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The design blog that connects the dots others miss. Written by Roger Wong.
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In Part I of this series on the design talent crisis, I wrote about the struggles recent grads have had finding entry-level design jobs and what might be causing the stranglehold on the design job market. In Part II, I discussed how industry and education need to change in order to ensure the survival of the profession.
Like most Gen X kids, I grew up with a lot of freedom to roam. By fifth grade, I was regularly out of the house. My friends and I would go to an arcade in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf called The Doghouse, where naturally, they served hot dogs alongside their Joust and TRON cabinets. But we would invariably go to the Taco Bell across the street for cheap pre-dinner eats. In seventh grade—this is 1986—I walked by a ComputerLand on Van Ness Avenue and noticed a little beige computer with a built-in black and white CRT. The Macintosh screen was actually pale blue and black, but more importantly, showed MacPaint. It was my first exposure to creating graphics on a computer, which would eventually become my career.
Desktop publishing had officially begun a year earlier with the introduction of Aldus PageMaker and the Apple LaserWriter printer for the Mac, which enabled WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) page layouts and high-quality printed output. A generation of designers who had created layouts using paste-up techniques with tools and materials like X-Acto knives, Rapidograph pens, rubyliths, photostats, and rubber cement had to start learning new skills. Typesetters would eventually be phased out in favor of QuarkXPress. A decade of transition would revolutionize the industry, only to be upended again by the web.
For my series on the Design Talent Crisis (see Part I, Part II, and Part III) I interviewed five recent graduates from California College of the Arts (CCA) and San Diego City College. I’m an alum of CCA and I used to teach at SDCC. There’s a mix of folks from both the graphic design and interaction design disciplines.
If these enthusiastic and immensely talented designers are available and you’re in a position to hire, please reach out to them!
In Part I of this series, I wrote about the struggles recent grads have had finding entry-level design jobs and what might be causing the stranglehold on the design job market.
When I met Benedict Allen, he had just finished with Portfolio Review a week earlier. That’s the big show all the design students in the Graphic Design program at San Diego City College work toward. It’s a nice event that brings out the local design community where seasoned professionals review the portfolios of the graduating students.
Allen was all smiles and relief. “I want to dabble in different aspects of design because the principles are generally the same.” He goes on to mention how he wants to start a fashion brand someday, DJ, try 3D. “I just want to test and try things and just have fun! Of course, I’ll have my graphic design job, but I don’t want that to be the end. Like when the workday ends, that’s not the end of my creativity.” He was bursting with enthusiasm.
This is the first part in a three-part series about the design talent crisis. Read Part II and Part III.
Erika Kim’s path to UX design represents a familiar pandemic-era pivot story, yet one that reveals deeper currents about creative work and economic necessity. Armed with a 2020 film and photography degree from UC Riverside, she found herself working gig photography—graduations, band events—when the creative industries collapsed. The work satisfied her artistic impulses but left her craving what she calls “structure and stability,” leading her to UX design. The field struck her as an ideal synthesis, “I’m creating solutions for companies. I’m working with them to figure out what they want, and then taking that creative input and trying to make something that works best for them.”
Since graduating from the interaction design program at San Diego City College a year ago, she’s had three internships and works retail part-time to pay the bills. “I’ve been in survival mode,” she admits. On paper, she’s a great candidate for any junior position. Speaking with her reveals a very thoughtful and resourceful young designer. Why hasn’t she been able to land a full-time job? What’s going on in the design job market?
For nearly three years, Arc from The Browser Company has been my daily driver. To be sure, there was a little bit of a learning curve. Tabs disappeared after a day unless you pinned them. Then they became almost like bookmarks. Tabs were on the left side of the window, not at the top. Spaces let me organize my tabs based on use cases like personal, work, or finances. I could switch between tabs using control-Tab and saw little thumbnails of the pages, similar to the app switcher on my Mac. Shift-command-C copied the current page’s URL.
All these little interface ideas added up to a productivity machine for web jockeys like myself. And so, I was saddened to hear in May that The Browser Company stopped actively developing Arc in favor of a new AI-powered browser called Dia. (They are keeping Arc updated with maintenance releases.)
They had started beta-testing Dia with college students first and just recently opened it up to Arc members. I finally got access to Dia a few weeks ago.
