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The new Metroid Prime 1-3 Visual Retrospective art book features 210 pages of concept art along with revealing commentary from series producer Kensuke Tanabe on Nintendo and Retro Studios' collaboration.
Ireland has made its basic income scheme for artists permanent, paying 2,000 creators €325 weekly (roughly $1,600/£1,200 monthly) and expanding it to 4,000 participants after an independent evaluation showed positive results.
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Figma has enhanced its Buzz tool with three major updates: customizable, design system–based templates for adaptable marketing assets; plugin support for integrations with tools like Brandfolder, Lokalise, and LottieFiles; and built-in video trimming. These features aim to streamline collaboration between designers and marketers, keeping content creation efficient and on-brand.
OpenAI acquired Software Applications Incorporated, the startup that created Sky, an AI interface that lets Mac users interact with their computers through natural language for tasks like writing, coding, and planning. The 12-member team will join OpenAI. Financial terms have not been disclosed. This marks OpenAI's latest acquisition following previous purchases of Statsig for $1.1 billion and Jony Ive's io for over $6 billion.
Adobe's Project Indigo app has finally added support for the iPhone 17 series after weeks of incompatibility due to the phones' new square-format front-facing camera sensor. To speed up release, Adobe temporarily disabled access to the selfie camera and is only supporting rear-camera functionality for now. A full fix, including front-camera support, is expected soon.
Brand designers are increasingly making their own typefaces to gain creative control, ensure distinctiveness, and avoid expensive licensing fees. With tools like Glyphs making font creation more accessible, studios such as Koto, &Walsh, and Order are integrating type design directly into branding work. However, this surge has also led to many underdeveloped or derivative fonts, as tight timelines and limited mentorship reduce craftsmanship. While the trend democratizes access and encourages diversity in type design, it also threatens the sustainability of the professional type industry.
Speakers shared design trends they'd like to see go at Frontify's Paradigms conference. James Greenfield criticized brands chasing viral social content over real experience, Bianca Berning debunked Comic Sans as a universal dyslexic-friendly font, Nkenna Amadi warned against blindly copying neon trends, Asmah Mansur-Williams advocated for more expressive typefaces, and Jonas Hegi suggested studying disliked trends for inspiration.
AI should be treated like an enthusiastic intern with no real-world experience, requiring clear instructions, constant supervision, and thorough verification of outputs. Real client projects demonstrate AI's practical applications across user research, design, development, and content creation, including online research, interview analysis, prototyping, and copywriting. While AI increases productivity by 25-33 percent, it cannot replace human creativity, strategic thinking, or understanding of user experience fundamentals.
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OpenAI's vision for ChatGPT resembles Tony Stark's JARVIS — a conversational interface where users complete tasks without switching apps. Evolving from plugins to the new Apps SDK, ChatGPT now embeds interactive tools directly in chat through cards, buttons, and widgets. For designers, this means crafting simple, intuitive, context-aware interactions rather than screens, focusing on clarity, minimal steps, and seamless integration across apps.
Error handling is a crucial but often overlooked part of UX that can either erode or build user trust. Good design treats errors as opportunities for empathy, guiding users clearly on what went wrong, why, and how to fix it. By distinguishing between slips (right intention, wrong action) and mistakes (wrong intention), designers can create forgiving, informative interfaces that prevent frustration. Errors should appear in context, near their source, and never block progress. Whether they stem from the user, environment, or system, the goal is always calm, supportive recovery that keeps users confident and in control.
Design fans and movie enthusiasts have widely praised the poster as a timeless, wall-worthy masterpiece that stands out amid recent AI-generated and poorly edited film posters.
Refusing to use generative AI is a deliberate philosophical choice rooted in schismogenesis—forming identity through opposition to an out-group.
