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).

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.

• PostScript was released by Adobe in 1984.
• The LaserWriter printer was released by Apple in 1985.
• PageMaker was released by Aldus—later bought by Adobe—in 1985.

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.

I think this is great advice and echoes what I’ve written about previously (here and here):

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Brad Feld is sharing the Cursor prompts his friend Michael Natkin put together. It is more or less the same that I’ve gleaned from the Cursor forums, but it’s nice to have it consolidated here. If you’re curious to tackle any weekend coding project, follow these steps.

Nate Jones performed a yeoman’s job of summarizing Mary Meeker’s 340-slide deck on AI trends, the “2025 Technology as Innovation (TAI) Report.” For those of you who don’t know, Mary Meeker is a famed technology analyst and investor known for her insightful reports on tech industry trends. For the longest time, as an analyst at Kleiner Perkins, she published the Internet Trends report. And she was always prescient.

Half of Jones’ post is the summary, while the other half is how the report applies to product teams. The whole thing is worth 27 minutes of your time, especially if you work in software.

As a reaction to the OpenAI + io announcement two weeks ago, Christopher Butler imagines a mesh computing device network he calls “personal ambient computing”:

…I keep thinking back to Star Trek, and how the device that probably inspired the least wonder in me as a child is the one that seems most relevant now: the Federation’s wearables. Every officer wore a communicator pin — a kind of Humane Pin light — but they also all wore smaller pins at their collars signifying rank. In hindsight, it seems like those collar pins, which were discs the size of a watch battery, could have formed some kind of wearable, personal mesh network. And that idea got me going…

He describes the device as a standardized disc that can be attached to any enclosure. I love his illustration too:

Christopher Butler: “I imagine a magnetic edge system that allows the disc to snap into various enclosures — wristwatches, handhelds, desktop displays, wearable bands, necklaces, clips, and chargers.”

Essentially, it’s an always-on, always observing personal AI.

Following up on OpenAI’s acquisition of Jony Ive’s hardware startup, io, Mark Wilson, writing for Fast Company:

As Ive told me back in 2023, there have been only three significant modalities in the history of computing. After the original command line, we got the graphical user interface (the desktop, folders, and mouse of Xerox, Mac OS, and Windows), then voice (Alexa, Siri), and, finally, with the iPhone, multitouch (not just the ability to tap a screen, but to gesture and receive haptic feedback). When I brought up some other examples, Ive quickly nodded but dismissed them, acknowledging these as “tributaries” of experimentation. Then he said that to him the promise, and excitement, of building new AI hardware was that it might introduce a new breakthrough modality to interacting with a machine. A fourth modality.

Hmm, it hasn’t taken off yet because AR hasn’t really gained mainstream popularity, but I would argue hand gestures in AR UI to be a fourth modality. But Ive thinks different. Wilson continues:

Ive’s fourth modality, as I gleaned, was about translating AI intuition into human sensation. And it’s the exact sort of technology we need to introduce ubiquitous computing, also called quiet computing and ambient computing. These are terms coined by the late UX researcher Mark Weiser, who in the 1990s began dreaming of a world that broke us free from our desktop computers to usher in devices that were one with our environment. Weiser did much of this work at Xerox PARC, the same R&D lab that developed the mouse and GUI technology that Steve Jobs would eventually adopt for the Macintosh. (I would also be remiss to ignore that ubiquitous computing is the foundation of the sci-fi film Her, one of Altman’s self-stated goalposts.)

Ah, essentially an always-on, always watching AI that is ready to assist. But whatever the form factor this device takes, it will likely depend on a smartphone:

The first io device seems to acknowledge the phone’s inertia. Instead of presenting itself as a smartphone-killer like the Ai Pin or as a fabled “second screen” like the Apple Watch, it’s been positioned as a third, er, um … thing next to your phone and laptop. Yeah, that’s confusing, and perhaps positions the io product as unessential. But it also appears to be a needed strategy: Rather than topple these screened devices, it will attempt to draft off them.

Wilson ends with the idea of a subjective computer, one that has personality and gives you opinions. He explains:

I think AI is shifting us from objective to subjective. When a Fitbit counts your steps and calories burned, that’s an objective interface. When you ask ChatGPT to gauge the tone of a conversation, or whether you should eat better, that’s a subjective interface. It offers perspective, bias, and, to some extent, personality. It’s not just serving facts; it’s offering interpretation.

The entire column is worth a read.

Nick Babich writing for UX Planet:

Because AI design and code generators quickly take an active part in the design process, it’s essential to understand how to make the most of these tools. If you’ve played with Cursor, Bolt, Lovable, or v0, you know the output is only as good as the input.

Well said, especially as prompting is the primary input for these AI tools. He goes on to enumerate his five parts to a good prompt. Worth a quick read.

Josh Miller, writing in The Browser Company’s substack:

After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the “novelty tax” problem. A lot of people loved Arc — if you’re here you might just be one of them — and we’d benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.