But before diving into Dia, I should mention I also got access to another AI browser, Perplexity’s Comet about a week ago. I’m on their Pro plan but somehow got an invite in my email. I had thought it was limited to those on their much more expensive Max plan only. Shhh.
When I was younger, I had a sheet of US Bicentennial stamps and I always loved the red, white, and blue star. Little did I know then that I would become a graphic designer.
The symbol, designed by Bruce Blackburn at Chermayeff & Geismar is a multilayered stylized five-pointed star. It folds like bunting. Its rounded corners evoke both a flower and a pinwheel at the same time. And finally, the negative space reveals a classic, pointed star.
I was in London last week with my family and spotted this ad in a Tube car. With the headline “Humans Were the Beta Test,” this is for Artisan, a San Francisco-based startup peddling AI-powered “digital workers.” Specifically an AI agent that will perform sales outreach to prospects, etc.
Artisan ad as seen in London, June 2025
I’ve long left the Bay Area, but I know that the 101 highway is littered with cryptic billboards from tech companies, where the copy only makes sense to people in the tech industry, which to be fair, is a large part of the Bay Area economy. Artisan is infamous for its “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign which went up late last year. Being based in San Diego, much further south in California, I had no idea. Artisan wasn’t even on my radar.
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.
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.
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.”
Tommy Geoco and team are finally out with the results of their 2024 UX Design Tools Survey.
First, two quick observations before I move on to longer ones:
I knew instantly that the brand identity was paying homage to Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographic studies of a galloping horse. It’s a logo for an AI video company.
The whole case study from Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell of Pentagram is great.
Nearly three weeks after it was introduced at Figma Config 2025, I finally got access to Figma Make. It is in beta and Figma made sure we all know. So I will say upfront that it’s a bit unfair to do an official review. However, many of the tools in my AI prompt-to-code shootout article are also in beta.
Since this review is fairly visual, I made a video as well that summarizes the points in this article pretty well.
I remember two years ago, when my CEO at the startup I worked for at the time, said that no VC investments were being made unless it had to do with AI. I thought AI was overhyped, and that the media frenzy over it couldn’t get any crazier. I was wrong.
Looking at Google Trends data, interest in AI has doubled in the last 24 months. And I don’t think it’s hit its plateau yet.
Four months into his role as interim CEO, Tom Conrad has been remarkably candid about Sonos’ catastrophic app launch. In recent interviews with WIRED and The Verge, he’s taken personal responsibility—even though he wasn’t at the helm, just on the board—acknowledged deep organizational problems, and outlined the company’s path forward.
But while Conrad is addressing more than many expected, some key details remain off-limits.
The interim CEO has been surprisingly direct about the scope of the failure. “We all feel really terrible about that,” he told WIRED, taking personal responsibility even though he was only a board member during the launch.
Last week, Figma held their annual user conference Config in San Francisco. Since its inception in 2020, it has become a significant UX conference that covers more than just Figma’s products and community. While I’ve not yet had the privilege of attending in person, I do try to catch the livestreams or videos afterwards.
Nearly 17 months after Adobe and Figma announced the termination of their merger talks, Figma flexed their muscle—fueld by the $1 billion breakup fee, I’m sure—by announcing four new products. They are Figma Draw, Make, Sites, and Buzz.
With these four new products, Figma is really growing up and becoming more than a two-and-half-product company, and is building their own creative suite, if you will. Thus taking a big swing at Adobe.
I’ve been seeing this new ad from Coinbase these past few days and love it. Made by independent agency Isle of Any, this spot has on-point animation, a banging track, and a great concept that plays with the Blue Screen of Death.
I found this one article about it from Little Black Book:
“Crypto is fundamentally updating the financial system," says Toby Treyer-Evans, co-founder of Isle of Any, speaking with LBB. "So, to us it felt like an interesting place to start for the campaign, both as a film idea and as a way to play with the viewer and send a message. When you see it on TV, in the context of other advertising, it’s deliberately arresting… and blue being Coinbase’s brand colour is just one of those lovely coming togethers.”
There has been an explosion of AI-powered prompt-to-code tools within the last year. The space began with full-on integrated development environments (IDEs) like Cursor and Windsurf. These enabled developers to use leverage AI assistants right inside their coding apps. Then came a tools like v0, Lovable, and Replit, where users could prompt screens into existence at first, and before long, entire applications.
