If AI can make anyone a product builder, the real edge is knowing what’s worth shipping. We grew up being told the future belonged to those who could code—that vision mattered, but the real advantage was knowing how to bring it to life. That version of the future is fading, as the distance between imagination and reality has all but disappeared.
figma.com
Even when people can’t tell the difference between human and AI content, they usually prefer the human, studies show. It’s hard for people to tell the difference between AI-generated advertising and writing. So why do they respond better to the human-made stuff?
computerworld.com
For the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I talked to Clive Thompson about one of the conversations that I'm having most often these days: What happens to coders in this current moment of extraordinarily rapid evolution in AI?
anildash.com
A lot to unpack here, but first let me stress the difference between the AI investment bubble bursting, the AI hype train derailing, and any chance that AI is going to disappear from your life. All three are big questions and each has a very different answer.
hughhowey.com
There has recently been a newfound excitement for pattern-based post-processing effects all over my timeline, as softwares such as Paper, Efecto, or Unicorn Studio are democratizing the use of shaders for both designers and developers. While some of these patterns originated as workarounds due to technical limitations we have since overcome, they now serve as an artistic direction to create distinct designs with self-imposed constraints.
blog.maximeheckel.com
Right now, something bigger than a seasonal slowdown seems to be happening. We take the temperature of the creative community, and some of their experiences may shock you.
creativeboom.com
If you’re an engineer, I can sense you might be getting frustrated, as most bullet points I listed look like extra work. I agree with you. It is. This post is as much about process, as it is about culture and the incentives it establishes. The best places I’ve worked were filled with shared trust and treated bugs as a joined responsibility of everyone, rather than a black-and-white division into “filers“ and “fixers,” with the ultimate end goal always being user’s experience
unsung.aresluna.org
We're delighted to welcome Jessica Walsh to Creative Boom. In her first column, she argues that branding has become too safe and interchangeable, and makes the case for expressive, human-crafted typography as one of the last true ways to stand out in an AI-driven world.
creativeboom.com
Design is changing fast. We see (and talk about) it every day, but in our annual State of the Designer survey, we're zooming in and double clicking on how designers are meeting the moment. Our report explores how AI is the tailwind propelling design forward. While designers are still wrestling with new technologies, they’re making AI work for them.
figma.com
Negative feedback hurts. There's no way around it. Your stomach drops, your heart beats faster, and your thoughts race: “Am I about to lose this client?” “Are they questioning if I'm the right person for this job?” “Will this affect my reputation?” But what if you could change your relationship with feedback and turn it into a tool for career growth, without losing confidence? You can easily master this skill: it just needs a different approach!
interaction-design.org
The designers radical model for creativity shifts the focus from output to input – focusing on all the things that feed into our creative process: “Connection, wonder, pause, movement, and joy.”
itsnicethat.com
Perfection in design is not possible. You can never simultaneously satisfy all of the possible objectives for any creation. For example, a ballpoint pen is an excellent tool for writing, until you need to erase. Yet a pencil fails you when you need to sign a legal contract. Every design choice trades one idea of perfection against another.
whydesignishard.substack.com
Why are so many celebrity memoirs surprisingly dull? This eye-opening take dives into what’s missing and what truly makes a story worth telling. Your own story might be closer to inspiring than you think.
herbertlui.net
Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.
noemamag.com
Entry-level jobs are disappearing. In their place: unpaid gigs, cold DMs and self-starters scrambling for a foothold. The ladder’s gone – what’s replacing it, and who’s being left behind?
itsnicethat.com
Exploring how React's dominance by default stifles frontend innovation, and why deliberate framework choices lead to better tools for performance, developer experience, and ecosystem diversity.
lorenstew.art
Have you ever thought about digital systems feeling us? What if letters could do more than just share words? What if typography could react, listen, and remember? Shuxuan Yang, also known as Eleanor Yang, is a gifted designer. She tackles these ideas in "Synthetic Nature." This interactive project shows motion design as a live system. It changes with the user.