Bubble AI Agent combines conversational AI coding with visual drag-and-drop editing to build production-grade applications, addressing security and quality concerns that limit AI coding tool adoption. The platform allows users to switch between natural language prompts and visual editing with full control, targeting the 72% of surveyed users worried about security vulnerabilities in AI-generated code. To promote the launch, Bubble announced a $25,000 hackathon with Anthropic and revealed upcoming features, including an AI-enhanced Property Editor and mobile in-app purchase support.
Apple's iOS 26.1 beta 4 adds customization options for the Liquid Glass interface, addressing complaints about its translucency. Users can now choose between Clear and Tinted modes, making text and notifications easier to read—an improvement driven by feedback from beta testers and accessibility advocates.
Microsoft is adding a new generative AI feature called Restyle to Paint in Windows 11, allowing users to transform images into different art styles, such as Pop Art. Currently available to Windows Insiders, Restyle integrates into the Copilot menu. It has drawn criticism from users tired of AI being added across Windows, as it requires a Microsoft account and is initially limited to Copilot+ PCs.
Claude excels at code-adjacent design tasks, making it valuable for UI designers in three key areas. It can transform high-fidelity mockups into HTML prototypes by processing screenshots, though the preview may need browser verification for accuracy. It also streamlines design system work by converting Figma component specs into React components and transforming style guides into CSS variables or Tailwind configs. Claude can generate micro-interactions and animations, including Framer Motion snippets for effects like button hover states and transitions.
A recent UC San Diego paper analyzed 90 AI coding assistants and identified 10 design dimensions across four categories: user interface, system inputs, capabilities, and outputs. The research traces three evolutionary eras—autocomplete (2021-2022), chat (2023-2024), and agents (2024-2025)—and revealed that industry products converge on speed and polish while academic prototypes explore novel interaction designs like multimodal inputs and explainability features. The paper maps these design dimensions to six user personas. It emphasizes that building these tools involves fundamental trade-offs between control versus convenience, simplicity versus capability, and access versus power.
The focus around AI has shifted from fearing its impact to fearing missing out on its benefits. This drive for convenience and efficiency risks eroding human judgment, creativity, and the value of effort, especially among younger generations who rely on AI to bypass learning through struggle. As reliance grows, cultural standards decline, with “good enough” work replacing true depth. While AI mirrors our values, prioritizing speed over meaning could hollow out what makes us human.
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Value-based pricing becomes simpler when ROI is calculated after project completion rather than predicted. The approach leverages proven results from previous projects—such as clients achieving $100K-$300K revenue increases from brand identity work—to demonstrate value to new prospects. This method replaces uncertain predictions with concrete past performance, making it easier to justify higher prices and convince clients that similar results are achievable for them.
Games excel at creating flow states through challenge-skill balance, clear goals, and immediate feedback, while productivity tools typically fail to engage users despite decades of research on flow psychology. Current task managers remain "state-blind," unable to recognize user context or adapt to energy levels, unlike games that constantly track and respond to player states. By applying game design principles, productivity apps can help users maintain flow states, making work genuinely engaging rather than feeling like drudgery.
Backpropagation in machine learning closely parallels design thinking, as both rely on iterative improvement through feedback loops. Each involves making an initial assumption, testing outcomes, identifying and analyzing errors, refining the approach, and repeating the process. Concepts such as bias, underfitting, and overfitting translate naturally to design: bias reflects designer assumptions, underfitting represents overly generic solutions, and overfitting denotes designs too specific to controlled conditions. Both disciplines emphasize gradual, continuous refinement — learning from feedback to steadily improve outcomes.
Holiday cards serve as an underrated yet powerful networking tool for designers.
Apple changed the Always On Display in iOS 26 so that Lock Screen wallpapers are now blurred by default instead of dimmed.
Freelance illustrators in 2025 are facing a major downturn, with shrinking budgets, fewer clients, and widespread ghosting.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, a web browser that integrates ChatGPT directly into the experience, combining search, AI, and personal context. Key features include memory to recall past interactions and website context, and agent mode to perform tasks like placing orders or preparing reports without leaving the page. It is now available on macOS, with other platforms coming soon.
