Thoughts

Weekly design newsletter covering branding, design systems, AI workflows, accessibility, CSS advances, and growth philosophy. Top reads on industry responsibility and feedback.

Dozens of tiny work habits from our team meetup that speed progress, reduce friction, and improve clarity—no new tools required.

Weekly design links: creativity, AI impact on designers, letting designers think, motion design, testing approaches, and cool tools like bird migration explorer.

Weekly design links covering product design state, AI's purpose, UX as competitive advantage, avoiding design autopilot, user feedback pitfalls, and visual design principles.

Struggling to balance creativity and execution? Learn how switching between open and closed modes can unlock your best work.

Weekly design links covering fundamentals, AI's impact on design, Figma-to-code workflows, and how efficiency killed creativity. Highlights: design vs decoration, AI as design moat, Japanese typography, View Transition API, and URL state management.

Weekly design links covering: AI prototyping with Cursor, building visual confidence, creative small screen design, Linear's remote work approach, SwiftUI text effects, CSS innovations, and Grammarly's rebrand to Superhuman. Focus on taste over execution.

Behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo: internal design engineering newsletter goes public so a departing friend can stay connected

Weekly design links covering Frank Chimero's essay on moving beyond machine thinking, Heineken's human-centered approach vs AI, Pentagram's archive, JSON guide for designers, Linear's liquid glass effect, ambient web animations, AI prototyping challenges, design's declining boardroom influence, and accessibility in prototyping.

Motion in product design shapes user interaction, enhances experience, and elevates brand identity—master timing and easing for natural, engaging interfaces.

80s horror: when practical effects weren't just techniques, but engineering magic that created visceral, tangible energy unlike today's sterile CGI.

Keep AI coding assistants on a tight leash - they're smart but lack taste for good code.

Unlock your design engineering potential with AI tools like Cursor and MCP—where creativity meets technical precision for revolutionary innovation.

Bold design decisions in the AI era: why user testing isn't enough, and the comeback of opinionated interfaces that challenge the status quo.

Siri's original 2011 demo anticipated today's AI chatbots, yet Apple's vision of invisible integration trumps conversational interfaces

Privacy isn't just a feature—it's invisible architecture that protects people while delivering seamless experiences in our surveillance world.

"Shinto's Ma concept reveals true elegance through absence—a philosophy I've studied for years and apply to design, where subtraction creates beauty."

Apple's Liquid Glass design: where screens float mid-air, elegantly blending technology with reality—a glimpse of our seamless digital future.

Bill Atkinson's legacy reveals technology's true purpose: human experience. Now, AI is reuniting design and development once again.

Design engineers navigate the 'messy middle' of product development, turning creative vision into reality through technical skill and thoughtful collaboration.

Design engineering isn't just flashy animations—it's rigorous problem-solving being lost to Twitter's dopamine-driven spectacle.

Intelligent operating systems that understand context, anticipate needs and respect privacy are coming

Discover 'Hodo Hodo No Dezain'—where Japanese design wisdom meets British restraint to create perfectly balanced products that charm without overwhelming.

Discover how a simple CSS border animation became a complex code odyssey—and why there must surely be a better way to achieve this effect.

AI isn't replacing designers—it's amplifying our impact by removing friction and democratising code, making taste more crucial than ever.

Is design software a fortress of abstraction? Designers who shun code deliver unworkable concepts whilst facing endless developer questions.

Agentic interfaces will revolutionise interaction with digital systems via intelligent, unobtrusive service delivery.

32.4 years of your life spent working - that's a lot of Monday mornings to get through!

Designing fluid interfaces requires balancing aesthetics with usability. Motion guides users while keeping interactions natural.

Sometimes improv techniques can help in the workplace.

Delight in design goes beyond animations—it's about anticipating needs and creating meaningful experiences.

Balancing work and side projects requires trusting your gut, focusing on what matters, and saying no to distractions.

Quantitative data isn’t always the answer

Finding balance without sacrificing evolution

Some thoughts on the Burnout Epidemic™

Rethinking design hiring: Balancing skill assessment with respect for candidate time

A journey of making a typeface

Design Engineers differ as pragmatists in design teams and optimists in engineering

Bridge design and engineering as a Design Engineer

Master basic tools, dodge tech dazzle, focus on work

The consequences of a disconnection from Production

The rise of design subscriptions, commercialisation, and unrealistic expectations

Migrate client-side pagination to server-side with React Server Components & Next.js 13

We need to get comfortable with the idea that product design is a temporary

The unicorn is dead, long live the unicorn

A cross-post of an article I wrote over on the Cosmic blog on using Raycast and Cosmic together

Design, development, and product management share a common thread: problem-solving.

Spatial design is essential in the future of computing interfaces.

It’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than important things that are not urgent

The minute money exchanges hands, the relationship changes drastically

The ultimate design companion is just around the corner

Lots of conversations, tasks, research and reading later

Why creating stuff for yourself is the best way to learn a new technology or how something works

I've talked about my history before, but I haven't provided explicit advice about how to switch careers

RegEx has been around since the 50's, and it's still just as unreadable

Why every design crit should be well structured, predictable and facilitated

Why it's better to shake hands with your developers, than throw your designs over the fence

The more I listen to our third album, the more I recognise the fact that I wrote it as a form of catharsis.

Knowing when to let an idea go and when to not even go there.

The future of networking is being built in the open.

Tempo is a minimalist email client, making email simple again

It's common when joining a new company to get thrown straight in at the deep end. Sometimes, it’s better not to.

Lessons I’ve learnt over the past year.

Reply to those automated emails, you never know what might happen.

Solving design problems by building Figma plugins.

My personal approach on how to think about code from a design perspective and how to implement those changes.

You should never feel like you have no limiting beliefs, but you should always fight to overcome them.

I decided to put together a free, multi-device, minimal wallpaper of Ram's ten principles.

Learning Typescript, the Figma API and solving a real personal problem.

A practical guide on how to navigate your career when the path you're heading down isn't the one you truly want.

Thinking about creative disciplines and how they intersect

Design is about people, and I've been thinking a lot about the problem of the term 'user'.

The power of visualising your API as part of your design process to align the entire team

How your title is reflective of your company's stage as well as your level.

Product Design is a term we use broadly these days to define a designer who creates products.

Not too long ago I decided to set myself a challenge; create and add new content to my website via a CMS.

What I’ve learnt about sharing constantly and live designing with my team.

How development can be learned through a design lens (and how I've managed to do it).

Why I think designers and developers should learn the basics of sales.

What learning Vue has taught me about the future of design, development and the modern web.