Daily Curated Design News and Resources

For Linear, AI is most useful when it expands a designer's capacity to think, rather than doing the thinking for them.

If prototypes constrain user behavior, they may also shape the insights we get from usability testing.

We trust people who show their work and say 'here's what I'm sure about and here's what I'm guessing.' Then we turn around and build AI that does neither, and act surprised when nobody can tell the good answers from the confident garbage.

What started as an attempt to organize his team's prototypes ended up becoming a new type of AI design tool.

I've added my design bookmarks to my website. 372 bookmarks, but I'll probably go through and pare them down over time, so the list is more useful on average.

A component library gives you parts. A design system carries the decisions that make a product feel coherent.

A dark mode toggle is a temporary comfort adjustment. When it comes to user goals, there are only two real states: The website looks ok. The user moves on with their actual goal and doesn't look for the toggle at all.

Three explicit options (System, Light, Dark) for a Dark Mode Toggle (or Vale's clever UI trick) don't come with this type of unexpected surprise.

Drop Markdown into a folder and ship a production-grade docs site, no app boilerplate to write or maintain. Free and open source, forever.

From CC Desktop or CLI, try something like "/design a few options for {feature}" before you build — pick your fave artboard, edit it and implement.

The pattern across these decades is consistent: every time a genuinely new technology arrives — video, computation, the web, physical computing, AI — the people who figure out what it means are often the ones who treat it as a medium rather than just a tool.

A component library built on real semantic HTML instead of div soup.

Using WebGPU compute shaders, we'll build a small pipeline to extract motion through frame differencing and encode it into masks and velocity maps.

The easier it gets for an agent to route around your system, the more that system needs a way to catch itself when it's been routed around.

A Modernist hydraulic tile floor, one motif rotated across the whole room, is something you'll find everywhere in Barcelona.

It’s based on the /better collection of skills and it's a mix of best practices and some of my personal preferences.

Design does not get back in by producing more. The work that moves a product forward is judgement applied to accumulated knowledge: which problem is worth solving, what users have already told us, what was tried before and why it fell short.

Specs serve as a hub for expressions across all the surfaces – Figma, prototypes, code libraries, docs – each a source of intent and a surface on which to render intent.

Taste teaches us what to notice. Intent gives that recognition a direction. Craft lets reality answer back.

Rather than one enormous instruction manual, we're creating a connected set of design system rules an agent can navigate as needed.

The work took about a year and covers 600+ icons in two sizes and two styles, every single exploration and every final icon variant drawn by hand.

I thought AI was about bringing engineering and design closer together, but in the end it was a QA holding the keys to a self-improving tool.

These are some of the books that we frequently recommend to designers who are setting out to make a positive difference in the world.

A standard format for describing the behavior an AI agent is expected to follow across repeated interactions. Written for the people and agents who review traces, design evals, and align prompts.