Design links for October 9, 2026

AI did not remove the complexity of software. It removed the interface that told you where the complexity went, and who is now paying for it.

Michelangelus is a humanist serif font inspired by one of the greatest artist and architects in human history.

The design critique is shifting as we work, its purpose being redefined. What do we pay attention to when the model has a hand in the making?

Developers and designers will always create new innovative ways to be weird and inaccessible in their UI, and spec authors will always struggle to decide how far to support the chaos.

Product leadership when software can build itself.

A design philosophy where every animation serves a functional purpose — motion is information, not decoration.

An argument can be made that Design owns coherence—how a suite of offerings, across channels of delivery, adds up for the person on the other end.

The more imperfect it got, the more it felt like mine (and like me).

I want a world built to make ourselves more capable with AI, not just to have more capable agents to talk to.

Discover how Microsoft redesigned the Copilot icon using shape, color, and motion to create a unified identity that communicates across apps and devices.

A great icon cannot just look good on its own. It has to feel like it belongs.

The idea is you write the viewport sizes in @media, set a named token on :root, and access it with a style query instead of repeating the media query.

CSS can now handle tooltip and dropdown positioning without JavaScript. Learn how anchor positioning, popovers, and anchor-size() simplify UI.

AI is not a substitute for divergent thinking, and the false certainty it gives will never save you from having to iterate.

blue-500 means whatever its palette decided it means, and in many of the palettes teams use, that is only where the shade sits in the ramp.

These are five principles I've been working through. Some get more difficult when you put them together, particularly when you move from someone speaking at their desk to someone talking through their AirPods with their phone in their pocket.

Drop-in animated toggles for React, Svelte, and Vue. Install with shadcn/ui, npm, or copy the source.

Router- and framework-agnostic — React, Svelte, Vue, Solid, Angular, and Qwik. Built on the Web Animations API, beyond what View Transitions can do.

Instead of considering how we build our products to fit the world of AI, we should be thinking about how to build AI that behaves like a native species in the ecosystem of human behavior.

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.