Articles

Manuel Muñoz Solera, aka mamuso, turned his personal site into a shelf of fake Famicom-style game cartridges, one per job. On a phone, long-press a cartridge and blow into the mic and it tilts back and shakes in the wind, the same ritual as blowing on a Nintendo cartridge.

Evil Martians’ eight-part framework for keeping AI-built interfaces consistent. Component contracts say when to use and not use each component, an inventory lets agents shortlist components before reading any code, and a design linter fails the build on a raw hex color. The agent skill is published too, split into craft and use workflows.

Anton Lovchikov, Head of Design at Evil Martians, makes the case that ​“a designer’s main job isn’t drawing screens. It’s pulling rules out of chaos and making sure they’re followed.” His proof is a 700-line localization refactor, after which Claude rewrote half the strings. The fix was a three-layer system of product principles, copy rules traced back to them, and skills built on those rules. Now when he dislikes a string, he asks Claude which rule produced it and fixes the rule.

A checklist for spotting AI-generated interfaces, written after a college app’s ​“minor UI improvements” update. Gradients everywhere, pulsing ​“active” badges that can never be inactive, fingernail cards, glassmorphism, and taglines built from ​“Elevate”, ​“Seamless” and ​“Unleash”.

Why stay in the details when agents can do the hard part? Geoffrey Litt, design engineer at Notion, says the time spent in the nooks and crannies of a problem loads your memory with the raw material your brain recombines later, even in the background. His choice for the AI era: get lazy and settle for good-enough, or work harder than ever. ​“You can already start to tell who is taking each path.”

“Saying what you’re not filters as hard as saying what you are.” Danny Martinez, co-founder of Decimals, on why the CEO of Arrows telling candidates up front that his company isn’t a 996 shop made a designer email him right away, and soon after take the job.

More than 6,000 hand-folded paper ​“libellula” (Italian for dragonfly) designed by Jony Ive’s LoveFrom fluttered down from the dome of Milan’s Galleria for the Vogue World finale. Each one is folded from a single sheet with no glue. The team used Codex to simulate the Galleria and see how the cloud would look at different sizes and densities.

“Benchmark and read the transcripts” – the most useful lesson in Atlassian’s write-up on building a CLI for its design system. The dashboards told them whether the agent succeeded. The transcripts showed agents ignoring carefully written instructions and reading source files instead. Charlie Sutton, Atlassian’s Chief Design Officer, adds that the public ADS MCP and CLI together cover 90%+ of atlassian.design.

Anthropic’s playbook for Opus 5.5 is mostly about longer runs: name the finish line, delete ​“think carefully” lines, and let it work. For designers, the section to bookmark is the one on design direction: ​“With no design direction, Opus 5.5 falls back on a few default styles. A general instruction like ​“avoid a generic look” mostly swaps one default for another. A list of specific patterns works much better.” Anthropic’s own example ban list reads like a catalog of today’s AI aesthetic: cream or off-white backgrounds, italic accent words in headings, numbered ​“01 / 02 / 03” section labels, monospace labels, and pill-shaped buttons. Worth copying into your prompts whatever model you use.

“A guideline can describe the brand. It cannot participate in the work.” Paul Jun, who leads brand at Ramp, on why in-house brand teams turned into service desks and what should replace them. Ramp’s version already works – you @mention an agent in Slack, attach a doc, and get a finished deck back in HTML, PDF, and PowerPoint. His proposed team pairs artists who set the bar with builders who turn it into components, agents, and evals. ​“Taste remains human. Repetition becomes software.”

In 1906, John Philip Sousa warned that the phonograph would become ​“a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul.” Jeffrey Katzenberg traces a line from Sousa to the fight over ​“canned music” in sound film to his own decision to end hand-drawn animation at DreamWorks: ​“This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms.” His line on today’s models: ​“It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done.”

“Whoever holds the title is not the head of design. They were hired to build somebody else’s caring into the organization, so it survives that person leaving the room.” Renato Valdés-Olmos, who led design at Honor, Lyft, Grammarly, and Pitch, argues the real head of design is whoever ranks highest and cares most.

Copy a frame from Figma Design, paste it into Figma Weave, and it becomes a node in your workflow. You choose which text and image layers the workflow can change, and the fonts, layout, and spacing stay exactly as designed. Edits sync both ways, so every connected asset stays current.

Will Newton, Staff Product Designer at Ramp, wrote up the demo he gave at the Design x AI event. His ​“design harness” is a folder with two text files: Rules​.md tells the agent how to behave and what to never do, Design​.md holds colors, type scale, spacing, component styles, and the philosophy behind them. Everything else (Paper, Figma via MCP, HTML prototypes, production code) hangs off that folder. No app, no plugin – just plain text an agent reads before it touches anything.

Rogie King on how generative shaders went from a vibe-coded ​“FigGPU” prototype to the Config keynote in two months. The detail I keep coming back to: progressive blur took the Figma Draw team months to build, and Rogie recreated the same effect with one or two prompts. He’s also honest about what didn’t work – his working prototypes were great for designers and useless as references for engineers, PMs, and stakeholders, so the team backed up to static Figma mocks to get alignment first.

Marcin Wichary gave Unsung, his blog about software craft, its first proper design in time for the 500th post. He wanted something that ​“steered clear of the preeminent AI aesthetic,” and landed on a factory green he kept spotting in real places, ​“beautiful in its own pedestrian way.” Warbler for body text, Bild for the sans, a modified Neonoir for the logo, all of it holding the old tenets: no rounded corners, no shadows, no blurs, and a general distrust of symmetry.

Matt Ström-Awn argued back in 2022 that picking a categorical color palette is an optimization problem rather than a taste problem. Version 2 ships that argument as an actual tool – an npm package, a CLI, and a GUI at cat​e​go​ry​col​ors​.com. Palettes export as raw values, CSS custom properties, or DTCG JSON, which is the part that matters if you’re feeding the result into a design system.

“It’s hundreds of little decisions done right. How you do anything is how you do everything.” Dennis Brotzky wrote a reflection a year after Wealthsimple acquired Fey, the highest craft investment research app he built with Tom Russ and Thiago Costa. The three of them were dropped into a thousand-person org, and within a year they had killed the last AngularJS route, shipped a new art direction, and replaced the old Patchwork design system with Mint, built on Base UI and designed AI-first with agent skills so that ​“the defaults carry the taste.” Worth reading if you have ever had to argue that the unglamorous foundation work is the design work.

Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger are taking the Tailwind Labs to Shopify. Tailwind CSS stays MIT-licensed and the same people keep leading it, but the business around it ends – both Tailwind Plus and ui​.sh are closed to new signups.

The framework is installed over 110 million times a week, but in January Adam had to lay off three of his four engineers with revenue down close to 80%. As AI agents read the docs developers no longer do, and the docs were selling the templates that funded the framework. Building a business around the open-source framework is incredibly hard, so I’m glad Shopify is ready to foot the bill.

ChatGPT now has Sketch (type “@Sketch”, draw a rough layout, get it rendered), templates for formats like posters and merch, comments pinned directly onto an image for focused edits, and shareable prompts so someone else can run your idea on their own photos. That’s a design tool’s vocabulary showing up inside a chat. Generation latency is reduced by up to 50% compared with Images 2.0, it’s live on every ChatGPT tier including free, and developers get two new API models: Flare as the default, Sunburst for precision work with longer generation times.