“Novelty tax” is another way of saying using non-standard patterns that users just didn’t get. I love Arc. It’s my daily driver. But, Miller is right that it does have a steep learning curve. So there is a natural ceiling to their market.

Miller’s conclusion is where things get really interesting:

Let me be even more clear: traditional browsers, as we know them, will die. Much in the same way that search engines and IDEs are being reimagined [by AI-first products like Perplexity and Cursor]. That doesn’t mean we’ll stop searching or coding. It just means the environments we do it in will look very different, in a way that makes traditional browsers, search engines, and IDEs feel like candles — however thoughtfully crafted. We’re getting out of the candle business. You should too.

“You should too.”

And finally, to bring it back to the novelty tax:

**New interfaces start from familiar ones. **In this new world, two opposing forces are simultaneously true. How we all use computers is changing much faster (due to AI) than most people acknowledge. Yet at the same time, we’re much farther from completely abandoning our old ways than AI insiders give credit for. Cursor proved this thesis in the coding space: the breakthrough AI app of the past year was an (old) IDE — designed to be AI-native. OpenAI confirmed this theory when they bought Windsurf (another AI IDE), despite having Codex working quietly in the background. We believe AI browsers are next.

Sad to see Arc’s slow death, but excited to try Dia soon.

Patrick Morgan writing for UX Collective:

The tactical tasks that juniors traditionally cut their teeth on are increasingly being delegated to AI tools. Tasks that once required a human junior designer with specialized training can now be handled by generative AI tools in a fraction of the time and cost to the organization.

This fundamentally changes the entry pathway. When the low-complexity work that helped juniors develop their skills is automated away, we lose the natural onramp that allowed designers to gradually progress from tactical execution to strategic direction.

Remote work has further complicated things by removing informal learning opportunities that happen naturally in an in-person work environment, like shadowing senior designers, being in the room for strategy discussions, or casual mentorship chats.

I’ve been worried about this a lot. I do wonder how the next class of junior designers—and all professionals, for that matter—will learn. (I cited Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, in my previous essay.)

Morgan does have some suggestions:

Instead of waiting for the overall market to become junior-friendly again (which I don’t see happening), focus your search on environments more structurally accepting of new talent:

1. Very early-stage startups: Pre-seed or seed companies often have tight budgets and simply need someone enthusiastic who can execute designs. It will be trial-by-fire, but you’ll gain rapid hands-on experience.

2. Stable, established businesses outside of ‘big tech’: Businesses with predictable revenue streams often provide structured environments for junior designers (my early experience at American Express is a prime example). It might not be as glamorous as a ‘big tech’ job, but as a result they’re less competitive while still offering critical experience to get started.

3. Design agencies: Since their business model focuses on selling design services, agencies naturally employ more designers and can support a mix of experience levels. The rapid exposure to multiple projects makes them solid launchpads even if your long-term goal is to work in-house in tech.

Tabitha Swanson for It’s Nice That:

A few years ago, I realised that within a week, I was using about 25 different design programs, each with their own nuances, shortcuts, and technological learning curves. (That number has continued to grow.) I also began to notice less time to rest in the state of full technological proficiency in a tool before trends and software change again and it became time to learn a new one. I’ve learned so many skills over the years, both to stay current, but also out of genuine curiosity. But the pressure to adapt to new technologies as well as perform on social media, update every platform, my portfolio, website and LinkedIn and keep relations with clients, is spiritually draining. Working as a creative has never felt more tiring. I posted about this exhaustion on Instagram recently and many people got in touch saying they felt the same – do you feel it too?

I get it. There’s always so many new things to learn and keep up with, especially in the age of AI. That’s why I think the strategic skills are more valuable and therefore more durable in the long run.

OpenAI is acquiring a hardware company called “io” that Jony Ive cofounded just a year ago:

Two years ago, Jony Ive and the creative collective LoveFrom, quietly began collaborating with Sam Altman and the team at OpenAI.

…

It became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company. And so, one year ago, Jony founded io with Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan.

We gathered together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product development and manufacturing. Many of us have worked closely for decades.

The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco.

It has been an open rumor that Sam Altman and Ive has been working together on some hardware. I had assumed they formalized their partnership already, but I guess not.

There are some bold statements that Ive and Altman make in the launch video, teasing a revolutionary new device that will enable quicker, better access to ChatGPT. Something that is a lot less friction than how Altman explains in the video:

If I wanted to ask ChatGPT something right now about something we had talked about earlier, think about what would happen. I would like reached down. I would get on my laptop, I’d open it up, I’d launch a web browser, I’d start typing, and I’d have to, like, explain that thing. And I would hit enter, and I would wait, and I would get a response. And that is at the limit of what the current tool of a laptop can do. But I think this technology deserves something much better.

There are a couple of other nuggets about what this new device might be from the statements Ive and Altman made to Bloomberg:

…Ive and Altman don’t see the iPhone disappearing anytime soon. “In the same way that the smartphone didn’t make the laptop go away, I don’t think our first thing is going to make the smartphone go away,” Altman said. “It is a totally new kind of thing.”

