My family and I are going on vacation, and I thought it might be great to share this design summer reading list from Design Better. For me, I'll be picking up Nonlinear by Kevin Bethune. It looks great.
Essential reads from our favorite podcast guests to fuel your creativity this season
If you want an introduction on how to use Cursor as a designer, here’s a must-watch video. It's just over half-an-hour long and Elizabeth Lin goes through several demos in Cursor.
Cursor is much more advanced than the AI prompt-to-code tools I've covered here before. But with it, you'll get much more control because you're building with actual code. (Of course, sigh, you won't have sliders and inputs for controlling design.)
How to use Cursor for rapid prototyping: interactive sound elements, data visualization, and aesthetic exploration without coding expertise
David Singleton, writing in his blog:
Somewhere in the last few months, something fundamental shifted for me with autonomous AI coding agents. They’ve gone from a “hey this is pretty neat” curiosity to something I genuinely can’t imagine working without. Not in a hand-wavy, hype-cycle way, but in a very concrete “this is changing how I ship software” way.
I have to agree. My recent tinkering projects with Cursor using Claude 4 Sonnet (and set to Cursor’s MAX mode) have been much smoother and much more autonomous.
And Singleton has found that Claude Code and OpenAI Codex are good for different things:
For personal tools, I’ve completely shifted my approach. I don’t even look at the code anymore - I describe what I want to Claude Code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI and if it’s not good enough, I start over with a slightly different initial prompt. The iteration cycle is so fast that it’s often quicker to start over than trying to debug or modify the generated code myself. This has unlocked a level of creative freedom where I can build small utilities and experiments without the usual friction of implementation details.
And the larger point Singleton makes is that if you direct the right context to the reasoning model, it can help you solve your problem more effectively:
This points to something bigger: there’s an emerging art to getting the right state into the context window. It’s sometimes not enough to just dump code at these models and ask “what’s wrong?” (though that works surprisingly often). When stuck, you need to help them build the same mental framework you’d give to a human colleague. The sequence diagram was essentially me teaching Claude how to think about our OAuth flow. In another recent session, I was trying to fix a frontend problem (some content wouldn’t scroll) and couldn’t figure out where I was missing the correct CSS incantation. Cursor’s Agent mode couldn’t spot it either. I used Chrome dev tools to copy the entire rendered HTML DOM out of the browser, put that in the chat with Claude, and it immediately pinpointed exactly where I was missing an overflow: scroll.For my designer audience out there—likely 99% of you—I think this post is informative as to how to work with reasoning models like Claude 4 or o4. This can totally apply to prompt-to-code tools like Lovable and v0. And these ideas can likely apply to Figma Make and Subframe.
Coding agents have crossed a chasm Somewhere in the last few months, something fundamental shifted for me with autonomous AI coding agents. They’ve gone from a “hey this is pretty neat” curiosity to something I genuinely can’t imagine working without.
Brian Balfour, writing for the Reforge blog:
Speed isn't just about shipping faster, it's about accelerating your entire learning metabolism. The critical metric isn't feature velocity but rather your speed through the complete Insight → Act → Learn loop. This distinction separates products that compound advantages from those that compound technical debt.
The point being that now with AI, product teams are shipping faster. And those who aren’t might get lapped (to use an F1 phrase).
In a world where traditional moats can evaporate in weeks rather than years, speed has transformed from competitive advantage to baseline requirement—yet here lies the paradox: while building and shipping have never been faster, the insights to fuel that building remain trapped in months-long archaeological expeditions through disconnected tools.
I remember the article from 2016 titled “Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Hurt UX Metrics” where the conclusion from NN/g was:
Discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty increases.
Fast forward nearly 10 years later and NN/g says:
Hamburger menus are a more familiar pattern today than 10 years ago, but the same old best practices for hidden navigation still apply.
Kate Kaplan, revisiting her conclusion from nearly a decade ago:
Over the past decade, the hamburger menu — much like its namesake — has become a classic. As mobile-first design took hold, it offered a clean, space-saving solution, and when design leaders like Apple and Amazon adopted it, others followed. Its growing ubiquity helped standardize its meaning: Through repeated exposure, users learned to recognize and interpret the icon with increasing confidence.
