In 1982, Apple developer Chris Espinosa addressed Steve Jobs' ongoing critiques of the endless calculator by creating a tool that allowed Jobs to adjust every visual parameter himself through menus. Jobs spent just 10 minutes tweaking settings and arrived at a design he liked, which shipped with the original Mac in 1984 and remained virtually unchanged for 17 years through macOS 9. The approach was an early example of parameterized design tools and revealed Jobs' preference for direct manipulation over verbal articulation of his preferences.
Nuits Sonores, Lyon's annual electronic music festival, received a neon green, techno-punk-inspired redesign from DIA Studio, featuring generative motion visuals and custom typeface MNKY Klaus. The identity merges expressive motion with functional design, adapting across festival assets, while neon accents sparked audience participation, turning the community itself into part of the visual experience.
Scott Thielman, CTO of Product Creation Studio, describes his evolution from an AI skeptic to an optimist after building a working checkers game prototype in one afternoon, despite having no prior programming background.
Serif fonts, once dismissed as outdated during the 2010s flat design era, are experiencing a major resurgence across tech, food, and AI brands.
BMW Motorrad, the century-old motorcycle brand, has transformed from a product-focused company into an experience brand with a flexible, globally consistent design system and immersive retail spaces that bring its “Make life a ride” philosophy to life.
Grammarly's rebrand into Superhuman grew from a simple AI-agent brief into a full transformation after major acquisitions and the launch of its AI assistant. Smith & Diction created Hero, a simple character-based logo whose expressive motion helps convey intelligence and adaptability across the product ecosystem. This flexible identity, supported by customised typography and deep product integration, unifies the previously separate brands and strengthens Superhuman's shift from a writing tool to a broad AI productivity platform, helping align teams and attract renewed interest.
ServiceNow and Figma have launched a strategic collaboration utilizing MCP technology, enabling developers to transform Figma designs directly into enterprise-ready applications through ServiceNow's Build Agent. The integration automates the path from design to deployment with enterprise-grade security, reducing initial UI and data model implementation time by over 80%. Users can now provide a Figma design link as a prompt to the Build Agent, which interprets layouts and components to automatically generate fully functional, secure, and scalable applications within minutes.
OpenAI has introduced group chats for ChatGPT, allowing up to 20 people to collaborate with the AI in a shared conversation. Initially rolling out in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, the feature supports planning and decision-making while keeping group chats separate from private memory, adds new social behaviors like emoji reactions, and includes participant and notification controls. Broader expansion is planned for after the pilot.
Figma's 2025 Schema Conference introduced nine major updates, including extended collections for multi-brand systems, slots for component customization, and AI-powered design checking, addressing long-standing design system needs. The announcements mark a significant shift from previous concerns about Figma neglecting its design system features, with improvements spanning performance, code integration through MCP servers and GitHub connections, and native variable import/export. Variable composability still requires further development for advanced authoring patterns.
2025.11.18·joshcusick.substack.com·7 min read·TLDR Design When executives demand features based on trends, designers should respond with strategic curiosity rather than compliance or refusal, using a stakeholder-as-user approach to understand motivations and context. Designers can justify their questions by estimating the likelihood that design decisions will impact user behavior, much like engineers provide development time estimates. Summarizing ideas into testable hypotheses—"If we [change feature], users will [behavior] because [rationale], achieving [goal]"—helps expose logical inconsistencies and may lead executives to reconsider poor decisions themselves.
2025.11.18·dataanddesign.substack.com·5 min read·TLDR Design Affinity by Canva is now a single, completely free app that merges Designer, Photo, and Publisher into one interface with Vector, Pixel, and Layout modes, plus optional Canva AI tools for paid users. Setup is simple and the software retains its strong tutorial support, robust vector and photo-editing features, non-destructive workflows, and comprehensive PDF export, while adding downloadable on-device ML models for tasks like object selection. Despite its refreshed packaging, it's largely the same Affinity suite users know, with no major losses, though it still lacks photo cataloguing tools and older Affinity files convert to a new .af format that legacy apps can't open.
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Alex Pierce built Blood Sugar Battler, a mobile diabetes education game, over the course of three months, utilizing the AI tool Lovable.dev for coding while hand-crafting all visual and audio elements. The retro-styled game challenges players to tap falling foods within 60 seconds, managing both score and a blood sugar meter that reacts differently to healthy versus processed foods. Pierce handled all creative decisions—pixel art sprites, vintage macOS interface design, sound effects, and gameplay balancing—while using AI to translate design intent into functional code. They learned that AI excels at technical scaffolding but cannot replace artistic direction or critical thinking.
Sol has launched a refreshed identity aimed at young adults, blending its Mexican heritage with a modern, energetic aesthetic. Created by LOVE with illustrator Tobias Hall, the rebrand introduces a revitalised wordmark, custom typography, updated historical elements, and a brighter palette featuring elevated reds, golds, and new teal accents. Together with an uplifted sun icon and more confident attitude, the redesign delivers a “newstalgic” brand experience that feels both authentic and contemporary.
