Lu: Standardize Mixed Headshots Using White Backgrounds and B&W Filters
Rio Lu · Cursor Head of Design Roasts Startup Websites · Y Combinator · Nov 20, 2025 · at 16:50
Cursor Head of Design Rio Lu critiques the investor and testimonial photo section on the CodeCrafters landing page.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“One trick you can do is like, maybe like you knock down all their backgrounds, but keep them like white. Maybe you add a filter so that they're all like black and white. Then it kind of standardized the thing without like butchering the picture too much.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Rio Lu
Lu Catches Startup Slashy Stealing an Image From Notion
“Oh wow, they're actually stealing, like, a Notion picture here.”
Lu: Design Tokens Prevent AI-Generated Interface Slop
“You want to avoid, say all the typical AI slop, say like massive shadows, purple gradients, bad typography, just clean the basics up, then with like a really robust like, foundational set of tokens and components, AI is able to compose them pretty well.”
Lu: Limit Landing Pages to One Main CTA Per Scroll
“Kill all the distractions. Make sure that like every single scroll, there is only one main CTA. There's always like a priority, your main message, what the hell is it, the CTAs, and then it's like the proofs.”
Lu: Startups Alienate Visitors by Using Invented Internal Jargon
“The thing I hate for like a lot of companies, what they do is like, they love talking in their own words and with their own concepts that they came up that nobody else understands. Like you just throw these like big words there, but then they don't really mean…”
Lu: AI Apps Should Display Execution States, Not Generic Spinners
“But you do want to control, like you don't want to show too many things at once where, Like it just becomes like a wall of text. You want to control like, ah, the things that are running, you show them in the more like focusable spot. And as it progresses, it …”