Issue #753: Why is AI bad at design?
Design-system maturity: A 6-dimension framework, Taste cannot be delegated, Product design in the age of AI, Design systems need evals, Grid Lanes, and more.
Highlights of the week
- Why is AI bad at design? - You cannot build an automatic grader for aesthetic taste, creativity, novelty, etc. because there is no correct answer to grade against. - Phil Morton
- Design-system maturity: A 6-dimension framework - Use this maturity model to assess your design system’s health and identify where to focus next. - Huei-Hsin Wang
Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- Taste cannot be delegated - Optimization improves what already exists. Judgment decides what should exist next. - Aurélie Radom
- Product design in the age of AI - While making becomes cheaper and perhaps deciding does too, accountability does not. - Tanner Christensen
- Designing 99 'No's for a single 'Yes' (video) - He screenshares dozens of unused concepts, novel art directions, brand identities, and everything in between. - Michael Riddering, Yuan Chuan
Design engineering
- Design systems need evals - You can write the cleanest AGENTS.md on the internet and still have no idea whether the component that shipped this morning came from your library, or got hand-rolled as a div with a hardcoded blue. - Murphy Trueman
- Grid Lanes - the future of masonry layout - CSS properties come in two excellent flavors – longhand properties have a direct impact on the element, while shorthand properties take a much more convoluted path. - Stacy Kvernmo, Miriam Suzanne
- How to build a design system strategy you'll actually deliver - No design system team can solve every problem at once, and any effort to do so will only dilute its impact. - Amy Hupe
Artificial intelligence
- Loop - Every AI conference this year was about loops. Here's what that means for design, and a loop you can run in the next ten minutes. - Marie-Claire Dean
Tools and resources
- NameThatUI: The visual dictionary of UI - See the element, learn its real name, and prompt your coding agent with precision. - argofowl
- Colorsym: Symbols that speak color - A free, open-source color-identification system. Simple, memorable symbols map to base and combined colors so anyone can tell them apart. - Luis Francisco, Chris Eastridge
Inspiration and creativity
- Advanced icon design: Compound icons (modifiers) - Compound icons are effective at getting more specific. What are we adding? A phone, a folder, a user, a location. - Helena Zhang
Last but not least
- Earning taste and judgment - The thing that stays durable and ungradeable is not getting better at solving problems that already have a known answer; it's choosing what to build and judging whether it's any good. - Addy Osmani