When you build a project, do you actually know how you want the UI to look or do you just go with whatever works?

Genuine question because I've been thinking about this a lot.

When you get to the frontend/UI part of your project, what actually happens? Do you have a clear picture in your head of how you want it to look, or do you just pick a template, use a component library, or let AI generate something and tweak it until it's "good enough"?

I ask because I recently built a dashboard and Claude gave me this generic blue theme. It looked fine. But fine felt wrong so I changed it to cream and green because that's what I actually wanted — I just didn't know it until I saw what I didn't want.

Made me wonder if that's a common experience or if most developers just ship whatever looks decent and move on.

No right answer here, just curious what the actual process looks like for people