Life's Complicated Enough Design, and using what gets designed, should be a streamlined and enjoyable thing. It usually isn't. Here are ten habits from twenty years of making things for people that put some of the joy back, for me and for the people I get to work with. None of them is a system. Most of them are manners. Read this one → -
Life's Complicated Enough Design, and using what gets designed, should be a streamlined and enjoyable thing. It usually isn't. Here are ten habits from twenty years of making things for people that put some of the joy back, for me and for the people I get to work with. None of them is a system. Most of them are manners. Read → -
What's Left to Design When the Screen Is Generated? If the model assembles the interface at runtime, what is the designer for? I thought the answer was 'less.' Then I spent a year designing generative pages for ten industries and the job didn't shrink. It moved. The screen stopped being the deliverable, and the rules the screen gets built from became it. Read → -
Before the Meeting Ends A client flagged a problem mid-call, and the fix was live before the next agenda item. Most of design process turns out to be scar tissue around the cost of revision, and the cost just left. Read → -
What a Startup Website Redesign Costs and Takes in 2026 I've been meaning to write this down for a year, and every time I sat down the answer had changed. So here are the two numbers every founder asks for, what a redesign costs and how long it takes, as of right now. One of them got a lot smaller. The other one didn't move. Read → -
The Rhinestone Was the Point I grew up in the mountains of southwest Virginia, a couple of hours up the ridge from her Smokies. I admired her over-the-top look before I understood why: it was beautiful, it was precise, and it was completely her. A few words for Dolly, from one of her own. Read → -
What Is Generative UI? The interface stops being decided months in advance and starts being assembled at the moment of need. A working definition of generative UI (GenUI), the four things it isn't, and why the more the model decides, the more design matters. Read → -
I Know What This Looks Like Every few days the feed hands me another version of the same post: how could any real creative touch AI? I read every reply, because they're talking about me. It took three failed drafts to notice the post isn't one argument. It's four. And one of them is a little bit right. Read → -
The Machine Signs Its Work I can tell when AI made a thing the way you can tell when your partner loaded the dishwasher: nothing's broken, nothing's dirty, and nothing is where it goes. So I started keeping a list of what it keeps doing... and somewhere in the middle, the list turned out to be about something else. Read → -
The Curb Cut in My Terminal There's a Claude Code plugin whose entire name is i-have-adhd. Ten rules in a text file. I installed it because the name is literally me... then I read the rules again and couldn't find a single one that only helps my kind of brain. There's a word for that, and it was poured in concrete in Berkeley in 1971. Read → -
The Drift Nobody votes to make the logo worse. The work drifts: hundreds of reasonable approvals, each judged against last week instead of the brief. AI drifts for exactly the same reason, fast enough to watch, which finally settles what was causing it all along. Read → -
Forty Rows Beat a Timeline A colleague sent me a three-minute phone video of himself reading a script, and by that afternoon we had a reviewable draft with motion graphics timed to his voice. Not because we edited fast. Because we didn't make a video at all. We made a list. Read → -
The Whimsy Budget There's a bouncing period at the bottom of my emails now. It took twenty minutes. I've known how to make it for twenty years. The difference between those two sentences is the difference between a shortcut and a streamline, and it's the most misunderstood thing about working with AI. Read → -
The Playbook Isn't Written Yet I got asked to gut-check a search-ads retainer, and halfway through my reply I realized the honest answer was: nobody knows anymore. The click economy that held up two industries is being rationed by AI answers, and the people writing the next playbook won't be career keyword people. 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 → -
Drop the Figma My feed is full of gorgeous interfaces nobody will ever use. AI made pretty cheap, the feed made pretty the point, and design became a genre of content. A field guide to the polished turd. Read → -
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 Rent Came Due For a decade my portfolio lived on a website builder, and the rent made sense. Then building got cheap, the math flipped, and I kept the name. 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 → -
Press 0 for a Human My cousins run a property management company, and their best pitch has nothing to do with the buildings: when you message them, a person answers. On chatbots, venting, and the exact line customers won't let a machine cross. 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 → -
The Skill Nobody Put on the Job Posting 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 → -
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 → -
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 generative UI actually is, and why composition beats generation. 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 → -
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 → -
The Rising Floor Polish is cheap. Confusion ships at full fidelity. What design leadership becomes when execution stops proving anything. Read → -
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 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 →
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