Design links for September 28, 2026

How the design industry built the infrastructure of sameness, and called it best practice.

Twenty-seven families, every named color inside each one, with the codes to paste, the text colors that stay readable on it, and how it behaves on press.

Designers tell us what’s changed, how they are responding and what it means for the future.

A conversation with Saeideh Bakhshi on AI in UX research. Where it helps, where it fails, where teams get it wrong, and what changes when the product you study is an AI model.

Context architecture is more than writing clear prompts or formatting instructions with headings and bullets. It is the design of the entire information environment surrounding an AI system.

Based on Sam Spike's original reading list on taste, new aesthetics, and the loss of beauty.

Extending Figma using conventions is one level deeper. It's about naming what's happening in the design system's model when the surface doesn't: what kind of thing is this, what is it a part of, what does it mean?

Products that were once simple become littered with popups and overlays, because there's nowhere to grow but up.

A strategy doesn't appear out of thin air. At its core, it is a response to a challenge.

I’m working on a portfolio website and stumbled upon an interesting question: can I detect when an element hits or collides with another? The initial answer in the back of my head is no! It’s not possible.

Delegative UX is what lets a person see, track and understand work being done in their name, by an agent.

Curating the right context now matters even more than writing a good prompt.

AI is a boring technology. It's infrastructure — and the sooner we get used to thinking of it that way, the sooner we can stop being astonished and get back to making things.

We are proposing to make this a built-in capability of the web, and we'd love to know if this is worth pursuing and what the exact scope should be.

This week's episode is with Geoff Teehan, co-founder of the legendary design agency Teehan+Lax, longtime design leader at Facebook, and now Chief Design Officer at Lightspark.

A metaphor is a function between two worlds. A good one is a protocol: many ideas meet in one place.

A lightweight library full of beautiful loading indicators for React.

In 2026 the browser does all of this on its own. Here are twelve of those features, each with the workaround it retires, a snippet you can paste into a plain .css file, and where support stands.

Ten thousand hours in, my practice looks very different from the one I started with. Every client, project, and experiment has helped me understand what I'm good at, what gives me energy, and where those things are valuable to others.

It’s easy to agree that we should care about the details. It’s much harder to decide which feature we’re willing to leave out so we can finish the ones we’re keeping.

What started as an effort to refine our spacing tokens ultimately changed how we think about semantic tokens altogether.

If you want to have fluid typography, I recommend sticking with viewport units. This keeps the changes to the elements uniform across similar compositions.

After a couple of years designing agentic products, the thing that surprised me most is how little of the work is text. It's mostly decisions.