I think the hamburger menu grew in popularity despite NN/g’s authoritative finger wagging. As designers, most of the time, we have to balance between the needs of the project and client with known best practices. Many websites, especially e-commerce, don’t have four or fewer main navigation links. We had to put the links somewhere and the hamburger menu made sense.
Hamburger menus are a more familiar pattern today than 10 years ago, but the same old best practices for hidden navigation still apply.
Crazy. Methinks there’s a non-zero chance that someone at v0 read my article and decided to give us designers the control we want.
Can’t wait to try it out.
We’ve added Design Mode to v0, so you can now make quick changes to your UI without editing code or spending any credits This currently only supports Tailwind based UIs and has full knowledge of shadcn/ui so it will play well with your existing design system Click this new tab in your v0 project to get started, or check out the video in the launch tweet below
It’s been said that desktop publishing democratized graphic design. For those of you too young to know what the term means, it means the technology that enabled graphic design to go digital. It was an ecosystem, really: the Mac, PostScript, LaserWriter, and PageMaker. But before all that, designers depended on typesetters to set type.
David Langton writing for UX Collective:
A lot was lost when the Macintosh wiped out the traditional typesetting industry. From the art of typography to the craft of typesetting, many essential elements were lost. Typesetters were part of a tradition that stretched back more than 500 years to Gutenberg’s printing press. They understood the basics of type: kerning (spacing between the letters), leading (the space between lines of text), and line breaks (how to avoid widows — those solo words abandoned at the end of a paragraph). They knew about readability (like how to avoid setting type that was too wide to read). There were classic yet limited fonts, with standards for size and leading that assured that everyone working within common ranges maintained a threshold for quality. Yet it was in the craft or business side of typesetting that these services were most under appreciated. Typesetters provided overnight service. They worked overnight, so graphic designers did not have to. We would finish our days specifying the type, and the typesetters would keystroke the manuscripts, proofread, stylize the type, and set up columns following our instructions.
Designers would then pick up the galleys from the typesetters in the morning. The black type was photographically printed on white photo paper. You’d have to cut them up and paste them onto boards, assembling your layout.
Because this was such a physical process, we had to slow down. Langton says:
But since the Macintosh became an in-house tool, the process was reversed. Now, designers design first, then think about it. This shift in process has contributed to a trivialization of the role of graphic designer because anyone can noodle around with the Mac’s sophisticated type tools and make layouts. The design process has been trivialized while the thinking, the evaluation, and the strategic part of the process are often abandoned.
One small thing I’ll point out is that desktop publishing wasn't popularized until 1985.
Upheaval and disruption are nothing new for graphic designers.
Christopher Butler writes a wonderful essay about the “best interfaces we never built,” exploring the UIs from sci-fi:
Science fiction, by the way, hasn’t just predicted our technological future. We all know the classic examples, particularly those from Star Trek: the communicator and tricorder anticipated the smartphone; the PADD anticipated the tablet; the ship’s computer anticipated Siri, Alexa, Google, and AI voice interfaces; the entire interior anticipated the Jony Ive glass filter on reality. It’s enough to make a case that Trek didn’t anticipate these things so much as those who watched it as young people matured in careers in design and engineering. But science fiction has also been a fertile ground for imagining very different ways for how humans and machines interact.
He goes on to namecheck 2001: A Space Odyssey, Quantum Leap, Inspector Gadget and others. I don’t know Butler personally, but I’d bet $1 he’s Gen X like me.
As UX designers, it’s very easy to get stuck thinking that UI is just pixels rendered on a screen. But in fact, an interface is anything that translates our intentions into outcomes that technology can deliver.
Every piece of technology is an interface. Though the word has come to be a shorthand for what we see and use on a screen, an interface is anything
Vincent Nguyen writing for Yanko Design, interviewing Alan Dye, VP of Human Interface Design at Apple:
This technical challenge reveals the core problem Apple set out to solve: creating a digital material that maintains form-changing capabilities while preserving transparency. Traditional UI elements either block content or disappear entirely, but Apple developed a material that can exist in multiple states without compromising visibility of underlying content. Dye’s emphasis on “celebrating user content” exposes Apple’s hierarchy philosophy, where the interface serves content instead of competing with it. When you tap to magnify text, the interface doesn’t resize but stretches and flows like liquid responding to pressure, ensuring your photos, videos, and web content remain the focus while navigation elements adapt around them.
