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.

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.

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

Fascinating side-by-side comparison of Midjourney 5.2 and the newly released version 6. The generative art from Midjourney has always felt more realistic and interesting compared to other services, and now the gap appears even larger.

John LePore is ​“designing the future” through his work on futuristic interfaces for films, video games, and the automotive industry, including the Hummer EV. He offers his own take on the recently announced Porsche’s bespoke interface for Apple CarPlay. Great presentation and deep thinking behind his choices.

“Best-in-class Design Systems with components and foundations references from top-tier tech companies and leading UI teams.”

Stripe Press makes the most over-the-top, beautiful, intelligent, and delightful books and websites. I pre-ordered this edition after it was announced, and was saddened by the news of Charlie Munger’s death just a few days before the book came out and a few weeks away from his 100th birthday. Thanks to Stripe for making the web edition free and open to everyone.

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.”

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.

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.)

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.