Hand-picked since 2012

Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.

  • Components are dead by Luis Ouriach

    Tokens are the layer we can still control. And if we let go of the instinct to componentise every single surface of the product, we might actually be able to build faster, at greater scale, and stay just as consistent, maybe more.

  • Does your form really need a dropdown list? by Huei-Hsin Wang

    Dropdown lists are one of the most familiar controls in forms, but that convenience comes at a cost: dropdowns hide available options behind a click, adding friction to every selection and slowing decision making.

  • Software factories, light and dark by Addy Osmani

    Structure is everything, and it all starts with small units. The whole stack is really three concepts layered on top of each other: the loop, the harness, and the factory.

  • How to apply Nir Eyal’s Hook Model to AI products, safely by Patrick Neeman

    The durable AI habits will belong to the teams that keep the low effort and quietly repair the friction that moved.

  • Not tokens by Donnie D'Amato

    The question to ask before creating any token is simple: will this value ever need to change independently of the property it's applied to?

  • Sculpting a shapeless medium by Ryan Mather, Amelia Wattenberger, Federico Villa, Robin Chen

    I think about it like — if you had to understand what a codebase is from the commit logs, that's kind of what we're doing with agent chats.

  • Product quality by Miguel Fernandez

    Craft isn’t perfectionism. Perfectionism is self-indulgent: it optimizes for the maker’s satisfaction. Craft is empathetic: it optimizes for the person on the other side. We’re not doing art. We’re designing for others.

  • 9 designers open up about AI-assisted coding by Ron Goldin

    Some see it as an invigorating return to what brought them to the discipline in the first place, from the joy of creating to finally being able to sweat the details that separate a mediocre product from a great one.

  • Learning before leverage by Roger Wong

    AI leverage becomes workplace pressure when every saved hour simply raises the output expected next time.

  • On shared context by Karl Koch

    Shared-element transitions are useful because they preserve object identity across that break.

  • Training design senses by David Hoang

    Training your design senses is rigorous work, no different from training as a boxer or musician.

  • Make it work vs. make it good by Jim Nielsen

    "Make it work" is the first 90% of the work. "Make it good" is the other 90%.

  • The Swiss cheese model, pt. 1 by Marcin Wichary

    What's important to understand about this model is that either of these in isolation would objectively be a small mistake, and caught by the other slices.

  • Rebuilding FIFA standings layout with CSS Subgrid by Ahmad Shadeed

    Thanks to subgrid, we can nest a grid on the inner items. That means we can have two children positioned at the start and end of the shared grid.

  • Retry is not a loop, its a data structure by Siddhant Khare

    Under partial failure, retry loops can rearrange history. If order, duplication, or staleness matters, retry needs state.

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