Over the past few months, some friends and I have been working to establish the Trinity Robotics and AI Society, with the goal of advancing education in these topics at Trinity.
As part of this, I built a landing page to promote the society and attract members. I wanted the design to reflect AI as a chance for Trinity to take a more prominent position on the European stage, so I featured figures from the university's past. The hero image shows the statue of Edmund Burke outside Front Gate. I kept the same visual theme across the rest of the site.
Unlike many of my earlier web design projects, I experimented with relied heavy use of AI throughout this one. Using Claude's Playwright extension, I was able to minimise how much manual bug fixing I needed to complete. That said, I do not think AI models can yet design beautiful looking websites on their own. My first attempt was to have the model scaffold the layout but the result was so generic that I started from scratch anyway.
I used Nano Banana for most of the image generation (apart from the Isaac Asimov image in the Ethics section, as Nano Banana refuses to generate images of people). I think that part turned out well. Once frontier coding models can generate images reliably as part of prompts, I think web development will exponentially grow in accessibility and quality.
Overall, using AI on this project started as an experiment and worked better than I expected. I would not take the same approach on anything more complex than a static landing page, but for this use case it was a complete success. I had the entire page done in less than an evening and learned a lot about using AI effectively for coding. If you are a TCD student and this interests you, join TAIR.
