Design links for September 21, 2026

Go back to the fundamentals. Study them until you can apply them, then until you can see them — in your own work, in other people’s, in whatever a model hands you. Build the habit of naming what’s wrong and why.

On the value of cultural references, and the cost of losing them at scale.

As more interface work is AI-generated, the output of research and design shifts from documents written for humans to curated context that guides AI.

Evals can tell us whether AI respected the decisions we've already made. They get much less useful when we ask them to make the next one for us.

All 115 elements of the current HTML specification laid out as a periodic table: search, filters by spec section and links to MDN.

As execution gets cheaper, the new cost of creation becomes your judgment, your willingness to keep going, and your ability to see something worth making in the first place.

What worries me is that we have started to accept the smooth, flat average without questioning it.

Most companies will use AI to clear a faster queue. But I think there’s a larger opportunity: to turn a company’s point of view into a living system, then give its best creative people more time to make the kind of work no system can predict or generate.

AI can now generate summaries, themes, documents, even recommendations faster than ever – but how do you know if any of it is actually good?

Taste, both as a physiological process and an aesthetic preference, is subjective. It's contextual and belongs to the individual.

The workarounds people build around a product can reveal requirements they would never think to ask for. The useful question is what those workarounds are doing for them.

The craft is not in removing complexity. It's in deciding who should see it, when they should see it, and how much of it they need at once.

Until we have widespread support for gap decorations, the easy trick for having borders between grid cells in CSS is giving the grid a 1px gap, setting the container's background color to the desired border color, and setting the cells' background colors to the desired background color.

100 top UXD methods ranked by breadth, altitude, persuasion, and cost. AI prototyping wins as the highest-value method.

A rubric I wrote years ago has five sections, and I only ever filled in four. Here is what belongs in the fifth, and why it took me this long to write it down.

The only thing between most dashboards and numbers that read right is a font that kept its figures and four lines asking for them.

Occasionally a designer is faced with an important question that awaits an honest answer: are you doing something to make your user's life simpler, or yours?

Most token systems were built for people. Agents expose where their naming, structure, and documentation break down.

Prompt-to-code interfaces don't create better ideas by themselves. But what they do is reduce the cost of execution to almost nothing — giving us more time to remain in the unknown, play with the problem and discover which ideas are actually worth pursuing.

Be extremely choosy about what you let be added to your system. And be militant about taking things out.

When the text is one line, the icon is centered, but when the text has multiple lines, the icon is still centered but looks odd.

Share your experience of design work, hiring, pay and AI. Take the Dive Radio survey and explore research on design careers and the economy.

Read the token file and you can follow some of the decisions your team has made; read an API response and you can design for the data your interface will receive; read a diff and you can tell what a change is likely to touch.