Since the Jony Ive days, Apple’s hardware has always been about celebrating the content. Bezels got smaller. Screens got bigger and brighter. Even the flat design brought on by iOS 7 and eventually adopted by the whole ecosystem was a way to strip away the noise and focus on the content.
Dye’s explanation of the “glass layer versus application layer” architecture provides insight into how Apple technically implements this philosophy. The company has created a distinct separation between functional controls (the glass layer) and user content (the application layer), allowing each to behave according to different rules while maintaining visual cohesion. This architectural decision enables the morphing behavior Dye described, where controls can adapt and change while content remains stable and prominent.
The Apple platform UI today sort of does that, but Liquid Glass seems to take it even further.
Nguyen about his experience using the Music app on Mac:
The difference from current iOS becomes apparent in specific scenarios. In the current Music app, scrolling through your library feels like moving through flat, static layers. With Liquid Glass, scrolling creates a sense of depth. You can see your album artwork subtly shifting beneath the translucent controls, creating spatial awareness of where interface elements sit in relation to your content. The tab bar doesn’t just scroll with you; it creates gentle optical distortions that make the underlying content feel physically present beneath the glass surface.
Liquid Glass represents more than an aesthetic update or surface-level polish. It functions as a complex behavioral system, precisely engineered to dictate how interface layers react to user input. In practical terms, this means Apple devices now interact with interface surfaces not as static, interchangeable panes, but as dynamic, adaptive materials that fluidly flex and
The Steve Jobs archive sharing a little behind-the-scenes of Jobs’s famous Stanford commencement speech:
The talk generated no small measure of anxiety for Steve. He had attended Reed College for only a few months before dropping out; now he would be speaking to graduates of one of the world’s top research universities, a place that meant a great deal to him. An intensely private man, Steve was not in the habit of talking about his personal journey—but he knew the occasion required it.
Steve Jobs has always had an aura of invincibility around him—a creative genius who could convince those around him and the world of anything he wanted using his “reality distortion field.” But he was also human.
I’m sure you’ve seen it before. But whether you’re 22 years old or 50, his advice still resonates. I love the clarity in this scaled-up version.
Marking the 20th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech with a digitally enhanced version of the video as well as a behind-the-scenes look at how it came to be: from firsthand accounts from people who were connected to the commencement to Steve’s personal drafts.
Sara Paul writing for NN/g:
The core principles of UX and product design remain unchanged, and AI amplifies their importance in many ways. To stay indispensable, designers must evolve: adapt to new workflows, deepen their judgment, and double down on the uniquely human skills that AI can’t replace.
They spoke with seven UX practitioners to get their take on AI and the design profession.
There is a growing misconception that AI tools can take over design, engineering, and strategy. However, designers offer more than interaction and visual-design skills. They offer judgment, built on expertise that AI cannot replicate.
Our panelists return to a consistent message: across every tech hype cycle, from responsive design to AI, the value of design hasn’t changed. Good design goes deeper than visuals; it requires critical thinking, empathy, and a deep understanding of user needs.
Top product experts share four strategies for remaining indispensable as AI changes UI design, accelerates feature production, and reshapes data analysis.
"Beating AI" is an interesting framing, but OK. There is a lot of concern out there about how AI will affect the entire design industry, from graphic design to UX. Understandably, designers are worried about their careers.
Georgia Coggan writing for Creative Bloq:
"So are we just cooked?" asks a recent Reddit thread from a designer who is four years out of college. " Any other jobs i can get with such a degree now that design is kind of becoming obsolete?"
Hundreds of responses poured in from designers with strong and diverse opinions on what AI is doing to the graphic design industry – and it isn't all as doom and gloom as you might fear. Ranging from advice around what humans can do that AI can't, to how nothing has really changed regarding what the industry needs from its designers, there's lots for the OP to feel positive about – as long as they're happy to stay agile. Head over to the Reddit thread to garner more wisdom from those in the field.
From staying agile to what to do if you're laid off.
Great reminder from Kai Wong about getting stuck on a solution too early:
Imagine this: the Product Manager has a vision of a design solution based on some requirements and voices it to the team. They say, “I want a table that allows us to check statuses of 100 devices at once.”
You don’t say anything, so that sets the anchor of a design solution as “a table with a bunch of devices and statuses.”
