If you call yourself a designer and—be honest with yourself—the bulk of your role has been the production of flat pictures of user interfaces, then I’m sorry to break it to you, but you are not designing. You are styling.

Rafa Conde is a design engineer at Retro and one of the most creative designers I know. I still remember where I was when I first saw the video on his personal site. In this episode we unpack what it means to design experiences that bring delight.

Design knows how to make things that do not yet exist. The work ahead may be to apply that capacity to the profession's own institutional life

Design gets talked about like it's a deliverable. Screens, mocks, prototypes, guidelines — those are artifacts of design, but they aren't design. Design is the act of deciding what should exist, why it should exist, and what "right" looks like before you've committed to building it.

The truth is: Form design isn’t easy, not when you actually do it properly.

AI didn’t teach designers to code. It gave them back the decisions that were always theirs.

Your professional reputation is what gets you to push back on the model.

Draftsmanship originates from the word draught, meaning “to draw or pull.” It’s an attribute defined as the art, skill, or technique of producing drawings, plans, or sketches, particularly emphasizing high-quality, precise, and accurate representation.

A design systems practitioner's honest read on what it is, what it isn't, and where Figma actually sits in this picture.

Define sounds as plain objects and play them with a single function call.

Setting a vision will guide you and team to the right tools, in the right context.

Everyone’s tired of AI slop in design. I get it. The flat illustrations all look the same. The landing pages read like nobody wrote them. The component libraries feel like a Tailwind starter someone forgot to edit. And no, Stitch doesn’t fix it.

A senior engineer’s job is mostly the parts that don’t show up in the diff. Specs. Tests. Reviews. Scope discipline. Refusing to ship what can’t be verified. AI coding agents skip those parts by default. Agent Skills is my attempt to make them not optional.

A 2026 UX portfolio isn’t about polished case studies; it’s proof of how you tackle ambiguity, use AI as a true creative partner, and move quickly from insight to execution to deliver results that matter to the business.

It’s really easy to say agents are able to use a design system. See, I just said it–that’s how easy it is. It’s another thing to show that agents are able it use it well–with receipts to prove it.

Every pixel you see on this page is the result of stacking hundreds of elements on top of each other and deciding, millions of times, pixel by pixel, what the result should look like.

Agentic Experience Design (AXD) is a discipline now. For some it will still feel like an emerging discipline but I think for many it is shaping up in real-time.

More interfaces now render while the response is still being generated. The UI begins in one state, then updates as more data comes in. You see this in chat apps, logs, transcription tools, and other real-time systems.

The rule design systems use to promote patterns stops working the moment AI is generating the instances.