Issue #752: The hard things about design
Career advice for designers, On designing finger-friendly interactions, Designing for trust, Dense by design, Design systems are no longer optional, and more.
Highlights of the week
- The designer’s guide to the buttons - A book about UX/UI design, from Xerox Alto to Vision Pro. Understand the logic, history, and evolution of interfaces through 500+ real examples, and learn how to build a design system. - Andrew Marcus sponsored
- The hard things about design - The steady state of a good designer is permanent dissatisfaction with how things are, which is an uncomfortable but essential fuel. - Hardik Pandya
- Career advice for designers - Career advice is common amongst designers. Often from respected designers. But I see common problems with some advice. - Anthony Hobday
Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- On designing finger-friendly interactions - Today, a lot of creativity and productivity happen onscreen, but our interfaces do not often respect the fingers the same way older instruments did. - Marcin Wichary
- Designing for trust - A product can be technically flawless and still fail. If anything in the experience creates a flicker of doubt, a confusing screen, copy that hedges too much, a moment where the user has to stop and wonder what's happening, the trust collapses. - Anton Sten
- Dense by design (video) - This talk unpacks UI density from first principles, moving through Tufte, gestalt psychology, and perceived performance to arrive at a framework you can actually use. - Matt Ström-Awn
Design engineering
- Design systems are no longer optional - A design system is not a static artifact, it is a continuously maintained claim about what a product should look and behave like. - Mandy Michael
- Design system architecture - The setup that worked for one team, one product, one platform starts to buckle under the weight of multiple verticals, competing release cycles, and a product org that wants to experiment with everything. - Luis Ouriach
- Ease in, ease out, and everything between - The keywords are just presets — every keyword is one spot to leave the handles, and these are not approximations, they are the exact values the browser uses. - Carmen Ansio
Tools and resources
- Agent skills for designers - A curated collection of agent skills for designers and builders using Codex, Claude, Cursor, and other AI coding agents to build rich user interfaces, frontend systems, agent loops, automations, and reusable workflows. - Meng To
Inspiration and creativity
- What is product craft in the age of AI and design systems? - A design system can only raise the quality floor. It sets the baseline below which nothing should ship. - Ben Callahan
Last but not least
- Free the icons - Apple's prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. - Paul Kafasis