How to avoid anchoring problems that result in stuck designers
I kind of expected it: a lot more ink was spilled on Liquid Glass—particularly on social media. In case you don’t remember, Liquid Glass is the new UI for all of Apple’s platforms. It was announced Monday at WWDC 2025, their annual developers conference.
The criticism is primarily around legibility and accessibility. Secondary reasons include aesthetics and power usage to animate all the bubbles.
Before I go and address the criticism, I think it would be great to break down the team’s design thinking and how Liquid Glass actually works.
I’ve been very interested in finding tools to close the design-to-code gap. Martina Sartor writing in UX Planet articulates why that is so important:
After fifteen years hopping between design systems, dev stand-ups, and last-minute launch scrambles, I’m convinced design-to-dev QA is still one of the most underestimated bottlenecks in digital product work. We pour weeks into meticulous Figma files, yet the last mile between mock-up and production code keeps tripping us up.
This is an honest autopsy of why QA hurts and how teams can start healing it — today — without buying more software (though new approaches are brewing).
(and Practical Ways to Ease the Pain)
In the early days of computing, it was easy for one person to author a complete program. Nowadays, because the software we create is so complex, we need teams.
Gaurav Sinha writing for UX Planet:
The faster you accept that they’re not going to change their communication style, the faster you can focus on what actually works — learning to decode what they’re really telling you. Because buried in all that technical jargon is usually something pretty useful for design decisions.
It’s a fun piece on learning how to speak engineer.
When engineers sound like they’re speaking alien.
I have relayed here before the story that I’ve been using Macs since 1985. It wasn’t the hardware that drew me in—it was MacPaint. I was always an artistic kid so being able to paint on a digital canvas seemed thrilling to me. And of course it was back then.
Behind MacPaint, was a man named Bill Atkinson. Atkinson died last Thursday, June 5 of pancreatic cancer. In a short remembrance, John Gruber said:
I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he’s on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.
I‘m happy that Figma also remembered Atkinson and that they are standing on his shoulders.
Every day at Figma, we wrestle with the same challenges Atkinson faced: How do you make powerful tools feel effortless? How do you hide complexity behind intuitive interactions? His fingerprints are on every pixel we push, every selection we make, every moment of creative flow our users experience.
We commemorate the Apple pioneer whose QuickDraw and HyperCard programs made the Macintosh intuitive enough for nearly anyone to use.
Apple’s annual developer conference kicked off today with a keynote that announced:
Of course, those are the very high-level highlights.
For designers, the headline is Liquid Glass. Sebastiaan de With’s predictive post and renderings from last week were very spot-on.
When you’re building a SaaS app, I believe it’s important to understand the building blocks, or objects, in your app. What are they? How do they relate to each other? Should those relationships be peer-to-peer or parent-child? Early in my tenure at BuildOps, I mentioned this way of thinking to one of my designers and they pointed me to Object-Oriented UX (OOUX), a methodology pioneered by Sophia Prater.
Mateusz Litarowicz writes:
Object-Oriented UX is a way of thinking about design, introduced and popularized by Sophia Prater. It assumes that instead of starting with specific screens or user flows, we begin by identifying the objects that should exist in the system, their attributes, the relationships between them, and the actions users can take on those objects. Only after this stage do we move on to designing user flows and wireframes.
To be honest, I’d long thought this way, ever since my days at Razorfish when our UX director Marisa Gallagher talked about how every website is built around a core unit, or object. At the time, she used Netflix as an example—it’s centered around the movie. CRMs, CMSes, LMSes, etc. are all object-based.
Anyway, I think Litarowicz writes a great primer for OOUX. The other—and frankly more important, IMHO—advantage to thinking this way, especially for a web app, is because your developers think this way too.
How Object-Oriented UX can help you design complex systems
The Talking Heads have released a new music video for an old song. Directed by Mike Mills—who is not only a filmmaker but also a graphic designer—and starring Saoirse Ronan, the video for the band’s first hit, “Psycho Killer” is a wonderful study on the pressures, anxieties, and joys of being a young person in today’s world. It was made to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary.
On Instagram, the band said, “This video makes the song better- We LOVE what this video is NOT - it's not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious.”
Bell Labs was a famed research lab run by AT&T (aka “Ma Bell” before it was broken up). You can draw a straight line from Bell Labs to Xerox PARC where essential computing technologies like the graphical user interface, the mouse, Ethernet, and more were invented.
