Design links for October 30, 2026

AI closes the distance between an idea and a working thing. It doesn't close the distance between people.

The values themselves don't need to be unique. Many companies say they care about quality. The difference is how much that belief affects their decisions.

“Move fast and break things” has always left me wondering who has to live with the things you break.

Why the terminal feels so unfamiliar to designers, and how to read it anyway.

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?