Design links for April 21, 2026

A Claude-powered Figma plugin built around an agent loop — not a chat window.

When the model is the new medium, shaping how it behaves in humanistic ways is design.

The real danger happens when expansion artifacts show up in the training data for the next generation of generative AI.

There's a kind of work that happens before anything gets made. It's the work of sitting with a decision long enough to actually believe in it.

Claude Design gives designers room to explore widely and everyone else a way to produce visual work.

Here's how it completes the designer's AI stack, and why you still can't delegate taste.

Software archaeology is a term engineers have been using for decades to describe reading legacy code you didn't write, and the design systems version needs the same name.

Browse the character set, discover related glyphs, and learn more about the scripts, symbols, and shapes that make up the standard.

I kept stacking several elements and accidentally varied the text-stroke-width for each layer.

Design system teams will need to move from documenting guidelines on a website to encode design decisions and governance using metadata, skills and building structures and workflows to automate linting, support, quality reviews.

We spent 20 years designing things users control. The next 20 will be about designing things that act on our behalf.

Agreeing on what to build is the new bottleneck.

Rebuilding our frontend had been a long time coming because of how tricky it was to work on MDN's UI.

A deep dive into Brian Lovin's design process and all of the ways he's iterating on his approach to both using AI tools as well as building AI tools at Notion.

Without the handoff, everyone builds. And that makes all the difference.

Hidden gems of UI development.

While I firmly believe the best way is to just start using SVG filters, I'd also like to provide this starter's guide, the stuff I wish I had read while getting into all this.

Most people are tireless and brave and brilliant in the work they do, when it’s work that has purpose and passion.

A UX strategy is a document that answers three questions specifically about the experience you're building: what's the experience like today, what do you want it to feel like, and what are you actually going to do to close the gap.

When design decisions are made in the medium where they'll live, you encounter immediately what the platform supports and what it doesn't.

Now, many people are tired of overly polished, gauzy, AI-generated visuals that look good from afar but fall apart in the details.

If you're an engineer who uses AI daily - for design reviews, code generation, debugging, documentation, architecture decisions - and you've noticed that you're somehow more tired than before AI existed, this post is for you.

In practice, I find myself using this trick a lot more on SVG icons than with bouncing balls, so that's what we'll focus on in this tutorial.