Hand-picked since 2012

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

  • Design is how it tastes by Jem Gold

    If our design specs only tell models what the interface is made of, they have already forgotten what the interface is for.

  • Protecting your creativity in an AI world (video) by Pablo Stanley, Michael Riddering

    Pablo Stanley has built as many creative tools as anyone in our industry. In this episode he gives us a behind-the-scenes of his latest creations .

  • Designing fast and slow by Andy Budd

    The useful question is not whether the organisation should think fast or slow. It is whether this particular decision is genuinely reversible, what failure would actually cost, and whether anyone will come back to fix it if the bet does not pay off.

  • Canvas UI: Creative canvas and WebGL component library by David Haz

    An open source library of tasteful html-in-canvas & WebGL components. Framework agnostic. Copy, paste, ship.

  • 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.

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