I love this piece in The Pudding by Michelle Pera-McGhee, where she breaks down what motifs are and how they’re used in musicals. Using audio samples from Wicked, Les Miserables, and Hamilton, it’s a fun, interactive—sound on!—essay.

Music is always telling a story, but here that is quite literal. This is especially true in musicals like Les Misérables or Hamilton where the entire story is told through song, with little to no dialogue. These musicals rely on motifs to create structure and meaning, to help tell the story.

…

So a motif doesn’t just exist, it represents something. This creates a musical storytelling shortcut: when the audience hears a motif, that something is evoked. The audience can feel this information even if they can’t consciously perceive how it’s being delivered.

If you think about it, motifs are the design systems of musicals.

Pera-McGhee lists out the different use cases and techniques for motifs:

• Representing a character with a recurring musical idea, often updated as the character evolves.
• Representing an abstract idea (love, struggle, hope) via leitmotifs that recur across scenes.
• Creating emotional layers by repeating the same motif in contrasting contexts (joy vs. grief).
• Weaving multiple motifs together at key structural moments (end-of-act ensembles like “One Day More” and “Non-Stop”).

I’m also reminded of this excellent video about the motifs in Hamilton.

Economics PhD student Prashant Garg performed a fascinating analysis of Bob Dylan’s lyrics from 1962 to 2012 using AI. He detailed his project in Aeon:

So I fed Dylan’s official discography from 1962 to 2012 into a large language model (LLM), building a network of the concepts and connections in his songs. The model combed through each lyric, extracting pairs of related ideas or images. For example, it might detect a relationship between ‘wind’ and ‘answer’ in ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ (1962), or between ‘joker’ and ‘thief’ in ‘All Along the Watchtower’ (1967). By assembling these relationships, we can construct a network of how Dylan’s key words and motifs braid together across his songs.

The resulting dataset is visualized in a series of node graphs and bar charts. What’s interesting is that AI is able to see Dylan’s work through a new lens, something that prior scholarship may have missed.

…Yet, when used as a lens rather than an oracle, the same models can jolt even seasoned critics out of interpretive ruts and reveal themes they might have missed. Far from reducing Dylan to numbers, this approach highlights how intentionally intricate his songwriting is: a restless mind returning to certain images again and again, recombining them in ever-new mosaics. In short, AI lets us test the folklore around Dylan, separating the theories that data confirm from those they quietly refute.

Oliver West argues in UX Magazine that UX designers aren’t monolithic—meaning we’re not all the same and see the world in the same way.

West:

UX is often described as a mix of art and science, but that definition is too simple. The truth is, UX is a spectrum made up of three distinct but interlinked lenses:

• Creativity: Bringing clarity, emotion, and imagination to how we solve problems.
• Science: Applying evidence, psychology, and rigor to understand behavior.
• Business: Focusing on relevance, outcomes, and measurable value.

Every UX professional looks through these lenses differently. And that’s exactly how it should be.

He then outlines how those who are more focused on certain parts of the spectrum may be more apt for more specialized roles. For example, if you’re more focused on creativity, you might be more of a UI designer:

UI Designers lead with the creative lens. Their strength lies in turning complex ideas into interfaces that feel intuitive, elegant, and emotionally engaging. But the best UI Designers also understand the science of usability and the business context behind what they’re designing.

I think for product designers working in the startup world, you actually do need all three lenses, as it were. But with a bias towards Science and Business.

This episode of Design of AI with Dr. Maya Ackerman is wonderful. She echoed a lot of what I’ve been thinking about recently—how AI can augment what we as designers and creatives can do. There’s a ton of content out there that hypes up AI that can replace jobs—“Type this prompt and instantly get a marketing plan!” or “Type this prompt and get an entire website!”

Ackerman, as interviewed by Arpy Dragffy-Guerrero:

I have a model I developed which is called humble creative machines which is idea that we are inherently much smarter than the AI. We have not reached even 10% of our capacity as creative human beings. And the role of AI in this ecosystem is not to become better than us but to help elevate us. That applies to people who design AI, of course, because a lot of the ways that AI is designed these days, you can tell you’re cut out of the loop. But on the other hand, some of the most creative people, those who are using AI in the most beneficial way, take this attitude themselves. They fight to stay in charge. They find ways to have the AI serve their purposes instead of treating it like an all-knowing oracle. So really, it’s sort of the audacity, the guts to believe that you are smarter than this so-called oracle, right? It’s this confidence to lead, to demand that things go your way when you’re using AI.

Her stance is that those who use AI best are those that wield it and shape its output to match their sensibilities. And so, as we’ve been hearing ad nauseam, our taste and judgement as designers really matters right now.