Aeroform, writing for 1517 Fund:
The reason why we don't have Bell Labs is because we're unwilling to do what it takes to create Bell Labs — giving smart people radical freedom and autonomy.
The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.
Or, how MBA culture killed Bell Labs
Peter Yang has been doing some amazing experiments with gen AI tools. There are so many models out there now, so I appreciate him going through and making this post and video.
I made a video testing Claude 4, ChatGPT O3, and Gemini 2.5 head-to-head for coding, writing, deep research, multimodal and more. What I found was that the "best" model depends on what you're trying to do.
Here’s a handy chart to whet your appetite.
Comparing all 3 AI models for coding, writing, multimodal, and 6 other use cases
I’ve been focused a lot on AI for product design recently, but I think it’s just as important to talk about AI for web design. Though I spend my days now leading a product design team and thinking a lot about UX for creating enterprise software, web design is still a large part of the design industry, as evidenced by the big interest in Framer in the recent Design Tools Survey.
Eric Karkovack writing for The WP Minute:
Several companies have released AI-based site generators; WordPress.com is among the latest. Our own Matt Medeiros took it for a spin. He “chatted” with a friendly bot that wanted to know more about his website needs. Within minutes, he had a website powered by WordPress.
These tools aren’t producing top agency-level websites just yet. Maybe they’re a novelty for the time being. But they’ll improve. With that comes the worry of their impact on freelancers. Will our potential clients choose a bot over a seasoned expert?
Karkovack is right. Current AI tools aren’t making well-thought custom websites yet. So as an agency owner or a freelance designer, you have to defend your position of expertise and customer service:
Those tools have a place in the market. However, freelancers and agencies must position themselves as the better alternative. We should emphasize our expertise and attention to detail, and communicate that AI is a helpful tool, not a magic wand.
But Karkovack misses an opportunity to offer sage advice, which I will do here. Take advantage of these tools in your workflow so that you can be more efficient in your delivery. If you’re in the WordPress ecosystem, use AI to generate some layout ideas, write custom JavaScript, make custom plugins, or write some copy. These AI tools are game-changing, so don’t rest on your laurels.
Being a freelance web designer often means dealing with disruption. Sometimes, it’s a client who needs a new feature built ASAP. But it can also come from a shakeup in the technology we use. Artificial intelligence (AI) has undoubtedly been a disruptive force. It has upended our workflows and made…
In this short piece by Luke Wroblewski, he observes how the chat box is slowly giving way as agents and MCP give AI chatbots a little more autonomy.
When agents can use multiple tools, call other agents and run in the background, a person's role moves to kicking things off, clarifying things when needed, and making use of the final output. There's a lot less chatting back and forth. As such, the prominence of the chat interface can recede even further. It's there if you want to check the steps an AI took to accomplish your task. But until then it's out of your way so you can focus on the output.
While chat interfaces to AI models aren't going away anytime soon, the increasing capabilities of AI agents are making the concept of chatting back and forth wi...
Sebastiaan de With, former designer at Apple and currently co-founder and designer at Lux (makers of Halide, Kino, Spectre, and Orion) imagined what the next era in iOS design might be. (WWDC, Apple’s developer conference is next week. This is typically when they unveil the new operating systems that will launch in the fall. Rumors are flying as usual.)
But he starts with a history lesson:
Smart people study history to understand the future. If we were to categorize the epochs of iOS design, we could roughly separate them into the Shaded Age, the Adaptive Age, and the New Age.
The Shaded Age, or skeuomorphic age, took inspiration from the Dashboard feature of Mac OS X Tiger. And then the Flat Age brought on by the introduction of iOS 7.
de With’s concept mocks for the New Age are fantastic. Based on the physicality of visionOS, with specular highlights and reactive reflections, it’s luscious and reminds me of the first time I ever laid eyes on Aqua—the glossy, candy-like look of the original Mac OS X. Steve Jobs said at its introduction, “…one of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it.”
Sebastiaan de With: “Philosophically, if I was Apple, I’d describe this as finally having an interface that matches the beautiful material properties of its devices. All the surfaces of your devices have glass screens. This brings an interface of a matching material, giving the user a feeling of the glass itself coming alive.”
There’s a lot of rumors of a big impending UI redesign from Apple. Let’s imagine what’s (or what could be) next for the design of iPhones, Macs and iPads.
