May 11, 2026

Issue #743: The death of design

Tiny toggle, Griddy Icons, Design is the work, Design from the inside, Dos and Don’ts of anchor positioning, Design was never the comps, and more.

The death of design - If you call yourself a designer and—be honest with yourself—the bulk of your role has been the production of flat pictures of user interfaces, then I’m sorry to break it to you, but you are not designing. You are styling. - Nathan Beck
Tiny toggle - Over at the Design Systems House website, I made a small toggle for light and dark mode. Here’s how I did it, and some additional considerations to keep in mind. - Donnie D'Amato
Griddy Icons - Griddy Icons is free open-source icon family with unique utilitarian vibe. - Filip Gres, Zuzana Benova

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

Design is the work - Design gets talked about like it's a deliverable. Screens, mocks, prototypes, guidelines — those are artifacts of design, but they aren't design. Design is the act of deciding what should exist, why it should exist, and what "right" looks like before you've committed to building it. - Jake Albaugh
Design from the inside - In the new world, the building needs to be designed from the inside. There is no 'source of truth' when everything changes at every moment. - Matt Ström-Awn
How to operate as a Staff Product Designer - Senior designers ship great features. Staff designers help the product make sense as a whole. The real difference isn't seniority — it's the scope and type of impact. - Tom Scott

Dos and Don’ts of anchor positioning - CSS anchor positioning isn't baseline yet, and there's good reason for that. You can use it, but it comes with some caveats. - James Stuckey Weber, Miriam Suzanne, Stacy Kvernmo

Design was never the comps - What I learned when Claude Design dumped a dozen screens on me. - Christopher Noessel
Claude Design is not a design systems tool. That's okay - A design systems practitioner's honest read on what it is, what it isn't, and where Figma actually sits in this picture. - TJ Pitre

Declarative audio synthesis library for the web - Define sounds as plain objects and play them with a single function call. - Raphael Salaja

Make your designs memorable - Rafa Conde is a design engineer at Retro and one of the most creative designers I know. I still remember where I was when I first saw the video on his personal site. In this episode we unpack what it means to design experiences that bring delight. - Michael Riddering, Rafa Conde

The boring internet - The internet you grew up on isn’t dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. - Terry Godier