Design links for August 25, 2026

A design system gives them a way to refer to decisions that already exist.

Not every interaction needs a journey, but the ones that introduce a new local surface benefit from a visible origin.

A visual history of how humans learned to talk to, look through, create with, and delegate work to artificial intelligence.

Many people have figured out how to break this creative process down into phases, making it easier to draw limits on what not to do, and focus.

A Cursor agent skill for applying a restrained Scandinavian visual system to a codebase: black-and-white foundation, sans-serif type, generous spacing, and purposeful product imagery.

A remix of the 2011 Critical Engineering Manifesto for design engineers.

Use design token metadata to generate :host defaults and :defined overrides for Shadow DOM web components.

Agents can inspect failed runs, edit their tools and instructions, test the result, and keep what works.

Is Agentic scores the public parts of a website that AI agents can discover, retrieve, understand, and use.

Chatbots are not the final interface: OpenAI’s Head of Design on what’s next.

A card packs everything about one item (image, title, key facts, action) inside a clearly bounded rectangle that the user's visual system sees as a single object, which is why cards excel at presenting browsable collections of self-contained things.

The core of it all really is, how do you turn qualitative decisions into a quantifiable rubric? That's exactly how you train a model to get better at any task.

In this video, I combine conversations with designer friends, current hiring research, and recent industry surveys to look at how the product design role is actually changing.

HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript's remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.

For Linear, AI is most useful when it expands a designer's capacity to think, rather than doing the thinking for them.

If prototypes constrain user behavior, they may also shape the insights we get from usability testing.

We trust people who show their work and say 'here's what I'm sure about and here's what I'm guessing.' Then we turn around and build AI that does neither, and act surprised when nobody can tell the good answers from the confident garbage.

What started as an attempt to organize his team's prototypes ended up becoming a new type of AI design tool.

I've added my design bookmarks to my website. 372 bookmarks, but I'll probably go through and pare them down over time, so the list is more useful on average.

A component library gives you parts. A design system carries the decisions that make a product feel coherent.

A dark mode toggle is a temporary comfort adjustment. When it comes to user goals, there are only two real states: The website looks ok. The user moves on with their actual goal and doesn't look for the toggle at all.

Three explicit options (System, Light, Dark) for a Dark Mode Toggle (or Vale's clever UI trick) don't come with this type of unexpected surprise.

Drop Markdown into a folder and ship a production-grade docs site, no app boilerplate to write or maintain. Free and open source, forever.