Issue #769: The beige era of product design
On borrowing Apple's type scale, The new full-stack designer (video), AI prototyping inside your design system, Introducing Adaptive Dark Mode and more.
Highlights of the week
- An AI notepad for user interviews - Jot down what stands out while the participant talks, and Granola fills in the rest from the transcript after the call. Sign up on desktop for a free month. - Granola promoted
- The beige era of product design - Convergence isn’t the enemy. It’s the floor. Standardise what users expect so you can spend your energy where they don’t. - Sasha Grishin
- On borrowing Apple's type scale - Apple's text styles gave me a useful starting point because they're organised around jobs: Body, Headline, Subheadline, Caption, and the various titles. - Karl Koch
Read all week, picked once. The best design links, every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- The new full-stack designer (video) - Marvin Schwaibold, who leads the product design studio at Shopify, joins YC's Aaron Epstein to walk through his design process. - Marvin Schwaibold, Aaron Epstein
Design engineering
- AI prototyping inside your design system - Why builders hand you a lookalike, what has to exist before an agent can use your components, and the MCP setup I use. - Christine Vallaure
- Introducing Adaptive Dark Mode - While creating Adaptive Dark Mode, we developed a color matrix to invert the luminosity of colors while preserving hue. - Simon Fraser
Tools and resources
- Blossom carousel - Blossom enhances native scrolling instead of replacing it. - Jesper Vos
Last but not least
- The era of personal software - Personal software is not a new idea. What changed is how accessible it has become. - Jakub Krehel