AI has become a practical companion rather than a replacement, helping structure plans, speed up analysis, automate workflows, and present findings more engagingly. It streamlines tasks, generates guided insights, and boosts company-wide engagement while still grounding everything in real user data. The result is faster research cycles that free up time for the human essentials of the job—judgment, creativity, and empathy.
2025.11.18·links.tldrnewsletter.com·8 min read·TLDR Design AI-generated art tools like Midjourney and Leonardo AI transform text into images within seconds.
This author attended an AI prompt battle at the Upscale Conference, finding it disappointingly unengaging as contestants typed basic text prompts.
AI writing tools are now so routine that people barely notice using them, yet a study shows they quickly feel disconnected from personal writing that's repeatedly rewritten by AI.
Google is adding a new “Images” tab to its app, letting users browse and save curated visual inspiration much like Pinterest. It launches in the US in the coming weeks. Google aims to boost engagement against rising visual-search competition.
Mozilla's new editorial platform, Nothing Personal, promotes a “post-naive internet,” championing community-driven, countercultural optimism against ads, subscriptions, and AI slop. Designed by Pentagram, its bold, deliberately awkward visual identity uses Mozilla's typographic DNA, lo-fi/hi-fi web vernacular, and provocative layering to celebrate human presence online while critiquing modern internet culture.
macOS Tahoe 26.2 adds Edge Light, a smart virtual ring light that brightens your face in low-light video calls by lighting the edges of your display. Powered by the Neural Engine and Image Signal Processor for adaptive, unobtrusive lighting, it works across all conferencing apps on Apple Silicon Macs (with automatic activation on 2024+ models) and even with Studio Display and external cameras.
AI adoption among creatives is accelerating rapidly, with over 90% using it and nearly half using it daily, yet designers are the most sceptical, reporting lower daily use, greater fears about lost originality, and more frustration with how AI affects the value of their craft. UK creatives are adopting AI more slowly and feel the most pressure to justify human creativity. Many creatives use AI in client work without disclosure due to fears of lower fees, highlighting an industry struggling to balance efficiency, ethics, and the preservation of genuine creative thinking.
A design team paused to reflect on AI's impact and mapped their entire process to identify tasks worth revisiting, skills to develop, and activities that could be automated. They discovered five critical shifts: deepening behavioral research, strengthening business and marketing partnerships, leveraging AI prototyping tools to move beyond static wireframes, embracing systems thinking as interfaces simplify into chat-based interactions, and developing capabilities in data literacy, business fluency, prototyping, service design, and engineering. The team aims to transform from creating static screens to functional prototypes, from UI focus to system-level thinking, and from passive collaboration to active business partnership in the AI era.
2025.11.17·somedesigners.substack.com·7 min read·TLDR Design Ivar Jacobson introduced use cases in the 1980s as a method for describing system requirements from an external perspective, focusing on interactions between actors and the system rather than its internal workings. Use cases consist of two parts: diagrams that provide an overview of actors and their associated use cases, and narratives that detail the interaction sequence, including the basic flow, alternative flows, and pre- and post-conditions. The appropriate level of detail in use cases should match the project stage, avoiding premature design decisions early on while maintaining enough structure to guide development effectively.
2025.11.17·interaction-design.org·17 min read·TLDR Design Grow with an AI Confidant that looks and sounds like you. Use it in real-time conversations that engage users, drive conversions, and onboard employees effortlessly.
Kolors AI offers AI-powered image editing tools for all you need.
Marble lets you create, edit, and share high-fidelity, persistent 3D worlds.
Ashfall refined Aptos' existing wave logo and rebuilt its entire brand system—typography, color, motion, layout, site architecture, and illustration—to shift the company from cliché Web3 aesthetics to a warmer, credible institutional identity, all under tight timelines and complex constraints, culminating in a unified design that proved its strength at Aptos' 2025 New York launch.
2025.11.17·the-brandidentity.com·5 min read·TLDR Design Freelancers struggling after three years shouldn't necessarily quit, as this timeframe is often too short to establish a sustainable business, and difficulties may signal a need to pivot rather than abandon self-employment entirely. Experts recommend reducing financial pressure through part-time employment, diversifying income streams beyond client work, and adopting a business owner's mindset focused on networking and strategic positioning. The decision ultimately depends on whether the creative individual still feels passionate about independence despite the challenges, with success often requiring patience, flexibility, and a willingness to adjust approaches while maintaining core professional values.
The State Pattern is a design approach that enables applications to alter their behavior based on internal state changes, ensuring predictable and consistent user experiences through organized state transitions rather than complex conditional logic. By implementing separate state classes that encapsulate specific behaviors and manage transitions between states, such as loading, success, or error, developers create interfaces that respond smoothly and reliably to user actions. When designers and developers collaborate around state awareness, mapping out transitions and behaviors early in development, they build cohesive digital products that feel intuitive and trustworthy to users.