A couple weeks ago, I decided to test out as many of these tools as I could. My aim was to find the app that would combine AI assistance, design capabilities, and the ability to use an organization’s coded design system.
While my previous essay was about the future of product design, this article will dive deep into a head-to-head between all eight apps that I tried. I recorded the screen as I did my testing, so I’ve put together a video as well, in case you didn’t want to read this.
Product design is going to change profoundly within the next 24 months. If the AI 2027 report is any indication, the capabilities of the foundational models will grow exponentially, and with them—I believe—will the abilities of design tools.
The AI foundational model capabilities will grow exponentially and AI-enabled design tools will benefit from the algorithmic advances. Sources: AI 2027 scenario & Roger Wong
The TL;DR of the report is this: companies like OpenAI have more advanced AI agent models that are building the next-generation models. Once those are built, the previous generation is tested for safety and released to the public. And the cycle continues. Currently, and for the next year or two, these companies are focusing their advanced models on creating superhuman coders. This compounds and will result in artificial general intelligence, or AGI, within the next five years.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Emigre was a prolific powerhouse. The company started out as a magazine in the mid-1980s, but quickly became a type foundry as the Mac enabled desktop publishing. As a young designer in San Francisco who started out in the ’90s, Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans were local heroes (they were based across the Bay in Berkeley). From 1990–1999 they churned out 37 typefaces for a total of 157 fonts. And in that decade, they expanded their influence by getting into music, artists book publishing, and apparel. More than any other design brand, they celebrated art and artists.
Here is a page from a just-released booklet (with a free downloadable PDF) showcasing their fonts from the Nineties.
On 4/4, Marvel released a wonderful teaser poster for their upcoming movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps. This will be the fourth iteration of the first family of comics on film. There was an unreleased Roger Corman-produced movie from 1994, with a fascinating history.
I was visiting a customer of ours in Denver this week. They're an HVAC contractor and we were camped out in one of their conference rooms where they teach their service technicians. On the walls, among posters of air conditioning diagrams were a couple of safety posters. At first glance they look like they're from the 1950s and ’60s, but upon closer inspection, they're from 2016! The only credit I can find on the internet is the copywriter, John Wrend.
Sadly, the original microsite where Grainger had these posters is gone, but I managed to track down the full set.
In a recent podcast with partners at startup incubator Y Combinator, Jared Friedman, citing statistics from a survey with their current batch of founders says, “[The] crazy thing is one quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated, which is like an insane statistic. And it’s not like we funded a bunch of non-technical founders. Like every one of these people is highly tactical, completely capable of building their own product from scratch a year ago…”
A comment they shared from founder Leo Paz reads, “I think the role of Software Engineer will transition to Product Engineer. Human taste is now more important than ever as codegen tools make everyone a 10x engineer.”
While vibe coding—the new term coined by Andrej Karpathy about coding by directing AI—is about leveraging AI for programming, it’s a window into what will happen to the software development lifecycle as a whole and how all the disciplines, including product management and design will be affected.
A tall man with curly, graying hair and a bushy mustache sits across from a woman with a very slight smile in a dimly lit room. There’s pleasant, calming music playing. He’s eager with anticipation to learn about his Outie. He’s an Innie who works on the “severed” floor at Lumon. He’s undergone a surgical procedure that splits his work self from his personal self. This is the premise of the show Severance on Apple TV+.
Ms. Casey, the therapist:
The fall of Sonos isn’t as simple as a botched app redesign. Instead, it is the cumulative result of poor strategy, hubris, and forgetting the company’s core value proposition. To recap, Sonos rolled out a new mobile app in May 2024, promising “an unprecedented streaming experience.” Instead, it was a severely handicapped app, missing core features and broke users’ systems. By January 2025, that failed launch wiped nearly $500 million from the company’s market value and cost CEO Patrick Spence his job.
What happened? Why did Sonos go backwards on accessibility? Why did the company remove features like sleep timers and queue management? Immediately after the rollout, the backlash began to snowball into a major crisis.
As a designer and longtime Sonos customer who was also affected by the terrible new app, a little piece of me died inside each time I read the word “redesign.” It was hard not to take it personally, knowing that my profession could have anything to do with how things turned out. Was it really Design’s fault?
