Design links for October 5, 2026

Timeless Grotesk, Sans, Serif and Text — four variable typefaces with matching italics, free for personal and commercial use.

My friend Cameron and I trained a language model to make images by writing code, using reinforcement learning.

In a world in which you can make anything, you still have to make something useful.

These are the superfamilies on Google Fonts. I've only included superfamilies where sans and serif typefaces are available, which have at least 3 styles per typeface, and which are not too decorative for general use.

How a few pencil sketches turned into a matchstick you can strike, and why the flicker needed three sine waves instead of one.

Honest uncertainty is exactly the material you need when designing though. In design things are rarely binary.

When agents write most of the code, the design system can become part of what I've called the AI steering layer: the context that keeps every website update aligned with brand, design, and development guidelines.

Creativity doesn't flourish when we push harder. It flourishes when we create conditions that allow it to thrive.

Rows (using column-wrap) provide a way to use multicol on the web without risking scrolling up and down to read if the columns become taller than the viewport.

Tactics from the best design teams and individuals working today, with notes on how the work got made.

EmDash started with a question: what would WordPress look like if it were built today.

A component library of well-crafted, animated AI status indicators for React. No dependencies, 3.8 KB gzipped.

The safeguards we put in place enabled us to roll out significant architectural changes safely, stress test in production, catch errors, pivot and repair efficiently, ultimately allowing us to succeed in our goals and realize great performance gains along the way.

This is a web example, influenced by some things I discovered whilst working in Swift on DuckDuckGo’s iOS toolbar.

Optimize for being a great design system. Then AI-readiness emerges as a property of that system.

The job of making software will become what the agents can't do.

modern-web-types is a drop-in replacement for TypeScript's official "DOM" and "WebWorker" libraries, built on TypeScript's own generator but with a single-engine support threshold.

I am passionately convinced that design isn't what happens after you understand the problem. Design is how you understand the problem.

Loading is a complex space, where sometimes the most natural solution is a bad one, sometimes making things faster is making things slower, and sometimes new thoughtful design for whatever delay there is can be a better use of engineering effort than focusing on shaving off more milliseconds.

System One models skip text generation. Given state and a bounded question with predefined answer types, they predict probabilities in a single forward pass.

What concerns me is how quickly I adapt. Something that would recently have felt like a major undertaking becomes the minimum I expect from myself.

Instead of writing something once and hoping it fits everyone who comes along, you build a corpus that can be recombined endlessly and produce a timely, relevant answer on demand.