…

“We are obviously still in the terminal phase of AI interactions,” said Altman, 40. “We have not yet figured out what the equivalent of the graphical user interface is going to be, but we will.”

While we don’t know what the form factor will be, I’m sure it won’t be a wearable pin—ahem, RIP Humane. Just to put it out there—I predict it will be a voice assistant in an earbud, very much like the AI in the 2013 movie “Her.” Altman has long been obsessed with the movie, going as far as trying to get Scarlett Johansson to be one of the voices for ChatGPT.

EDIT 5/22/2025, 8:58am PT: Added prediction about the form factor.

Sam Bradley, writing for Digiday:

One year in from the launch of Google’s AI Overviews, adoption of AI-assisted search tools has led to the rise of so-called “zero-click search,” meaning that users terminate their search journeys without clicking a link to a website.

“People don’t search anymore. They’re prompting, they’re gesturing,” said Craig Elimeliah, chief creative officer at Code and Theory.

It’s a deceptively radical change to an area of the web that evolved from the old business of print directories and classified sections — one that may redefine how both web users and marketing practitioners think about search itself.

And I wrote about answer engines, earlier this year in January:

…the fundamental symbiotic economic relationship between search engines and original content websites is changing. Instead of sending traffic to websites, search engines, and AI answer engines are scraping the content directly and providing them within their platforms.

I was recently featured on the Design of AI podcast to discuss my article that pit eight AI prompt-to-code tools head to head. We talked through the list but I also offered a point of view on where I see the gap.

Arpy Dragffy and Brittany Hobbs close out the episode this way (emphasis mine):

So it’s great that Roger did that analysis and that evaluation. I honestly am a bit shocked by those results. Again, his ranking was that Subframe was number one, Onlook was two, v0 number three, Tempo number four. But again, if you look at his matrix, only two of the tools scored over 70 out of 100 and only one of the tools he could recommend. And this really shines a dark light on AI products and their maturity right now**.** But I suspect that this comes down to the strategy that was used by some of these products. If you go to them, almost every single one of them is actually a coding tool, except the two that scored the highest.

Onlook, its headline is “The Cursor for Designers.” So of course it’s a no brainer that makes a lot of sense. That’s part of their use cases, but nonetheless it didn’t score that good in his matrix.

The top scoring one from his list Subframe is directly positioned to designers. The title is “Design meet code.” It looks like a UI editor. It looks like the sort of tool that designers wish they had. These tools are making it easier for product managers to run research programs, to turn early prototypes and ideas into code to take code and really quick design changes. When you need to make a change to a website, you can go straight into one of these tools and stand up the code.

Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

I tried early versions of Stable Diffusion be ended up using exclusively Midjourney because of the quality. I’m excited to check out the full list. (Oh, and of course I’ve used DALL-E as well via ChatGPT. But there’s not a lot of control there.)

Allen Pike:

While chat is powerful, for most products chatting with the underlying LLM should be more of a debug interface – a fallback mode – and not the primary UX.

I agree. Pike breaks down the various non-chat UIs in his post.

As a certified Star Wars geek, I love this TED talk from ILM’s Rob Bedrow. For the uninitiated, Industrial Light & Magic, or ILM, is the company that George Lucas founded to make all the special effects for the original and subsequent Star Wars films. The firm has been an award-winning pioneer in special and visual effects, responsible for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the liquid metal T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and the de-aging of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

The point Bedrow makes is simple: ILM creates technology in service of the storyteller, or creative.

I believe that we’re designed to be creative beings. It’s one of the most important things about us. That’s one of the reasons we appreciate and we just love it when we see technology and creativity working together. We see this on the motion control on the original “Star Wars” or on “Jurassic Park” with the CG dinosaurs for the first time. I think we just love it when we see creativity in action like this. Tech and creative working together. If we fast forward to 2020, we can see the latest real-time virtual production techniques. This was another creative innovation driven by a filmmaker. In this case, it’s Jon Favreau, and he had a vision for a giant Disney+ “Star Wars” series.

He later goes on to show a short film test made be a lone artist at ILM using an internal AI tool. It’s never-before-seen creatures that could exist in the Star Wars universe. I mean, for now they look like randomized versions of Earth animals and insects, but if you squint, you can see where the technology is headed.

Bedrow goes on…

Now the tech companies on their own, they don’t have the whole picture, right? They’re looking at a lot of different opportunities. We’re thinking about it from a filmmaking perspective. And storytellers, we need better artist-focused tools. Text prompts alone, they’re not great ways to make a movie. And it gets us excited to think about that future where we are going to be able to give artists these kinds of tools.

Again, artists—or designers, or even more broadly, professionals—need fine-grained control to adjust the output of AI.

Watch the whole thing. Instead of a doom and gloom take on AI, it’s an uplifting one that shows us what’s possible.