September 2, 2026

Issue #759: Invisible interfaces

Speaking design at scale, The new Instagram logo divides creatives , Design’s legibility gap, The rise of design engineering (video), and more.

Paper is the design tool for teams shipping with agents - Introducing Paper: a connected canvas, a new workflow for designers. Let agents do the busy work so you can focus on the decisions only you can make. - Paper sponsored
Invisible interfaces - Design isn't disappearing along with the interface. It is concentrating, and all the care we used to spread across hundreds of screens now pours into a handful of moments, into a sentence, a summary, a request for permission. - Felix Haas
Speaking design at scale - A design system gives them a way to refer to decisions that already exist. - Matt Rothenberg

Read all week, picked once. The best design links, every Tuesday.

The new Instagram logo divides creatives - The new Instagram logo hasn't just raised a huge debate amongst creatives. It's also exposed a deeper divide over what design, in general, needs to do. - Tom May
Design’s legibility gap - If we want UX/Design to avoid the fate of the forest's second generation, the real work of leadership is to evolve what businesses see as 'legible.' - Peter Merholz

The rise of design engineering (video) - What happens when designers can code and engineers have taste? You get a design engineer, and this role is quietly reshaping how the best software gets built. - Raphael Salaja, Warp
On animating what you can't see - Any transition that animates a snapshot instead of the live view is worth checking for two failure modes: capturing bounds instead of drawn extent, and resizing instead of scaling. - Karl Koch

Comms: Show and tell, for your agents (beta) - Comms turns what you show and say into a brief your agent can execute. - Jan Haaland
Make your logo brighter than white - Upload a logo, choose which colors should glow, download an HDR JPEG. On HDR screens the chosen parts shine up to 7.5× brighter than #FFFFFF. - Chris Bennett

Creative clarity - Many people have figured out how to break this creative process down into phases, making it easier to draw limits on what not to do, and focus. - Herbert Lui
The AI interface museum - A visual history of how humans learned to talk to, look through, create with, and delegate work to artificial intelligence. - Kyle Jeong

DHH: Future of programming (video) - There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. And we have seen decades of progress happen in the last nine months. - Lex Fridman, David Heinemeier Hansson