OMG! Figma window is streamed to GPT-4 Vision, which then provides feedback on the fly narrated in the voice of Steve Jobs. Looking for a way to make this a part of our design crits.

Vercel developed a new typeface specifically designed for developers and designers. “We began by creating a monospace version that prioritized readability and seamlessly integrated into coding environments. After perfecting the monospace variant, we expanded Geist into a Sans version, adding versatility to its capabilities.” Heavily inspired by Inter, it looks great and definitely going to be very popular!

A curated collection of design system content, tagged with topics, speakers, and events. Now, where do I find time to go through all of this?!

A fascinating look into thinking behind API design from CSS Working Group, and a reminder that some things we accepted and got used to do not in fact make much sense.

I’m still waiting for access to GPT-4 Vision, but examples like this make me so excited about possible use cases! Imagine using LLM for a heuristic evaluation or pairing design and sketching sessions.

I love the format of this new newsletter. Every week, Aleks summarizes the many discussions and hot takes that took place on Design Twitter (or should we call it “Design X” now?!) It’s a valuable community service and I enjoy the roundups!

Aaron Shapiro talks about his work as a Staff Product Designer at Patreon to “guide product, design, and engineering teams in an effort to clean up a decade of cruft and reimagine their existing design system.” It’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how an expansive design system is being built, but I also love this format and storytelling way more than a regular portfolio presentation.

Rauno Freiberg is trying to deconstruct and dig out the “why” behind great displays of interaction design: “This essay is not a tutorial nor a collection of guidelines. But rather an observation on the invisible details of a few interactions that I use often but rarely think about. Besides recreating interfaces, I found this exercise in reflection to be another great way to build a stronger design intuition and vocabulary.”

Figma, but for architects: “Arcol is a design and documentation tool that helps AEC teams create better buildings, faster.” Backed by Dylan Field as one of the investors. (Hat tip to Jon Moore.)

Great collection of UI elements and patterns organized by the function like login, empty state, wizard, etc. A great resource for gathering ideas and analyzing the best practices.

Amelia Wattenberger wrote an insightful essay discussing a few reasons chatbots are not the future of interfaces and how adding controls, information, and affordances can make them more usable.

So happy to see that this geeky tool hit 2nd place as a Product of the Day at ProductHunt last week! Its author Roman Shamin collaborated with me on Accessible Palette in the past and built a few other projects featured in this newsletter. While the UI of the color picker may seem complicated at first, its guiding principle was educating and demonstrating new concepts underlying the OKLCH and LCH color spaces. It’s my go-to tool for working with these color spaces and wide-gamut P3 colors.

For additional context, see an in-depth article OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL by Roman’s co-author on using OKLCH color space in code, as well as my article Accessible Palette: stop using HSL for color systems on using perceptually uniform color spaces as a foundation for design systems.

Spline is like a Figma of the 3D world — web-based, real-time, and collaborative. (I still can’t believe that this is actually possible!) They’ve just introduced Spline Viewer, a new and easy way to embed 3D on your site. Support of all kinds of interactions makes it really fun to play with. Check out a recent experiment by Vijay.

“This document outlines a non-exhaustive list of details that make a good (web) interface.” Great list by Rauno Freiberg, Staff Design Engineer at Vercel. I’ve had the idea of writing an internal “quality UI checklist” for a long time, and this list would have made a fantastic foundation.

This new color palette generator took “design Twitter” by storm last week, and for a good reason! “Poline is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century. This magical technology defies explanation, drawing lines between anchors to produce visually striking and otherworldly palettes.”

Marcin Wichary leads the editor design team at Figma and wrote some of my favorite deep dives on design-related topics (like underlines on Medium or fonts and line height at Figma). Now he is working on a gorgeous book about keyboards, “covering 150 years from the early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pockets.” Shift Happens (what a name!) has already become the #3 Kickstarter non-fiction book of all time, and seems like it’s on its way to a stretch goal, unlocking a larger 3rd volume. Highly recommend listening to his recent interview on the Design Details podcast about the book, its publication, website, and more. Consider backing this project by March 9, 2023 to help it reach a stretch goal.

Loved this article by Paul Stamatiou on elevating product quality. His thoughts on the constant tension of shipping faster vs. shipping better and a promise of iterating are something I’ve been pondering a lot. Paul’s website itself is an inspiring example of a truly personal “homepage” with carefully crafted essays and resources.

Affinity announced Version 2 of the Designer, Photo, and Publisher apps on November 9th. Their suite provides the strongest alternative to Adobe Creative Cloud, and now is an important time to support indie alternatives. Affinity offers the Universal License on all platforms with just one payment (currently 40% off!) and without subscriptions.

I’m not a heavy user by any means, but bought the previous version of Designer back in 2016 and been using it occasionally. The app was regularly updated all these years, so I just ordered the Universal License and set up the new apps. Hope after climbing the learning curve they’ll become a great addition to my Figma-centric workflow.

Speaking of the font metrics, I’ve just bought the Martian Grotesk font family for the upcoming redesign of my personal website. Its author Roman Shamin put a great deal of work into making this font a fantastic choice for web and digital design — equal vertical metrics for perfect positioning inside a bounding box, glyph height sticking to the pixel grid at common sizes, case sensitivity, and a variable version. It’s one of the most thoughtfully made fonts for the UI work and currently it’s 60% off until September 4th. (See also his free open-source font Martian Mono.)

If you ever looked for a Mac app for a specific task, you probably sifted through a ton of low-quality apps to find some gems. And the gems were probably paid apps or required a subscription, which is not always feasible for one-off tasks. Setapp is an alternative app store offering a single subscription to a curated catalog of high-quality apps. I’ve been using it for a few years and always check first when looking for a new app. Some of my favorites installed on all computers include CleanShot X, TablePlus, Bartender, and Sip. Bonus point: Setapp is made by a Ukrainian company based in Kyiv. (My referral link gives both of us a free month.)