If you’re curious about the new wave of AI-based development tools, I found this review of Cursor quite insightful: ​“A few months into using Cursor as my daily driver for both personal and work projects, I have some observations to share about whether this is a ​“need-to-have” tool or just a passing fad, as well as strategies to get the most benefit quickly which may help you if you’d like to trial it. Some of you may have tried Cursor and found it underwhelming, and maybe some of these suggestions might inspire you to give it another try.”

Archive link without a paywall. A large profile in The New York Times of what Jony Ive and his studio LoveFrom have been up to in the last five years. 

It’s a rare look behind the scenes at his interests and work, but this part caught me by surprise: ​“Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman met for dinner several more times before agreeing to build a product, with LoveFrom leading the design. They have raised money privately, with Mr. Ive and Emerson Collective, Ms. Powell Jobs’s company, contributing, and could raise up to $1 billion in start-up funding by the end of the year from tech investors. In February, Mr. Ive found office space for the company. They spent $60 million on a 32,000-square-foot building called the Little Fox Theater that backs up to the LoveFrom courtyard. He has hired about 10 employees, including Tang Tan, who oversaw iPhone product development, and Evans Hankey, who succeeded Mr. Ive in leading design at Apple.” 

2Advanced relaunch wasn’t on my bingo card for 2024. One of the most influential websites of the early 2000s is back, this time rebuilt with Rive and React instead of Flash. It’s really cool to see it again.

This website does a great public service by classifying dark UI patterns, pointing to relevant international laws, and publicly shaming the biggest offenders: ​“Deceptive patterns (also known as ​“dark patterns”) are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something. […] We’ve collected over 400 examples in our hall of shame. The most commonly complained about companies are Google, Facebook, Amazon and LinkedIn.”

“Show Them” is a new course on landing page optimization by Rob Hope. He hosts one of my favorite design podcasts and curates an inspirational collection of single-page websites at One Page Love. Rob spent years analyzing landing pages, so when he shares knowledge, I’m listening! To see what his content is like, check out the bonus video on Social Proof.

The course is launching on November 19th and offers a generous 70% discount until September 18th, which I immediately took advantage of. (Not affiliated, just love Rob’s work.)

What a fantastic post from Paul Stamatiou! His observations resonated with me after working on multiple products from the early days. ​“There’s nothing glamorous about being a designer at a startup. It’s a role that frequently values speed and pragmatism over going deep in the craft. It’s not all big launches, viral tweets, building for happy paths, and clear-cut product requirements. However, it can be incredibly rewarding. The fun comes from being able to excel at learning new skills and wearing many different hats while being solely responsible for large efforts.”

Rauno from Vercel wrote a fantastic article with over 20 visual examples of using depth for design, animation, and interaction.

A Chrome extension that ​“steals” a button from every website you open. ​“It’s fun, useless, and free!”

Benji Taylor on creating guiding principles and designing interactions for the Family crypto wallet app: ​“This is not a technical post or tutorial. There are many good resources about how to craft smooth animations or design pixel perfect UI, by people much smarter than I am. This is about how we made something complex feel welcoming. It’s about what makes Family feel familiar.”

I switched to Raycast from Alfred a while ago but felt like I was leaving most of its potential and power untapped. In the two parts of these videos, designer Charlie Deets shows a few generic and design-specific features that he uses all the time.

Niki Tonsky claims that ​“we, as a civilization, forgot how to center things.” As always, his essay gets into nitty-gritty design details in the most hilarious way. He explains how CSS, font metrics, and icons get in the way of centering things and what designers and developers can do about them.

Cool little app for generating a consistent color palette from Lightness, Chroma, and a given number of Hue steps using OKLCH.

“The Knob is a low-profile mechanical keyboard being designed by 3D Artist and Motion Designer Ben Fryc, and developed by Work Louder. Evoking the look of both classic and modern technology, the Knob is designed to be a beautiful and functional part of your every day workflow.” This looks incredible 🤤 I wish Apple licensed Touch ID to other manufacturers or sold as a standalone device, as I can’t imagine using the keyboard without it. Here is a Figma playground for a Knob screen.

I loved this article by Karri Saarinen from Linear on why redesigns are important and its sequel, ​“How we redesigned the Linear UI,” on tackling that kind of project. ​“This incremental way of building the product is hugely beneficial, and often necessary — though it unbalances the overall design, and leads to design debt. Each new capability adds stress on the product’s existing surfaces for which it was initially designed. Functionality no longer fits in a coherent way. It needs to be rebalanced and rethought.”

On paying off the design debt: ​“While the design debt often happens in small increments, it’s best to be paid in larger sweeps. This goes against the common wisdom in engineering where complete code rewrites are avoided. The difference is that on the engineering side, a modular or incremental way of working can work as the technical implementation is not really visible. Whereas the product experience is holistic and visual.”

On exploring the next version without considering practicality: ​“A secret I’ve learned is that when you tell people a design is a ​“concept” or ​“conceptual” it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That’s the power of visual design.”

Think you’re good at picking colors? Test your skills with this fun little game.

Alexey Ardov built a new app to explain color spaces visually. Make sure to enable DCI-P3 in Gamuts to compare it with sRGB, and drag an indicator to transform spaces from one to another. A really powerful tool for understanding different models and spaces.

Great observation and essay from Niki, with a beautiful roundup of historical examples.

Some of the industry’s best designers answer the question ​“What book should designers read and why?” I only managed to read six of these so far, but a bunch of them have been sitting in my queue for a while. Great project by Vincent van der Meulen.

Speaking of books, I’m in the middle of a work project involving data visualization and felt like I needed a refresher and a solid reference. I’m reviewing Edward Tufte​’s books (how are they not on the above list?!), but also landed at ​“Fundamentals of Data Visualization” by Claus Wilke while looking for an answer to a specific question. Seems like a highly practical book with clear guidelines. An entire book is available online for free and seems to be out of print, but after skimming through a few chapters I ended up ordering a copy from AbeBooks.

“All the essential resources for setting up the design system.” A solid guide and a collection of interviews with design systems practitioners.