Design links for October 29, 2026

James McDonald is one of my favorite visual designers on the planet… but recently he took on his first ever contract where he's responsible for both designing and building his ideas from scratch.

If you think about it for a second, skills are the apps of the agentic era.

My design system now starts in code, and I generate my Figma library from it. Code always wins, and Figma is a mirror, not a second truth.

I hate slop. You hate slop. Agents love sneaking slop into our designs.

The HTML-in-Canvas API bridges the gap between the interactive, accessible world of the DOM and the high-performance, pixel-level control of canvas.

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.