Issue #720: Good visual design
Design engineering, Shipping too fast, Sameness, Responsive letter spacing, Vibe coding as a designer, Color Palette Pro, and more.
Highlights of the week
- The Mindful Design course is now live - 24 hours of videos with 15-30 hours of exercises make course far beyond a deep dive. Save £60 using the code MDLAUNCH and get 50% off your next course. - Set Studio sponsored
- Good visual design, explained - I explain visual-design principles that contribute to good-looking designs, with real-site examples. - Kelley Gordon
- The Rosetta Stone of design engineering - A deeper look at how design and engineering meet, overlap, and translate meaning. - Yann-Edern Gillet
Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- The hidden cost of shipping too fast - Speed often gets treated as progress even when no one has agreed on what progress actually means. - Anton Sten
- In the sea of sameness - On authenticity. - Itay Dreyfus
Design engineering
- Responsive letter spacing - Earlier this year, a longtime customer shared a new iteration of their brand guidelines. - Tyler Sticka
- My CSS layout strategy - It isn’t really about grids; it’s about a repeatable way to make layout decisions. - Andy Clarke
Artificial intelligence
- What AI is really for - Best case: we’re in a bubble. Worst case: the people profiting most know exactly what they’re doing. - Christopher Butler
- Vibe coding as a designer - I’m deep in vibe coding mode this week. - Sil Bormüller
Tools and resources
- Color Palette Pro - A synthesizer for color palettes. - Ryan Feigenbaum
- Grid Paper - A home-cooked app for drawing straight lines. - Dave Rupert
Inspiration and creativity
- Exposure - Designers spend too much time with other designers. - Hardik Pandya
Last but not least
- Good enough is a strategy - Perfect is the enemy of done. And done is the only way to learn what perfect actually means. - Trevor I. Lasn