Issue #755: Skills and workflows for designers
The plateau of sad gray icons, Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers (video), 10 GUI design elements, On layout choreography, and more.
Highlights of the week
- The AI notepad for back-to-back meetings - Notes, actions and memory. Without a meeting bot. - Granola promoted
- AI skills and workflows for designers - This is a living resource library that will be updated and continue to grow. - Carmen Rincon
- The plateau of sad gray icons - The sad gray icons looked like a taste problem, but the biggest improvement came from giving the agent access to product judgment I had already worked out. - Yesenia Perez-Cruz
Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers (video) - Why "systems thinking" is now the most important skill she looks for. - Elizabeth Stone
- 10 GUI design elements build every user interface - Strip away the branding, and nearly every screen you used today was assembled from roughly a dozen standard parts: a button here, an input field there, a menu across the top, links in the middle, and a dialog box interrupting at the worst moment. - Jakob Nielsen
Design engineering
- On layout choreography - Layout animation keeps spatial memory intact when lists reorder, panels expand, and items enter or leave. FLIP turns layout jumps into transform-based motion. - Karl Koch
- Component contracts and schemas - Establish principles to shape, decide and communicate design intent. - Nathan Curtis
- The future of design systems (video) - TJ explains why sprinkling AI into a design system without proper context creates chaos rather than speed. - TJ Pitre, Michael Rispoli
Artificial intelligence
- The AI aesthetic - It all makes me wonder what other aesthetics are being born out of this AI moment and how many will spread, take seed, and become part of common software interaction paradigms for years or decades to come? - Jim Nielsen
- You can prompt a prototype. You can’t prompt taste - Generation won't tell you when to stop looking, taste is the stopping rule. - Ecaterina Petroia
Tools and resources
- Interface Lineage: The invisible mechanisms in your interfaces - Interface Lineage takes them apart for the people who make them. You leave able to name each move, feel how it works, and say why it matters. - Johannes Mutter
- Dither it! - Online image dithering tool. Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Bayer ordered dithering, animated GIFs, and multi-image upload — processed locally in your browser. - Alex Harris
- The launch of CodePen 2.0 - We do it, naturally, for you, as we set out to rebuild our online editor to better support what today's developers want and expect. - Chris Coyier
Inspiration and creativity
- Rauno's field notes - A running notebook of Rauno Freiberg's in-progress UI explorations. Raw sketches, dead ends, and iterations shown alongside the working version, unpolished by design. - Rauno Freiberg
Last but not least
- Everyone's work is starting to look the same - The question to sit with: A year from now, when everyone on your team has the same tools and the same prompts and skill files, can anyone tell your work apart from theirs? - Marie-Claire Dean