Written from inside the work, not above it. New essays monthly.
Frankenjob The trade press says design is about to be full of Frankenjobs: roles stitched together from parts of other roles. Twenty years of freelancing says the monster works fine. Watch the doctor. Read the essay →
The Eye Is the Spec Center a play button by math and it reads as off. Design runs on small corrections like that, made entirely by eye, and the eye is the one thing AI design doesn't have. Read →
The Rent Came Due For a decade my portfolio lived on a website builder, and the rent made sense. Then building got cheap, the loan inverted, and I kept the name. Read →
An Audience of Two This year I shipped a budget app for two users. One of them married me. When building gets cheap, software stops needing a market, and design finally gets to commit. Read →
I Stopped Delivering Files An agency asked for deck graphics, the same request every pitch sends. This time I didn't send files. I sent the machine that makes them, and it changed what the client buys. Read →
Google Thinks I Sell Lumber A spam email greeted me as a lumber company, and Google agreed. The machines have been reading us all along. Now they answer, and what they believe about you is a design problem. Read →
Building Got Cheap. Deciding Didn't. Building a tool used to cost more than doing the task by hand a dozen times over. AI flipped that. Now the scarce skill is deciding what is worth building at all. Read →
No One Mentioned a Button Twenty years designing things people look at, then a meeting where no one mentioned a button. The work didn't disappear. It moved. Read →
Which Kind of Wrong AI hands you work that looks finished and asks you to know whether it is. The skill is diagnosis: four kinds of wrong, and a different move for each. Read →
GenUI Is Not a Chat Window A chatbot is not inherently good product design. In most cases, it is the absence of product design. What GenUI actually is, and why composition beats generation. Read →
The Rising Floor Polish is cheap. Confusion ships at full fidelity. What design leadership becomes when execution stops proving anything. Read →
Design Management Is the Missing Skill in the Age of AI When software is generated rather than drawn screen by screen, quality moves upstream into the system that produces it. That is design management work. Read →
The Brand Kit Was the Easy Part A brand kit used to be a finished thing you could hold. Now it's the floor of a much taller system with two audiences, people and machines. The real work is the system. Read → Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.
Or write hello@joshuawells.com directly.