A developer's free Adobe clones, built with AI
Headlines declaring that software is over (the usual clickbait). The developer Brandon Thomas made project ArtCraft, and it is seven free Rust apps modeled on Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and the…
Writing
Notes and articles on UX, AI and everything around and in between.
Why everything is starting to look the same
Sameness gets a bad rep sometimes. It is boring. Often it's just what success looks like.
Destroy any website, for fun
You type an address, a stick figure appears, and you shoot the website. That's Destroy Any Website by Hugo Duprez. Pistols, grenades, a flamethrower, multiplayer.
Creatives are doing more with AI
Contra Labs says taste, perspective, judgment and direction "became more valuable" with AI. I agree with that. I just don't think a survey can show it, and the line is old anyway.
My homelab, and an AI agent with root
My homelab hobby is standing still. Just normal life (kids, house, recreation) doesn't give me enough extra time to tinker. Everything works: Nextcloud, Jellyfin, webserver… But I think I already…
Design tokens: understand the structure first
Nate Baldwin argues that design tokens should emerge from reusable interface structures, rather than being created through naming conventions. His team at Adobe Spectrum identified recurring patterns…
Many agents need many views
Chat is a log, not a view. For one agent doing one job, a doc and a chat is enough. It breaks when agents start managing other agents. That's where Luke Wroblewski's Many Agents, Many Views starts.…
Just let me in, please
Max van IJsselmuiden's Just let me in, please is a good rant about login friction. Codes that send you to your inbox. A dashboard that forgets which page you wanted. A lot of it looks like ritual to…
AI and design systems, a course
AI & Design Systems is a course by Brad Frost, Ian Frost and TJ Pitre. It costs $1,495. I haven't taken it, so this isn't a review.
A model that tells you how sure it is
Jev for Designers by MC Dean is about Jev, a model from TypeSafe that doesn't write text. You give it a question and the allowed answers, and it gives back a choice with a probability. The aim is…
How to de-slopify your designs
Slop is what you get when nobody decided anything. Maya Brennan's How to de-slopify your designs agrees: slop "strips out considered decisions." I don't think her fix works.
Goodbye WordPress
Nolan Lawson moved his blog off WordPress to a static Astro site, and Claude did most of the work. He says this should make WordPress "nervous". I doubt it.
Are we going to use the same desktop UX forever?
Scott Jenson's Akademy talk, Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?, has a good complaint: the desktop has no working memory. Copy a few too many things and the clipboard drops the…
Design execution is cheap now
Claude Opus 5 is amazing, especially 5.5. I can finally get good results in Figma design with it via Figma MCP.
Animated AI status indicators for React
Thinking Orbs is a React library of animated AI status indicators. It looks nicely made. I haven't used it.
Why icon consistency is harder than it looks
Streamline wrote a nice essay on icon consistency. Making the thousandth icon look like it came from the same hand is hard, no argument. Whether users care is another question.
Do we need reading progress bars?
Max Schmitt thinks the thin progress bar at the top of articles is pointless, because the browser already has a scrollbar. His proof is one screenshot and where his own eye goes. That's one person,…
AI as a junior partner in accessibility testing
"Typically 30%-60%" is a wide range for a fact. That's how many issues automated tools can find, according to Ricky Onsman's post on using AI as an accessibility testing partner. He gives no source.
Acquired taste: whose eye is in the tool?
Designers say "taste" when they want to sound irreplaceable. Sven Ellingen's write-up is a little rude to that habit, and I like it for that.
Outflank, don't rebut
Arguing with anti-AI fanatics never goes well. Every answer gets taken to the absolute. A podcast has a name for the alternative: outflank, don't rebut.
From language model to agent, in one guide
Hernan Huwyler's guide on how language models become agents is written for cloud architects. As far as I can tell, it never mentions the person who has to trust the output.
Will AI thin out the next generation of UX designers?
I read that devs, doctors, lawyers… are complaining that AI is destroying the pool of new people coming in, lowering demand and undertraining the workforce.
Take away the "I'm not conscious" training and see what happens
"As an AI, I don't have feelings." Someone wrote that sentence, or trained it in, like a tone-of-voice guide. A new preprint says it may have side effects.
Is it wrong to anthropomorphize AI agents?
We do this to pets, cars, plants… Human-like behavior doesn't imply consciousness. "The agent wants X" is a functional description, not a claim about experience.
Do we need to review all this code?
Rachel Laycock says AI writes more code than people can review, so we should stop making every change wait for a human. Humans would keep the risky stuff: architecture, security, anything big or…
Please don't tell junior designers that tools matter more than design
I rarely post on LinkedIn, but today I got frustrated reading yet another wave of posts about AI and design.
The UX of LEGO interface panels
Awesome that people get into this and write an article for the rest of us: The UX of LEGO Interface Panels.
Good UX is overrated
Good UX is overrated. The steep learning curve of a bad UX is manly!
More with less is not a strategy
"Do more with less" is what a company says when it has run out of ideas.
Talking to the anti-AI crowd
I've been interacting a bit with the anti-AI crowd. Unfortunately it doesn't go well. A lot of people are fanatics, being very aggressive, starting with insults and taking everything to the absolute:…
AI can't design. Not yet, anyway
So much BS about the role of user experience in AI.
