Issue #763: The default is not a design decision
For the designless, How is AI changing design?, UX context design, Delegative UX: Designing the agent experience , Design system conventions, and more.
Highlights of the week
- 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
- The default is not a design decision - How the design industry built the infrastructure of sameness, and called it best practice. - Shrawani Bhattarai
- For the designless - On the value of cultural references, and the cost of losing them at scale. - Joshua Leigh
Read all week, picked once. The best design links, every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- How is AI changing design? - Designers tell us what’s changed, how they are responding and what it means for the future. - Mark Curtis
- UX context design - As more interface work is AI-generated, the output of research and design shifts from documents written for humans to curated context that guides AI. - Tony Alicea
- Delegative UX: Designing the agent experience - Delegative UX is what lets a person see, track and understand work being done in their name, by an agent. - Marie-Claire Dean
Design engineering
- Design system conventions in Figma - Extending Figma using conventions is one level deeper. It's about naming what's happening in the design system's model when the surface doesn't: what kind of thing is this, what is it a part of, what does it mean? - Nathan Curtis
- On making room for craft - It’s easy to agree that we should care about the details. It’s much harder to decide which feature we’re willing to leave out so we can finish the ones we’re keeping. - Karl Koch
Tools and resources
- Every color, by family - Twenty-seven families, every named color inside each one, with the codes to paste, the text colors that stay readable on it, and how it behaves on press. - Jeff Mahacek
Last but not least
- Building an independent design practice - Ten thousand hours in, my practice looks very different from the one I started with. Every client, project, and experiment has helped me understand what I'm good at, what gives me energy, and where those things are valuable to others. - Gabriel Valdivia