abduzeedo.com
Product management has borrowed the concept of “taste” from European aesthetic philosophy, but this borrowing creates a fundamental problem: it traps us in subjective discussions that distract from what actually matters. When PMs debate whether something has “good taste,” they’re engaging in discussions rooted in personal preference and cultural signaling rather than objective measures of user value and business outcomes.
medium.productcoalition.com
To take creativity to new heights, agencies and freelancers are breaking down traditional boundaries and using tools like Figma to partner with their clients every step of the way.
figma.com
What makes an interface accessible? And how can designers create experiences that work for all users? This guide answers all your burning questions about accessibility—like how to design for everyone, even those juggling a hot coffee and a pet hamster.
designbeyondbarriers.com
The modern world has made huge advances in knowledge, technology, and skill. We can build faster than ever. We know more than ever. Yet quality still feels so rare. So many things feel unfinished, broken, or forgettable – why?
linear.app
We all want our UIs to feel great and animations can definitely help with that. But how do you actually create a great animation? This article is a collection of practical tips to help you go from good to great animations.
emilkowal.ski
In an era defined by accelerating AI, ecological urgency, and cultural division, design is no longer optional—it is essential for survival. For centuries, design and craft have shaped our tools, our systems, and our sense of self. From the meticulous detail of the Arts & Crafts movement to the functional…
maeda.pm
How the new wave of design and dev tools are changing who builds it, how decisions get made, and what the role of a designer even is.
uxdesign.cc
Album art didn’t always exist. In the early 1900s, recorded music was still a novelty, overshadowed by sales of sheet music. Early vinyl records were vastly different from what we think of today: discs were sold individually and could only hold up to four minutes of music per side. Sometimes, only one side of the record was used.
matthewstrom.com
Constraints act not as limitations but as catalysts for creativity. Examples from architecture, design, and art reveal the paradoxical relationship between boundaries and innovation.
arun.is
I often find myself contemplating the greatest creators in history — those rare artists, designers, and thinkers whose work transformed how we see the world. What constellation of circumstances made them who they were? Where did their ideas originate? Who mentored them? Would history remember them had they lived in a different time or place?
chrbutler.com
When OpenAI released GPT-4 back in March 2023, they kickstarted the AI revolution. The consensus online was that front-end development jobs would be totally eliminated within a year or two. Well, it’s been more than two years since then, and I thought it was worth revisiting some of those early predictions, and seeing if we can glean any insights about where things are headed.
joshwcomeau.com
"I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: “What does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?” In the hope that this will be an inspiration to someone out there, I wrote down the traits I observed in the most exceptional people in our craft. I wish I had that list when I was starting out. Had I followed this path, it would have saved me a lot of time."
endler.dev
An essay on how the decisions we make writing software shape our enjoyment of the craft
questdb.com
Fluid CSS methodologies have completely transformed my approach to web integration by improving the responsive aspect and simplifying maintenance. I find this topic deceptively simple yet incredibly powerful and still relevant today.
willybrauner.com
Good design can be tricky. What’s obvious to one person might not make sense to someone else. Design might feel subjective, but there are things I (and the rest of design leadership) consistently…
uxdesign.cc
We've gathered essential tips from seasoned creatives to help you navigate your career with confidence, clarity and long-term success.
creativeboom.com
Are we responding to the right inputs? For many years, it has been ‘best practice’ to use relative units (especially em and rem) for sizing text. That’s great! But after playing around with my user preferences, I think we can improve on the common approaches.
oddbird.net
Some thoughts, experiences, opinions and unsolicited advice on the current state of websites and web design as a freelancer.
perozzi.blog
Rebranding isn't just a logo swap—it's a deep introspective journey. By questioning fundamental purpose and making thoughtful, incremental changes, even centuries-old institutions can breathe new life into their core identity and relevance.
reiinamoto.substack.com
Set of guidelines that empower a team to make wise decisions and appropriate trade-offs when designing, building and innovating.
