Design links for September 15, 2026

Designers now turn ideas into working products. Explore a curated collection of apps, tools, websites, and experiments designed, built, and shipped by designers.

It sits at the intersection of design and engineering, but if you ask ten different people exactly what it means to be a design engineer, you might get ten different answers.

Today I'm re-launching DESK as a personal archive of these essays, with the goal to keep writing till the very last day.

The current planning medium is a poorly designed environment for humans to do high-quality thinking in.

Words alone will rarely sink the ship. But they absolutely can contribute to headaches, misalignment, wasted motion, false confidence, and harmful flattening.

When a prompt outperforms the tool, that isn't the machine's triumph; it's the instrument's failure.

Our dashboard at Vercel has a sidebar. All kinds of important notices or promotions live on the sidebar surface. There can often be many of them, so there needs to be a way to navigate through several cards.

A Design OS brings the systems and processes of design together in software so they can be used by both people and agents.

I’ve released Humane functionalism, a skill for AI coding agents that applies ideas from Danish functionalism to UI and UX.

Much like I maintain my own CSS reset, which provides me a clean slate for my styles, I maintain my own boilerplate, which I use as a base structure and reference when creating HTML documents.

The foundational language of the web is getting plenty of love lately. While HTML moves a bit more slowly than its buddies, CSS and JavaScript, that tends to be a good thing.

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.