Apple is reportedly cutting iPhone Air production to near end-of-production levels due to weak demand, while other models like the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro are exceeding expectations. Analyst data suggests that the iPhone Air is significantly less popular than anticipated. Overall iPhone production remains in line with forecasts.
Designers should shift from using AI as a creative tool to designing products specifically for AI agents to interact with. Traditional design elements will become obsolete as AI agents act as proxies between humans and digital services, requiring designers to understand reasoning engines and create modular, voice-activated systems. Design leaders must reimagine their entire practice around synthetic users, moving away from conventional metrics and interfaces toward trust-based, contextual experiences that accommodate AI's proactive, non-linear decision-making processes.
The "illusion of alignment" occurs when teams use identical language but imagine completely different solutions, leading to costly miscommunication that only surfaces when designers finally present their work. Designers can prevent this breakdown by sketching rough visual interpretations early and often, which forces misaligned assumptions to surface during strategy sessions, kickoffs, and reviews, thereby avoiding wasted time and strained relationships. Rather than waiting for a "seat at the table," designers should leverage their natural visual thinking to create shared understanding through simple drawings.
In the age of AI, the debate between generalist and specialist designers misses the point: the most valuable designers are “generalized specialists” who combine broad skills with deep domain expertise. Generalists spot patterns and opportunities across fields, while specialists optimize within a domain. Strategically switching between these modes and applying AI thoughtfully allows designers to tackle diverse challenges and remain indispensable in smaller, stretched teams.
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Designers often struggle to defend their work when stakeholders ask tough questions, typically due to failing to adapt design processes to specific projects, lacking data-driven evidence, avoiding regular feedback, or using jargon instead of business language. The solution involves documenting decisions throughout the process, gathering relevant evidence, exposing work to frequent feedback, and connecting design choices to business metrics and KPIs. Success requires emotional detachment from one's work, strategic adaptation of design methods rather than rigid process adherence, and communicating in terms that resonate with the audience's priorities.
Great design leaders systematically deploy curiosity as a strategic tool by setting up brief, targeted conversations with stakeholders across the organization to gather specific insights that help reframe and position their work effectively. Personalized questions tailored to different roles reveal crucial context, like how departments' bonuses tie to specific outcomes. This structured method of strategic curiosity, rather than unorganized relationship-building or complaining, enables designers to understand business constraints, justify resource needs, and ultimately advance both their projects and careers.
Herman Miller partnered with Order to refresh its 25-year-old brand identity, restoring the archival boldness and expressiveness while updating typography, color, and application for modern use. Key elements like the Irving Harper “M” were preserved but given flexibility, and the collaboration's focus on trust and clear communication led to a widely praised, modernized brand system that honors the company's legacy.
Artists and designers can thrive amid AI-generated content by weaponizing their humanity—sharing personal stories, embracing imperfections like visible brushstrokes, and creating physical artifacts that offer tangible, sensory experiences.
Cadbury's latest Heroes campaign achieved System1's highest-ever score for outdoor advertising based on emotional response testing.
A new study using lasers and mice has shed light on how the Kanizsa square illusion tricks the brain.
The Adobe AI Foundry is a service that enables enterprises to build custom generative AI models trained on their own branding and intellectual property to create text, images, video, and 3D content. The models are built on Adobe's Firefly family, which uses only licensed training data and is priced based on usage rather than per seat. The service helps brands scale personalized advertising campaigns across different seasons, languages, and formats while keeping humans at the center of creativity.
Google's Play Store is implementing Material 3 Expressive design, introducing bolder colors, fluid animations, and adaptive layouts to create more intuitive and engaging app discovery experiences. The redesign extends across Android's ecosystem, including the Phone app and Wear OS, with phased rollouts planned alongside future Pixel launches to gather user feedback. This strategic shift aims to enhance user retention and discoverability in a competitive marketplace, responding to rivals like Samsung's One UI 7 while offering developers new personalization tools.