principles.design
Jonathan Ive, the long-time Chief Design Officer at Apple, is among the most prominent creatives who have been influenced by Dieter Rams and his design principles. Here, in one of his rare interviews in recent years, Ive speaks openly about his admiration—pointing out one important achievement of Rams that is often overlooked.
rams-foundation.org
Want to see how we used Figma’s latest features to audit and refresh our web system? Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we streamlined our components, improved our workflows, and built for the future.
figma.com
People get annoyed about hearing about craft as they know being a good designer requires other skills to succeed: strong communication skills, a growth mindset, and ability to collaborate. However, I must share the hard truth. Craft is an unavoidable foundation as a designer.
proofofconcept.pub
Smith & Diction showcases their project for Anterior. […] After Perplexity dropped we got a lot of inquiries from other AI companies. Like, a lot a lot. Most of them were very early in their journey and didn’t really know what they were building or who they building for.
medium.com
Polished interfaces and seamless experiences dominate the design landscape. UX design has, in many ways, become too safe. We prize consistency, accessibility, and user-friendliness — values that are crucial to creating good products. But is “good” enough? Have we, in the quest for perfection, lost the soul of UX? Don’t we need more punk?
uxdesign.cc
One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton, make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I finally consider it done. With software, the fact is that sometimes there are just too many variables to know and test and smooth out. So I click around, using the UI over and over, until I finally cannot give myself any more splinters. It’s a small thing, but lots of small splinters lead to an agonizing experience.
blog.jim-nielsen.com
Next time you reach for your smartphone, pause and consider what else you could reach for that offers not just a function, but some feeling. And if you are someone who creates, in any medium, challenge yourself to elevate touch to the level of other senses. […] Otherwise the default path we’re on will lead us into an empty room with just walls and screens — and not much else.
workingtheorys.com
A petri dish bursting with vibrant bacteria – Crucible’s identity is as intriguing, unconventional and experimental as the creative hub itself. Housing a drinks, bar and restaurant consultancy, flavour lab and a collaborative workspace, the London-based company is designed for bartenders to unleash their creativity – working with equipment such as a centrifuge, a freeze dryer and a rotovap!
the-brandidentity.com
Modern CSS keeps giving us a lot of new, easier ways to solve old problems, but often the new features we’re getting don’t only solve old problems, they open up new possibilities as well. Container queries are one of those things that open up new possibilities, but because they look a lot like the old way of doing things with media queries, our first instinct is to use them in the same way, or at least a very similar way.
css-tricks.com
Everyone can agree that design by committee usually fails. But it’s not because there are multiple people involved, it’s because (most) committees are not made up of skilled collaborators with a shared vision and process. Shared vision and collaborative process don’t just happen when good developers sit around a table. Like anything else, collaborative art and design are skills that people learn and practice […]
miriamsuzanne.com
This is a good thing. Because when you realise that being challenged and ignored is part of the job it takes the pressure off and you do better. But how do you actually take this realisation and apply it in the workplace. Follow these 3 simple steps.
adamsilver.io
Design is defined by its utility. Unlike art, we expect design to provide us with some useful function in order to accept it into our lives. At least, that’s the story our rational brain tells us. Appealing to this unimpeachably logical side of us we find every product description practically humming with gigabytes, megapixels, thread counts and earnest lists of useful ‘features’.
designlobster.substack.com
With the recent announcement of Figma’s AI feature-set at the corporate vibe-fest that is Config, there’s been something of a clamour to opine, positively and negatively, on the impact these features will have on designers and the industry as a whole. Now, a lot of these are actually half decent, minor features that might save us a few minutes here and there. As a serial ‘Group 24098’ layer-name-forgetter, the ‘rename layers’ functionality is sound. The enriched search even veers on actually useful.
scott.is
I am a perfectionist, and I admit that. Is this my best or worst quality? Maybe it’s both. It’s a trait that defines a lot of who I am, not only professionally, but also personally. There’s a sense of validation that comes when you get something done to perfection that everyone enjoys. However, how far can you or should you go to get something done perfectly? Also, what defines perfect? It can be extremely subjective.
