Sol vs Fable creating a drum machine (UI only)

I decided to put GPT 5.6 Sol (Ultra) against Claude Fable (Max) as Sol is supposed to be so much better at design that GPT 5.5...

The idea was to come up with several designs for a drum sequencer VST I'm building.

Both started with the same basic UI (3rd image) - and both were given the same prompts:

To come up with 4 unique designs:

1. Vintage/Classic console 2. Fun/retro - teenage engineering vibes 3. Their choice 4. Their choice

They were told they had complete creative freedom to build and change whatever they wanted - create custom controls, UIs, svgs etc, change the template completely if it better suits the theme.

For Fables #3 and #4 it chose: Blackout and Phosphor.

For Sols #3 and #4 it chose: Blacksite and Abyssal Bloom.

I think both gave reasonably similar results. Sol was more willing to change the layout completely (good), but in the details you can see it doesn't deliver, especially with #2 - the fun/retro option.

I feel like creatively, they're both at a *similar* level, but Sol falls short on the details - alignment, consistency etc - you can see text spilling over containers, or icons misaligned all over the place - Fable does a much better job in giving a polished result.

It's probably not news to anyone here:

**Winner: Fable** \- although neither of their designs really blew me away...