Design links for September 11, 2026

In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.

Perhaps one of the most important design skills in the world of AI will be a very simple one: not to rush into agreeing with the first reasonable answer.

The prompt is the front door, and context engineering is the architecture of the whole entire house.

My post on two-state dark mode toggles sparked a lot of discussion about the optimal dark mode toggle design. But should you have a (persistent) dark mode toggle at all?

Human factors has reinvented itself every decade since Bell Labs, the oldest lessons are the ones pointing the way forward.

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.