The sad gray icons looked like a taste problem, but the biggest improvement came from giving the agent access to product judgment I had already worked out.

The question to sit with: A year from now, when everyone on your team has the same tools and the same prompts and skill files, can anyone tell your work apart from theirs?

Taste is the work after generation, when you read the output, name what's wrong and change it before anyone else has to live with the draft.

As AI becomes increasingly powerful at generating ideas, our judgement of those ideas becomes increasingly important.

We do it, naturally, for you, as we set out to rebuild our online editor to better support what today's developers want and expect.

Why "systems thinking" is now the most important skill she looks for.

TJ explains why sprinkling AI into a design system without proper context creates chaos rather than speed.

Strip away the branding, and nearly every screen you used today was assembled from roughly a dozen standard parts: a button here, an input field there, a menu across the top, links in the middle, and a dialog box interrupting at the worst moment.

Generation won't tell you when to stop looking, taste is the stopping rule.

Interface Lineage takes them apart for the people who make them. You leave able to name each move, feel how it works, and say why it matters.

It all makes me wonder what other aesthetics are being born out of this AI moment and how many will spread, take seed, and become part of common software interaction paradigms for years or decades to come?

In this week’s episode Charlie shares the principles that guide his design practice and takes us on a tour of some of the finer craft details inside Dia.

Establish principles to shape, decide and communicate design intent.

Why most AI-built products are screens without a system, and the three things that make one real (with the live system and docs to prove it).

Online image dithering tool. Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Bayer ordered dithering, animated GIFs, and multi-image upload — processed locally in your browser.

This is a living resource library that will be updated and continue to grow.

I set out to package judgement and context into a kit so they could accompany every prompt rather than being reconstructed each time.

Agents rarely fail because they can't build the feature. They fail because they break something that was already working.

Every AI problem you chase — hallucinations, wrong answers, poor retrieval — traces back to the IA projects you never funded. Now’s the time to fund them.

Layout animation keeps spatial memory intact when lists reorder, panels expand, and items enter or leave. FLIP turns layout jumps into transform-based motion.

Product sense means predicting which product decisions will succeed based on patterns learned through experimentation — and knowing when those patterns apply.

Feed the machines the raw structured data they want on the backend, but don't let the order they require dictate your human design.

A running notebook of Rauno Freiberg's in-progress UI explorations. Raw sketches, dead ends, and iterations shown alongside the working version, unpolished by design.

About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper.

CSS infinity solve some pretty specific problems elegantly, but can also just be plain fun to use.