14:46, when shadows are short, on a grey background, with the readout sitting on top of the white model where you could not read it. Now it opens on 21 December at 16:42 with long shadows, on a dark stage like a model on felt, with the controls below the canvas. The trees were spheres in cups, like golf balls; they are now lumps of foam the way a model maker would do them.

Smaller gaps

The sun study answered a question buyers ask second. The first one is "which houses are left?" Every house on the model is now clickable: it lights up and shows its type, price, whether it is reserved, and how much of its own court is in shade at that moment.
Every real estate site in the set had a location section. Mine had none. Added Shela drive times, plainly marked as estimates.
Every one had a mark. Mine was a word. Added a small sun arc, the same shape as the dial in the hero.
On a phone, the hero headline sat on bright leaves. Added a light scrim at the top only, enough to read.
On a phone, the jaali text collided with the pattern. The roof edge now keeps the top of the wall in shade, which is also what a real verandah roof would do.
The jaali was perfectly regular. Handmade brick is not, so every opening now varies a little in width and height.
The hero started at 06:41 with the sun at 0°, which is before sunrise in Shela on 21 March. Moved first light to 06:58.

Checked against the 37 rules

Grepped the built code for the mechanical tells (banned fonts, blur, shadows, side stripes, radial gradients, rounded-xl, scale on hover, checkmarks, sparkles, em dashes, pure white or black): none found. Then looked at the rendered pages for the rest: no card rows, no bento, no pricing tiers, no terminal mockups, no eyebrows, no numbered sections, no italic serif display, no testimonials, privacy and terms pages exist.

Three things are close to a rule and are there on purpose:

A gradient in the hero, top and bottom only, at 34 to 55 percent black. It is a legibility scrim, not decoration, and it is not visible as a gradient.
One-pixel lines under the form fields. They are the fields, not row dividers.
The house list has no lines between types. Spacing does the grouping.

What is still not good enough

The photographs are 1672 px wide. On a large retina screen the hero is softer than Lenval's.
All the photographs come from one image model and share its lighting habits. A real launch would use real renders from the architect's model, and the site should be built around those.
The sun study has no terrain and no neighbours, so it overstates how much sun the outer houses get.
No Gujarati or Hindi version. For an Ahmedabad project that is a real gap, not a nice-to-have.
The hero is 420 percent of the screen tall. There is now a "skip ahead" link, but a returning visitor still lands at dawn every time.
Tested at 1440 and 390 px in a headless browser and in the app browser, not on real phones.

How Ujas was made, and what is still wrong with it