Design links for October 27, 2026

A different way to think about creative work.

Building a site has never been cheaper, but making it fast still costs attention and your user's resources.

Code is cheap now. What's still expensive is deciding what to build and how it should feel.

Typography is the backbone of every design system. It touches every screen, every component and every word your users read.

AI has made "personal computing" actually personal.

Products ship with the same AI panel; people hunt for the off switch, and spend has outrun returns. Build features with AI, not AI features.

You don't always have to build from atoms. Sometimes, you need to discover them.

Dimensional drawings and technical specifications.

Code review was always meant as a verification step: does the code produce the outcome we want?

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.