Design links for October 28, 2026

I learned programming and design by trying, failing, and trying again. When I hit a wall, I figured out how to climb it.

I missed an internet with more personality. Building a little piece of it involved Claude, 4,096 colors, and a surprisingly difficult pair of legs.

Some of the knowledge has to move out of the designer and into the system.

I've recently split review into two kinds. Objective review asks whether the code works: bugs, security holes, edge cases and an adversarial reviewer trying to break it. Subjective review asks whether it's the right code.

Find the select in your product where people hesitate the most, ask what they're really trying to find out, and put that answer inside the option.

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.