Design links for July 6, 2026

Today, a lot of creativity and productivity happen onscreen, but our interfaces do not often respect the fingers the same way older instruments did.

In this interview you will see how Carol Lei designed Command which is Mercury's agentic operation system for banking.

You need a rich set of concepts in your mind to think creatively and fluently about how to move something forward.

The demos show you one clean layer working under perfect conditions. Your actual work needs three or four layers stacked together, and nobody shows you the stack, because the stack is where it gets messy and half-solved.

A design system can only raise the quality floor. It sets the baseline below which nothing should ship.

Production is being commoditized much much faster than taste. It's an open question of whether AI will be able to produce 'taste.' For now, the ability to create qualitatively new judgments remains distinctly human.

A design system that adapts to your workflow, not the other way around. Built for speed, clarity, and creative freedom.

Shaders for you to use in your projects, as React components or GLSL.

Motion stops being a one-off deliverable someone rebuilds in After Effects and becomes a systematized property of your components.

The bet we're making with Orbit is this: make it hard to express an off-brand decision in code in the first place.

The last year in product design has felt turbulent. Not just because the tools changed — but because of the sheer volume of extremely confident opinions about what the future looked like. Design is dead or whatever bullshit.

Halfway through the year, so let's look at what I nailed, what I totally missed, and why usability still lags terribly behind.

A conceptual rebrand exploring how Stack Overflow can evolve its identity and digital experience in response to changing developer behaviours, the rise of AI, and the future of online knowledge sharing.

Semantic HTML is not an accessibility chore. It is interface infrastructure.

Design engineering is less about sitting between functions and more about combining the parts of those functions that let one person ship beautiful product.

We need to bring the calculations back into CSS and mix our units, combining the accuracy of pixel-based breakpoints with the accessibility of rem-based font sizes.

We do a ton of screen-sharing and go deep into his strategies for prompting, how to get better outputs from the models, and more.

The central design question is how do we help users rely on AI appropriately.

Comprehensive reference for designing AI experiences. 100+ patterns, visual examples, and reusable components for AI UX designers and product teams.

This talk dives into some of the newest updates in the CSS and web UI space while giving you a UX framework of 5 principles to frame digital design decisions through the lens of modern UI patterns.

The last wall before 'done' is always the same: the it-doesn't-feel-quite-right-yet wall. A wall that gives you no error messages, nothing to copy and paste into the chat. Just you, looking at the thing, knowing it isn't it.

A hypertoken is a named bundle of style properties, defined once, that every tool's copy is built from.

This standard puts design system docs in one shared format that any tool can read.

Print forced you to separate concerns: the grid, the frequency, the shape at each node. The browser lets you ignore all of that. I didn't.