Issue #733: The design process is dead
Designing in the age of agents, Designing for clarity, The new era of design, Sprites on the web, The ultimate guide for PMs, and more.
Highlights of the week
- The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it (video) - Anthropic’s Jenny Wen on why the traditional design process is dead, how engineers are forcing the role to evolve, and what designers must do to stay relevant in the age of AI. - Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
- A real space to design in the age of agents - Agents are shipping faster than we can think so we need a space to zoom out more than ever. - Agu Segui
Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- Designing for clarity - How we restructured Intercom’s information architecture. - Pranava Tandra
- What I’m seeing in UX leadership right now - The shift is quiet but it’s real. - Marina Krutchinsky
- The new era of design at Stripe (video) - A deep dive into how the practice of design is evolving at Stripe and everything they’re doing to push past the status quo. - Katie Dill, Michael Riddering
Design engineering
- On adding homepage delight - Built a vinyl-style music shelf with spring physics, deflection, hover layers and velocity gating; reduces motion to grid/mobile. - Karl Koch
- Sprites on the web - In this blog post, I’ll show you the best way I’ve found to work with sprites in CSSb. - Joshua Comeau
- border-shape: the future of the non-rectangular web - It’s a powerful upcoming CSS primitive that defines a custom shape for an element’s border. - Una Kravets
Artificial intelligence
- Expose your design system to LLMs - LLMs drift, fabricate tokens, and start every session from scratch. Here's how to feed your design system to AI coding agents so they stop guessing. - Hardik Pandya
- How to write a good spec for AI agents - How to structure, plan, and iterate for high-performance coding agents. - Addy Osmani
- The prompt addiction - A four-act reflection on how frictionless AI tools reshape creative behaviour, blur intention, and make committing to a final version increasingly difficult. - Magdy Blass Selmy
Tools and resources
- CSS minify tests - Correctness tests for CSS minification tools. Each test provides a CSS input and a single canonical minified output. A tool passes if its output matches exactly. - Keith Cirkel
Inspiration and creativity
- Letters to a young creator - Letters to a Young Creator is a collection of honest perspectives on what it takes to make something great, written by people who have done it before. - Steve Jobs Archive
Last but not least
- Small teams win, again - I’ve always believed in the power of small teams. - Luke Wroblewski