Design links for September 10, 2026

Principles of design focus on the how. How a design is executed, composition, arrangement, layout. Design principles are strategic and focus on the why? They are used to aid decision-making about a project's goals.

In this video: the One Slice Rule that finds the price every time, the value math behind it, and Papa Bear Pricing—the three-option proposal that gets clients excited about the biggest number on the page.

How I scaled Scribe’s design system to help serve over 6 million users.

A prototype shouldn't just look like the product; it should be built against the same data shapes.

In HTML, we have six different heading levels, and it can be a real pain to style them all in a way where they’re both identifiable and accessible.

Picking a categorical color palette is an optimization problem — there's no such thing as the right colors, but if you use the right cost function, and the right kind of hill climbing, you can at least get the least wrong ones.

Learn and understand web accessibility standards with interactive demos and comprehensive guidance for designers and developers.

AI doesn't change the question: it creates new choices and moves the thresholds.

These are only the more popular or notable non-standard bits. There are so many more obscure bits drifting through the shatters of cyberspace.

The only way to know if our AI products and workflows are any good is with evals.

The first half gets your attention. The second half is what makes it possible. Fewer details allow you to care more deeply about each one.

I automated our design tokens release with two AI agents. It took six minutes per run. A button my plugin has had for years takes seconds.

The designer behind the original Macintosh icons on simplicity, constraints, and making technology feel human.

AI is most powerful when designers treat it as a tool to bend to their will, extending their capability without outsourcing their judgment.

Splits text into lines, words and characters exactly where the browser already broke it.

Beauty and function are not different. Beauty IS a function. And it is important.

Coding agents can produce working UI fast, but what's harder is a different shape.

A good AI Input looks simple, but hides a lot of details. And every layer matters.

Calendly didn't just want us to give them a light little refresh, they wanted to signal a big shift in what they do, not just how they look.

DeLibra turns existing design data from Figma, CSS, or code into a structured libra that agents can build, inspect, and maintain.

Whoever holds the title is not the head of design. They were hired to build somebody else's caring into the organization, so it survives that person leaving the room.

AI can reduce the work of doing a task without removing the work of understanding the task well enough to know whether it was done correctly.

The decisions we make now will become the habits, expectations and quality bar for everyone who joins later.

As an engineer who is not a designer and hates slop.

I am not using an LLM, I am coding with my own hands, wading through documentation, tinkering, reverse engineering, console logging my way to understanding.