raffdimeo.com
clip-path is often used for trimming a DOM node into specific shapes, like triangles. But what if I told you that it's also great for animations? In this article, we'll dive into clip-path and explore some of the cool things you can do with it. Once you read it, you'll start seeing this CSS property being used everywhere.
emilkowal.ski
The process of focusing our attention only to a subset of the stimuli in the environment — usually those related to our goals.
lawsofux.com
I was thinking back to the old days of a time where I spent a great deal of time creating a design and building it with so much love and care, thinking of every detail and not being scared to try out new ideas. Everything was unique, it felt personal and was a labour of love. We were daring and had no fear.
dan-davies.co.uk
A predictable and delightful experience is what makes a product stand out from a crowded market. That's why companies invest in design engineers for example. Animations can play a big role in creating such experiences. Great animations are hard, as there are many aspects to consider. From easing and timing to accessibility and performance. This post is a collection of principles that, in my opinion, make animations great.
emilkowal.ski
We’ve made so many changes to Figma since we launched nearly a decade ago, but even amidst new functionality, features, and products, the core Figma layout has remained remarkably consistent over the years. This isn’t by accident. With so many of you spending hours a day in Figma, we know how important it is to expand functionality while also preserving and respecting the workflows you’ve perfected to date. But as those updates compound over time, what once felt simple can become unnecessarily complex. To tackle this complexity and lay the foundation for the next decade of Figma, we’re rolling out UI3 […]
figma.com
Colour contrast makes a big part of the user experience for all users. Accessibility guidelines however, are not always easy to follow. In this article we will see how to meet the requirements with practical examples.
goodpractices.design
We constantly tell young designers and illustrators to develop their own unique style. But what happens when that style becomes widely adopted and even copied? Our US editor-at-large considers the impact on both individual creatives and the industry as a whole.
itsnicethat.com
Figma finally supports typography variables after teasing us since last June. During the ‘Framework by Figma’ in April, they announced multiple features that made it feel like a mini Config.
uxdesign.cc
As someone who has their best ideas when falling asleep, I’ve always been interested in the power of sleep for creative problem-solving. Recently, I’ve been exploring the different ways in which we can harness the power of sleep for creative work.
uxdesign.cc
There are a plethora of money questions a creative freelancer asks themselves at least once a quarter. Am I asking for enough money? How high is too high? Can I ask for more or less from my regular clients? Is it embarrassing if I accidentally ask for too little?!
wepresent.wetransfer.com
Eating is a multi-sensory experience, and the design surrounding food – from restaurant interiors to menu typefaces – can have a tangible impact on that. But with gentrification tearing out eateries with an ounce of individuality, is this distinctive visual experience now being forfeited?
itsnicethat.com
Design systems are a set of standards (like Google’s Material Design or IBM’s Carbon Design System) needed to manage design at scale. Style guides (like content or visual style guides) are just one piece in a design system.
nngroup.com
TLDR: We weren’t always so close-minded to new designers entering the field. We started out as more open. We weren’t always over-focused on visuals. We used to see people’s strengths in other areas…
uxdesign.cc
Twen was a magazine for the first generation of postwar teens and young adults. It was a wild conglomeration of the controversial ideas and blooming freedoms of the 1950s. A big part of the impact came from Willy Fleckhaus’ design: a 12-column modular grid with already familiar blown-up headlines set in Schmalfette Grotesk; psychedelic illustrations; extremely tightly cropped or enlarged black-and-white photos, and, of course, a lot of white space perfectly arranged on the page. Twen was stunning, groundbreaking, sometimes shocking and definitely something that had never been seen before.
readymag.com
He's been doing a lot of interviews for designers lately so here’s a list of all the questions he’s asking along the way. Maybe this helps someone out there looking for a design gig.
robinrendle.com
How to organize design tokens? How to set up the design tokens architecture? Interactive guide and playground with templates.
