Design links for October 23, 2026

Katie Dill explains why great design still depends on a clear point of view, an understanding of users, and care in the details.

A live inventory of the brand’s system of colors, typography, iconography, and components.

Thirty-three isometric figures for the web. SVG, no dependencies, React or plain DOM.

The job has changed more in a year than in the decade before it. Here’s what mine feels like today.

The nice thing about display: grid-lanes is that you don't have to figure out where every item goes yourself.

Apple's streaming service has rebranded for the first time since launch. Created with TBWA\Media Arts Lab, the new identity is full of ripples made by sound.

Flow is the state of total absorption in which work feels effortless, time evaporates, and performance peaks.

I think in most codebases, the config that shapes the most code will soon be a preset and a few lines of AGENTS.md that nobody on the team wrote. That’s fine by me, as long as whoever wrote them spends their life on this stuff.

A good partnership changes more than how much work each person has to do.

Opening lecture for the Dyson School of Engineering in October 2026 where I reviewed a variety of thoughts I've had over the years in a 43-minute talk.

In intelligence-driven products, outcomes are probabilistic and vary across people and contexts, which makes static personas less effective for capturing real-world complexity.

The careers that thrive now are the ones willing to become someone new, over and over.

Turning the outlines on is usually a useful place to start. Once I can see which box I'm actually moving, I've got a much better chance of fixing the thing that looked wrong in the first place.

As we head into Interop’s 7th year, it's undeniable that the project has been a smashing success for the web. I’m so glad they keep building on this success.

Apple tried putting icons in all their menus, and even they went back on it.

Ten years of design tokens, several competing formats, and the shared language that never arrived.

USWDS was built to do the things government websites do, like make information easy to access and understand, and it does them really well.

Paper Mono is a free and open source font family with 8 variable weights and coding ligatures.

If your agent can test its own output, it'll write a change, run the check, read the output, and try again over and over until it can pass the check.

Designers should understand code the way an architect understands stone: what it can do, not how to cut it.

We've open-sourced our Accessible Components Library, and, as you might expect, this includes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.

Agents make that problem easier to solve, but they also expose how much discipline the underlying information needs.

Titles, company logos, and even specific initiatives don't tell the story of what a designer is great at and how they might fit the needs of a business.