2025.11.17·links.tldrnewsletter.com·12 min read·TLDR Design iOS 26.2 beta 2 brings the Liquid Glass design to the Measure app's Level tool, adding dynamic distortions and chromatic effects as part of Apple's ongoing visual overhaul.
Compelling storytelling requires prototyping simple concepts first, mastering digital-physical interactions where audiences become active participants, and building layered visuals with minimal latency using real-time tools like Notch and Disguise.
Animations can cause real harm to motion-sensitive users when they malfunction, triggering migraines, dizziness, or seizures.
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Webflow's App Gen is an AI-powered tool that enables users to build and deploy full-stack web applications through natural language prompts without writing code. The platform automatically integrates applications with existing design systems and CMS data while maintaining brand consistency across typography, colors, and components. Currently in beta, App Gen will eventually support authentication and databases, with all applications hosted on Webflow's enterprise infrastructure.
World Labs, founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has launched Marble, its first commercial world model. Marble transforms text prompts, photos, videos, or layouts into editable 3D environments available through freemium and paid tiers. Unlike competitors' on-the-fly generation, it creates persistent, downloadable 3D worlds with AI-native editing tools. Marble can be used for gaming, visual effects, and virtual reality applications. Li envisions it as the first step toward machines achieving spatial intelligence.
UEFA has revealed the new brand identity for EURO 2028, highlighting a modern yet understated design that celebrates unity and shared emotion. Centered around the Henri Delaunay Trophy, the logo features bold, blocky typography and vibrant colors inspired by the five host nations. The refreshed identity combines simplicity with contemporary flair, using motion design and playful energy to evoke the spirit of togetherness and excitement. Fans have warmly received the rebrand, praising its balance of elegance, color, and movement as a strong and uplifting visual update.
The design-to-development handoff has a critical impact on product quality, as poor handoffs can lead to errors, inconsistencies, and delays that negatively affect the user experience. Modern handoff tools, which utilize interactive prototypes, code-backed components, and design systems, reduce miscommunication and rework while accelerating development timelines. Research shows teams using these tools cut engineering time by 50%, reduce feedback loops from days to hours, and deliver products faster while maintaining design integrity.
Midjourney v7 can generate UI designs using a prompt template that emphasizes design-specific vocabulary, such as "interface" and "layout," over artistic terms. System keywords like "--style raw" can be used for sharper details, and "--ar 16:9" for aspect ratio control. v7 tends to produce pseudo-3D layouts while v6 creates flatter designs, and recommends anchoring prompts with established design systems such as Material Design 3 or Apple HIG for better structural results. The AI-generated visuals work best during early design exploration phases, allowing for experimentation with look and feel before creating high-fidelity versions in tools like Figma.
AI tools like Reweb, Figma Make, and Firefly are accelerating UI/UX design workflows by automating wireframing, generating layouts, analyzing user research, drafting microcopy, and creating visual assets. These tools allow designers to explore more creative directions quickly while maintaining focus on human-centered strategy, empathy, and inclusive design principles. Designers must develop prompt engineering skills, data literacy, and critical judgment to effectively steer AI outputs rather than accepting them unquestioningly, ensuring designs remain ethical and accessible.
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Thesys provides C1 API and React SDK to bring Generative UI to your applications. With C1, you can send a natural language prompt, and the API will generate and stream live, interactive UI components directly into your client application.
A meaningful shift occurred at Adobe MAX 2025 in Los Angeles. The event moved away from tool-centric hype toward emphasizing who creatives are and how the ecosystem supports their growth. The presentations balanced technological innovation with the creative process. They featured live demos of AI-powered storytelling tools and discussions about blending emotion and purpose to drive real-world impact. Adobe executives emphasized their commitment to human-centered development, customer trust, and aligning tools with how creatives actually work.
Psychology deeply shapes design by influencing how users perceive and emotionally respond to what they see, with color playing a central role. Warm tones like red create urgency and stimulate action, while cool tones like blue evoke calm and trust. Though biological reactions to color are largely universal, cultural meanings differ, so designers must consider context. Understanding color psychology allows designers to craft experiences that connect emotionally and guide user behavior more effectively.
Polish artist Gabriela Niko transitioned from design to illustration, embracing traditional mediums like alcohol and acrylic markers, graphite, and colored pencils. Her intuitive, joy-driven work captures imperfection and subtle emotion, blending fantasy and realism in character-focused pieces that invite personal interpretation.
Nearly half of creative professionals use AI daily, with Gen Z leading the adoption at over 50%.
Liverpool-based illustrator Luke McConkey has built a thriving career creating playful, cartoonish artwork inspired by 1990s animation and European comic artists, working with major brands such as Nike, Apple, and Costa Coffee.