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Design Intelligence: Squarespace’s Unique Approach to AI

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My vision, as Sr. Group Product Manager in charge of Squarespace’s core website builder, is for every person who uses Squarespace to end up with a website they love. One of the newest and most innovative ways we’re helping you get to a beautiful website is with a set of tools we’re calling Design Intelligence.

Encompassing a set of cutting-edge features that combine automation, design presets, creative guidance, and generative AI, Design Intelligence leverages new technology to bring Squarespace’s 20+ years of design expertise to the forefront of the website building experience.

What is Design Intelligence?

We’ve often heard from customers that they’re looking for more design guidance and more help with content creation when building a website. So we started asking ourselves: What have we been asking our users to handle themselves in the website editor that we could be helping with? How could Squarespace show up as more of a creative partner, and how could our design expertise scale to millions?

Design Intelligence is our answer to these questions. It’s a mix of automated processes, AI-powered tools, and one-click design options in our website builder, all with the shared goal of making it easier to build a more beautiful and impactful website.

But it’s not just about technology. We have decades of experience as leaders in web design, and we wanted to bring that expertise to the fore. Against a backdrop of AI hype, we knew we didn’t want to simply shoehorn a set of parlor tricks into the website editor. Instead, we’ve been searching for ways to filter new technology through the lens of hand-curation from expert designers, and we’ve sought out ways to integrate it seamlessly into targeted moments of the website building journey.

That way, your final product is beautifully designed, but still human—with your unique ideas and passions at the foundation.

The Design Intelligence suite of tools

So what does Design Intelligence actually look like on Squarespace? Let’s walk through a few examples.

Squarespace Blueprint AI

It all starts with your onboarding onto Squarespace. Our newest iteration of Blueprint AI solicits a few pieces of information about your website—how you’d categorize it, your site goals, name, and brand personality—and with just those few inputs it generates an entire customized website. We populate each page with beautiful, AI-generated imagery that’s been carefully designed with a proprietary prompting approach and custom art direction, as well as generative text copy that matches your website’s category, goal, and tone. Each image is beautiful and inspirational, and each bit of text provides a helpful jumping off point. It’s AI speed, with Squarespace design and personalization.

Site Themes

In the editor, we’ve rolled out a new Site Themes feature that allows you to quickly view your site content in a variety of styles curated by our designers. Within each theme, we’ve curated recommended variations for every style element: curated color palettes, font packs, button styles, and more that match your website’s unique brand style. These recommended variations allow you to explore thousands of combinations within your brand personality, bringing Squarespace’s design expertise to your fingertips even as you experiment and diverge from the base theme.

Layout Switcher

The Layout Switcher analyzes the contents of a Fluid Engine section and recommends curated layouts based on a given combination of blocks. With a single click, you can see your content immediately rearranged into professionally designed layouts.

As you add, remove, or edit blocks in your section, the Layout Switcher provides new, updated layout recommendations. Our suggestions will provide easy, one-click ways to arrange your content into attractive layouts, each hand-designed and curated by Squarespace’s expert designers.

AI writer

Our AI writer makes it a snap to draft text copy—anything from a short marketing headline to an entire email campaign. You can retain the generated text as-is, or you can use it as an inspirational jumping off point for your own ideas. You can find it in even more locations across Squarespace, including the text block in the website editor, product descriptions, SEO site descriptions, and more.

Brand Identity

Our new Brand Identity service keeps track of a few pieces of information about your website, including your business or industry and your brand personality. We use this information to inform the content and style recommendations we make. You can update and fine-tune your brand personality at any time. Having a clear brand identity is especially helpful for generating tailored content that’s unique to your website.

Combining AI and creative excellence 

One of our core differentiators at Squarespace has always been the elevated design sensibility we bring to everything we do. Whether it’s our designer templates, our AI-powered site creator with Blueprint AI, our site theme variants, our layout suggestions, or our generative content, we never want you to have a generic experience. With Design Intelligence, we wanted to take the time to craft something truly special curated by our designers and catered to your particular website, at scale.

Design Intelligence is an innovative experience powered by new technology, but at its core, it embodies our deference to human creativity when it comes to bringing new ideas to life. As we move forward, we’ll continue to look for ways to marry our expert design curation with innovative product enhancements. In the end, we want you to be the architect of your website, with Squarespace as your devoted design advisor along the way.

Ready to explore Design Intelligence?

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