Issue #739: State of prototyping: Spring 2026
Words before pixels, How I use Claude Code to vibe code my designs, The new era of UX, The invisible layer of UX, and more.
Highlights of the week
- State of prototyping: Spring 2026 - The most-used design tool after Figma is now an AI. The profession split into three camps, and most people haven't noticed yet. - Tommy Geoco
- Words before pixels - The most important design tool right now might be a text cursor. - Roger Wong
- How I use Claude Code to vibe code my designs - The canvas still matters. The craft still matters. Your judgment still matters. - Jeremy Hsu
Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- The new era of UX (video) - Jenny Wen led design on FigJam, one of the most playful tools to hit design in a decade. Now she's at Anthropic designing Claude. Not just the model, but the product that millions use daily. - Tommy Geoco, Jenny Wen
- The invisible layer of UX most designers ignore - How your design decisions translate to screen reader output. - Allie Paschal
Design engineering
- Inverted themes with light-dark() - Creating light and dark variable sets isn’t difficult, but delivery has trade-offs. - Dave Rupert
- Uber's agentic system for instant design specs - How Uber built an agentic system to automate design specs in minutes. - Ian Guisard
- On oklch - The entire design system flows from one idea: define colours perceptually, derive everything else. - Karl Koch
Artificial intelligence
- Redesigning workflows for AI - In a controlled field experiment, startups that redesigned end-to-end workflows around AI generated 90% more revenue than equally equipped peers that used AI mainly to speed up individual tasks. - Jakob Nielsen
Inspiration and creativity
- Should designers "code"? - There's a question that never goes away in design: should designers code? My answer has always been yes. - Luke Wroblewski
- Building the next web with Corey Moen from Anthropic (video) - Mason Poe (Founder, Edgar Allan) sits down with Corey Moen, web designer, former Webflow brand team lead, and now part of the Web team at Anthropic, for a wide-ranging conversation about what's actually changing in design, marketing, and the web. - Mason Poe, Corey Moen
Last but not least
- How designers survive (2026) - Good craft always finds its way in the world, it’s just a question of how much you can get paid by an organization for it. - Scott Berkun