thedesignsystem.guide
In my circles, AI is either everything or it is nothing. It is the thing to use in every case because if we don’t someone else will or it is the thing to never use because it is a sin against humanity. Capitalists and artists have almost always disagreed. AI is like a compass sitting between them.
chrbutler.com
Throughout history, artistic production has been framed in opposition to productive labour. Today, creatives are still feeling the aftereffects of this. Here, anthropologist and illustrator Julien Posture unpacks why this might be and offers some potential solutions.
itsnicethat.com
Just a few months ago, Figma announced updates to the gradient tool, which included the ability to flip and rotate gradients. At Framework, the updates continued, as color variables can now be bound…
medium.com
In the world of digital art, few names resonate as profoundly as teamLab, a collective that has redefined the boundaries between art, technology and nature. With the highly anticipated reopening of teamLab Borderless in Azabudai Hills, Tokyo, the collective continues to enchant and engage audiences worldwide.
timeout.com
Name a search engine and it will have integrated AI — but can you name one that's any better for it? I'm at a loss and I can't help but wince every time another announces some sort of LLM integration.
coryd.dev
Try to imagine a product design world where meetings are more than just mandatory; they drive collaboration and product innovation. Where every session presents an opportunity to bring together the team, fine-tune design and product visions, and drive projects forward with clear action items. In the end, rather than feeling like you wasted time, you leave with, “Well, it was a productive meeting. I look forward to the next one!”
blog.logrocket.com
"Whenever I’m in a room without a whiteboard I feel trapped. Perhaps this is just the way I have to think through a problem but I can’t breakdown ideas or solutions without a whiteboard or a glass window to draw on. In fact, I’d say that the most unproductive conversations I’ve had with folks is simply down to the fact that I didn’t sit them in front of a whiteboard, put a pen in their hand, and tell them to draw their argument back to me."
robinrendle.com
Starting a freelance practice is as exciting as it is daunting. You’re your own boss, but with that comes so many unknowns: How will you find clients? How much should you charge them? Can you actually go to the movies at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday?
fastcompany.com
Do you ever open up your calendar in the morning and sadly realize that you’ll spend your whole day in back-to-back meetings, with zero time to create or think? This is one of my least favorite feelings — and if I feel it a few weeks in a row, it’s time to change something.
amivora.substack.com
Instead, AI will empower us to push our execution to new, unimaginable places—removing a lot of barriers to what was technically possible. If you’re concerned about being replaced by AI, maybe you are still equating the value of your craft merely to the outputs you produce.
doc.cc
Most designers are familiar with responsive design, a column-based layout approach with fixed breakpoints to cover all screen sizes. However, we can move beyond the rigid structure with modern CSS…
uxdesign.cc
A Global Design System is less about the “what” and more about the “who” and “where”. Nearly all of the popular open-source systems out there are perfectly fine from a component/feature/architecture perspective. The goal of a Global Design System is not to create a sibling to these existing systems, but to introduce a new canonical, more formal layer that can feed into these systems and beyond.
bradfrost.com
Examining 30 years of Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Albums of All Time” Rankings through a very well made and interactive timeline.
pudding.cool
Replit's VP of Marketing and Design David Hoang talks about how AI is reshaping the future of product design and development.
figma.com
As templates, tutorials and tools become ubiquitous, technical skills are more accessible than ever. It’s no longer enough to be able to simply draw or design. Now, our US editor-at-large argues, you need to be able to select from the vast sea of possibilities.
itsnicethat.com
Discover how Smith & Diction simplifies client interactions through their design process, offering upfront insights and examples. Embracing various creative approaches, they believe in fostering better collaboration and exploration.
medium.com
When you stay in the problem longer, you give more time for seemingly unrelated dots to connect. Often, this is what creativity is all about — finding meaning in unrelated things. A phenomena referred to as apophenia. We’re connecting unrelated dots, and we’re doing it while embracing uncertainty […]
uxdesign.cc
