A stranger, Dribbble, and one day

2026-09-30 · ~4 min read · by Gal Tidhar

I wrote about my site being spotted as AI slop and asked for opinions. Adam Morad, who I had never met, commented, then sent me a message and helped me a lot. A day later all three NautiVia sites run on one new design language, and every illustration on their pages was generated by Codex with real examples attached. This is what changed, and the lesson I should have learned a long time ago: give the agent something to aim at.

Yesterday and today

nautivia.eu on 29 September: flat cartoon ferries on a painted sea, dark square travel buttons and an orange own-boat button — nautivia.eu on 29 September, the flat cartoon version.

nautivia.eu on 30 September: a painted Adriatic coast, white rounded travel cards with painted scenes, and a live ferry ports card — nautivia.eu on 30 September. Open it live.

How naive I was

I had the best design skills installed (Impeccable, taste-skill), I had made about 110 mockups, and I thought I was out of it. What I had never done was leave the terminal and go find something I actually liked. I expected taste from the model without showing it a single example of what I love.

What changed

A few Dribbble screenshots reached me, of a design miles better than anything I had made. I sent Claude the screenshots and asked it to pull out the colours and the font and build a full design language from it, then move the sites onto it page by page.

One shared stylesheet with the tokens and the components, synced into all three sites.
One font, Plus Jakarta Sans.
Rule zero, written at the top of the design doc: the primary job of every screen is above the fold, at every screen size.
The phone homepage of nautivia.eu (at 390×844) went from 3,463px tall to 2,243px.

The images: Codex, with examples

Eight painted Adriatic images: a coast, a car ferry, a walk-on passenger, a sailing boat, a boat band, an anchorage cove, a port and a phone-size coast — The illustrations now on the pages, generated with Codex image_gen.

Every illustration on the pages was generated with Codex's image_gen: the painted coast for wide screens and for phones, the three choice cards, a boat band, an anchorage cove and a port scene: eight illustrations, each rendered in two sizes. Two crops of the reference mocks were attached to every prompt as examples, and I think that is a big part of why they look like one painter made them. Before this, the agent had skills but nothing to aim at.

The part that is not about design

Adam did not owe me anything. He gave just for the sake of giving. Strangers are friends you have not met yet, and I think I gained one.

And taking feedback on something you built is never easy. When people said it looked like AI, the first thing I wanted to do was explain why they were wrong. It was hard to shut up for a minute and just listen, even when it stung. That is where the useful part was.

Tell me honestly

Before and after, even if it is hard to hear.

nautivia.eu· croatianferries.com· nautivia.app