Design links for May 19, 2026

43 interactive field cards covering nudges, biases, heuristics, and AI phenomena. A practical reference for designers, researchers, and product teams building with AI.

It's fast becoming the case that if you put any Mac app's icons in reverse, it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really, really good at icon design.

If you are sitting on a portfolio right now and not getting the calls you think you should be getting, there is a chance at least one of these is the reason.

Facts don't just advocate for the user; they prove that UX is a non-negotiable requirement for a healthy bottom line.

Acceptance and commitment therapy is a whole thing worth exploring. With acceptance, with the acknowledgment that AI is here, it's likely not going away, despite my feelings and my grief around it.

If you don't want your floating chat button to end up sitting behind the home indicator, where it's unreachable, you need to account for the safe area inset.

Most users never need to reset a form. If they make mistakes, they fix them and move on.

Most AI tools one-shot a plausible-looking mock. Impeccable starts with a conversation: audience, brand personality, anti-references, aesthetic direction.

Personal software is a solution that is good enough for a niche audience. It's software made by "anyone," for themselves and the people around them.

Using AI without an active intent to learn quietly degrades the skill you're being paid for.

Advocates are tenured or high level people in other functions (engineering, product management) who want to see a change from design and help you make it happen.

Do not use AI to automate or take away the joy for the thing you used to have. Because if you do this, you will eventually lose your joy entirely.

AI automates what is lowest value first. For design, that was UI. Not because UI is easy. It isn't. But because it is repeatable. Learnable. Describable enough to train a model on.

Three file formats have moved from proposal to working convention in the design systems conversation in roughly twelve months.

The pattern is familiar. A new tool arrives, compresses something that used to take time, and creates space for designers to do more of what actually matters.

When a designer can't articulate why a decision was made beyond surface-level descriptions of what the decision is, they're not failing to translate internal knowledge into external language.

In a moment when AI is changing what it means to design, when the agents you'll be working with and designing for live and breathe in this environment, the fear of the black window is a wall between you and the work that matters most.

From orchestration patterns to iconography, the experience we're building will ultimately have components that work together to amplify thinking, guide decisions, and unlock creativity—seamlessly, wherever you work.

The new install HTML element changes that: drop a single HTML element into your page and the browser renders a trusted install button for you, with no JavaScript required.

Now, much of the interdisciplinary work that goes into product management can be done by an LLM in minutes, sometimes seconds.

Strong context upstream produces accurate output downstream. Weak context upstream produces drift that scales with whatever tooling you point at it.

Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear.

Media query ranges are clearer, easier to debug, and well-supported. Give them a try in a project, I’m sure you will find it useful.