I’ve been playing a lot with ComfyUI recently—I’m working on a personal project that I’ll share if/when I finish it. But it made me realize that prompting a visual to get it to match what I have in my mind’s eye is not easy. This recent Instagram reel from famed designer Jessica Walsh captures my thoughts well:

I would say most AI output is shitty. People just assumed, “Oh, you rendered that an AI.” “That must have been super easy.” But what they don’t realize is that it took an entire day of some of our most creative people working and pushing the different prompts and trying different tools out and experimenting and refining. And you need a good eye to understand how to curate and pick what the best outputs are. Without that right now, AI is still pretty worthless.

It takes a ton of time to get AI output to look great, beyond prompting: inpainting, control nets, and even Photoshopping. What most non-professionals do is they take the first output from an LLM or image generator and present it as great. But it’s really not.

So I like what Dr. Ackerman mentioned in her episode: we should be in control of the humble machines, not the other way around.

I spend a lot of time not talking about design nor hanging out with other designers. I suppose I do a lot of reading about design to write this blog, and I am talking with the designers on my team, but I see Design as the output of a lot of input that comes from the rest of life.

Hardik Pandya agrees and puts it much more elegantly:

Design is synthesizing the world of your users into your solutions. Solutions need to work within the user’s context. But most designers rarely take time to expose themselves to the realities of that context.

You are creative when you see things others don’t. Not necessarily new visuals, but new correlations. Connections between concepts. Problems that aren’t obvious until someone points them out. And you can’t see what you’re not exposed to.

Improving as a designer is really about increasing your exposure. Getting different experiences and widening your input of information from different sources. That exposure can take many forms. Conversations with fellow builders like PMs, engineers, customer support, sales. Or doing your own digging through research reports, industry blogs, GPTs, checking out other products, YouTube.

Scott Berkun enumerates five habits of the worst designers in a Substack post. The most obvious is “pretentious attitude.” It’s the stereotype, right? But in my opinion, the most damaging and potentially fatal habit is a designer’s “lack of curiosity.” Berkun explains:

Design dogma is dangerous and if the only books and resources you read are made by and for designers, you will tend to repeat the same career mistakes past designers have made. We are a historically frustrated bunch of people but have largely blamed everyone else for this for decades. The worst designers are ignorant, and refuse to ask new questions about their profession. They repeat the same flawed complaints and excuses, fueling their own burnout and depression. They resist admitting to their own blindspots and refuse to change and grow.

I’ve worked with designers who have exhibited one or more of these habits at one time or another. Heck, I probably have as well.

Good reminders all around.

David Kelley is an icon in design. A restless tinkerer turned educator, he co-founded the reowned industrial design firm IDEO, helped shape human-centered design at Stanford’s d.school, and collaborated with Apple on seminal projects like the early mouse.

Here’s his take on creativity in a brief segment for PBS News Hour:

And as I started teaching, I realized that my purpose in life was figuring out how to help people gain confidence in their creative ability. Many people assume they’re not creative. Time and time again, they say, a teacher told me I wasn’t creative or that’s not a very good drawing of a horse or whatever it is. We don’t have to teach creativity. Once we remove the blocks, they can then feel themselves as being a creative person. Witnessing somebody realizing they’re creative for the first time is just a complete joy. You can just see them come out of the shop and beaming that I can weld. Like, what’s next?

Like it or not, as a designer, you have to be able to present your work proficiently. I remember I had always hated presenting. I was nervous and would get tongue-tied. Eventually, the more I did it, the more I got used to it. …But that’s public speaking, just half of what a presentation is. The other half is how to structure and tell your story. What story? The story of your design.

There’s a lot to be learned from master storytellers like Pixar. Laia Tremosa writing for the Interaction Design Foundation walks us through some storytelling techniques that we can pick up from Pixar.

Most professionals stay unseen not because their work lacks value, but because their message lacks resonance. They talk in facts when their audience needs meaning.

Storytelling is how you change that. It turns explanation into connection, and connection into influence. When you frame your ideas through story, people don’t just understand your work, they believe in it.

And out of the five that she mentions, the second one is my favorite, “Know Where You’re Going: Start with the End.”

Pixar designs for the final feeling. You should too. As a presenter, your version of that is a clear takeaway, a shift in perspective, or a call to action. You’re guiding your audience to a moment of clarity.

Maybe it’s a relief that a problem can be solved. Maybe it’s excitement about a new idea. Maybe it’s conviction that your proposal matters. Whatever the feeling, it’s your north star.

Don’t just prepare what to say; decide where you want to land. Start with the end, and build every word, visual, and story toward that moment of understanding and meaning.

I must admit I’ve tried to read this essay by Frank Chimero—a script from a talk he recently gave—for about a week. I tried to skim it. I tried to fit it into a spare five minutes here and there. But this piece demands active reading. Not because it’s dense. But because it is great.

Chimero reflects on AI and his—and our—relationship to it. How is it being marketed? How do we think about it? How should we use it?

First off, Chimero starts with his conclusion. He believes we should reframe AI to be less like a tool or technology, and more like a musical instrument.

Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice. Instruments require a performance that relies on technique—the horn makes the sound, but how and what you blow into it matters; the drum machine keeps time and plays the samples, but what you sample and how you swing on top of it becomes your signature.

In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.

Then, he wanders off to give examples of four artists and their relationships with technology, stoking his audience—me, us, you—to consider “some more flexibility in how to collaborate with the machine in your own work, creative or otherwise.”

Read the whole piece. Curl up this mid-autumn Sunday afternoon with some hot tea and take the 20–25 minutes to read it and take it in.

Robin Sloan wrote a thought piece exploring what “extended thinking” and “reasoning” models actually mean.

…the models can only “think” by spooling out more text — while human thinking often does the oppo­site: retreats into silence, because it doesn’t have words yet to say what it wants to say.

That’s an interesting point Sloan makes. I believe there’s nuance though.

I’ve long felt that I do my best thinking by writing. When I work through a gnarly design problem, I’m writing first, then sketching, then maybe Figma-ing. But that could be after a walk, a shower, or doing the dishes.

I think the headline is a hard stance, but I appreciate the sentiment. All the best designers and creatives—including developers—I’ve ever worked with do things on the side. Or in Rohit Prakash’s words, they tinker. They’re always making something, learning along the way.

Prakash, writing in his blog:

Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you don’t like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste.

It’s important for designers to see other designs and use other products—if you’re a software designer. It’s equally important to look up from Dribbble, Behance, Instagram, and even this blog and go experience something unrelated to design. Art, concerts, cooking. All of it gets synthesized through your POV and becomes your taste.

I will say that A-ha’s 1985 hit “Take On Me” and its accompanying video was incredibly influential on me as a kid. Listening to the struggles the band endured and the constant tuning of the song they did is very inspiring. In an episode of Song Exploder, Hrishikesh Hirway interviews Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, who originally wrote the bones of the song as a teenager, about the creative journey the band took to realize the version we know and love.

Hirway:

Okay, so you have spent the whole budget and then this version of the song comes out in 1984, and it flops. How were you able to convince anybody to give you another chance? Or maybe even more so, I’m curious, for your own sake: How were you able to feel like that wasn’t the end of the road for the song? Like, it had its chance, it didn’t happen, and that was that.

Waaktaar-Savoy:

Yeah, that’s the good thing about being young. You don’t feel, (chuckles) you know, you just sort of, brush it off your shoulders, you know. We were a hundred percent confident. We were like, there’s not a doubt in our minds.

…

…it took some time, you know, it was very touch and go. ‘Cause the, you know, they’ve spent this much money on the half-finished album. Are they gonna pour more money into it and risk losing more money? So, from Norway? Hey, no one comes from Norway and makes it. And so it was a risk for people.

Having gone to England from their native Norway, A-ha released two versions of the song in the UK before it became a hit in the US. With the help of the music video, of course.

A new record exec at the US arm of Warner Bros. took a liking to the band and the album, as Waaktaar-Savoy recalls:

And there was a new guy on the company, Jeff Ayeroff. He fell in love with the, the album and the song. And he had been keeping this one particular idea sort of in the back of his head. There was this art film called Commuter, with animation. So, he was the one who put together that with Steve Barron, who was the director.

And they made the video. And the song slowly climbed the charts to become a number one hit.

Noah Davis writing in Web Designer Depot, says aloud what I’d thought—but never wrote down—before AI, templates started to kill creativity in web design.

If you’re wondering why the web feels dead, lifeless, or like you’re stuck in a scrolling Groundhog Day of “hero image, tagline, three icons, CTA,” it’s not because AI hallucinated its way into the design department.

It’s because we templatified creativity into submission!

We used to design websites like we were crafting digital homes—custom woodwork, strange hallways, surprise color choices, even weird sound effects if you dared. Each one had quirks. A personality. A soul.

When I was coming up as a designer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of my favorite projects was designing Pixar.com. The animation studio’s soul—and by extension the soul I’d imbue into the website—was story. The way this manifest was a linear approach to the site, similar to a slideshow, to tell the story of each of their films.

And as the web design industry grew, and everyone needed and wanted a website, from Fortune 500s to the local barber shop, access to well-designed websites was made possible via templates.

Let’s be real: clients aren’t asking for design anymore. They’re asking for “a site like this.” You know the one. It looks clean. It has animations. It scrolls smoothly. It’s “modern.” Which, in 2025, is just a euphemism for “I want what everyone else has so I don’t have to think.”

Templates didn’t just streamline web development. They rewired what people expect a website to be.

Why hire a designer when you can drop your brand colors into a no-code template, plug in some Lottie files, and call it a day? The end result isn’t bad. It’s worse than bad. It’s forgettable.

Davis ends his rant with a call to action: “If you want design to live, stop feeding the template machine. Build weird stuff. Ugly stuff. Confusing stuff. Human stuff.”