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Mexican artist Gerardo Pontiérr recreates famous paintings and portraits using thousands of LEGO pieces that function like digital pixels, with each brick serving as a single color point that blends with others to form cohesive artwork when viewed from a distance.
Designer Craig Ward utilized the AI coding app Replit to create Composit, a color-led moodboarding tool designed to revive the creative serendipity he believes has been lost in modern design work.
Apple has been granted a patent for a next-generation Apple Pencil equipped with optical sensors that can track motion, orientation, and position in 3D space, allowing users to draw on any surface—or even in mid-air—without needing a touchscreen. The stylus may feature technologies like optical flow sensors, laser speckle tracking, internal trackballs, and other advanced sensors, signaling Apple's ongoing push toward spatial computing beyond traditional devices like the iPad.
Figma has released new updates to its grid beta feature, providing designers with enhanced precision and control capabilities. The improvements include the ability to delete rows and columns directly on the canvas, set minimum and maximum resize parameters for both grids and objects within them, and efficiently adjust multiple grids simultaneously using a faster grid picker tool. These updates streamline the grid editing workflow by offering more granular control over grid layouts and batch editing functionality.
Apple COO Jeff Williams will retire later this year, with Sabih Khan taking over the COO role this month. Until his retirement, Williams will continue overseeing the design team, Apple Watch, and Health initiatives. After Williams steps down, Apple's design team—which he took over after Jony Ive's departure—will report directly to CEO Tim Cook, marking a notable leadership shift in Apple's design structure.
Throughout history, our understanding of complex systems, such as the brain, has been shaped by contemporary technologies, from hydraulic mechanisms in Descartes' era to modern AI neural networks. Xerox's breakthrough paper metaphor made computers accessible by mapping unfamiliar digital concepts onto familiar office experiences, while smartphones later adopted physics-based interactions. Effective metaphors don't merely explain, they transform thinking by bridging the unfamiliar with intimate, human-scale experiences, although cultural assumptions about universality must be questioned.
The creative industry faces significant challenges, including economic uncertainty, AI disruption, and tighter budgets, leaving many professionals exhausted and questioning their futures. Despite these difficulties, the industry isn't dying but transforming, presenting opportunities for those willing to adapt by diversifying services, building stronger networks, and focusing on authentic human creativity that AI cannot replicate. Rather than abandoning their careers, creatives should view this rebuilding phase as an opportunity to create a more sustainable industry while also recognizing that human creativity remains essential and valuable.
In fast-paced product teams, designers who raise concerns are often mislabeled as negative, when in fact they're using “defensive pessimism”—a strategic, experience-driven effort to anticipate and prevent failure. While confidence and optimism dominate decision-making cultures, it's the cautious voices—often dismissed or ignored—that provide essential foresight to ensure ambitious plans actually succeed in the real world.
Tailorbrand's logo creator uses AI to create custom logos in just a few clicks.
Colormoods.co is a color generator that suggests pairs based on a stimulation scale. It uses intensity, contrast, hue, and vibration to match the desired mood or effect.
This guide explores onboarding microinteractions, small design elements that respond to user actions and create smoother first experiences. Effective microinteractions maintain simplicity through single-purpose interactions, provide immediate contextual feedback, and use motion carefully with durations of 200-300ms. Designing them properly involves identifying key onboarding moments, defining triggers and feedback, prototyping with tools like UXPin, and iterating based on user testing.
Notifications often create disruption and fatigue due to their high frequency, but they can be improved by designing for different severity levels and starting with slow, steady delivery rates. Facebook's research showed that reducing notification frequency initially decreased traffic but ultimately improved user satisfaction and long-term engagement. Effective notification UX encompasses setting up notification modes, integrating frequency options into onboarding, and enabling users to snooze or pause notifications as needed.
Dyson's design approach prioritizes technology and visual impact over usability, leading to products that are often uncomfortable, impractical, or unnecessarily complex. The brand's emphasis on innovation and the myth of the “star designer” support a culture of flashy, tech-driven consumption, which ultimately undermines more thoughtful, collaborative, and user-focused design.
Karolina Banasik combines her love for needlework and travels through xStitched Maps, her Etsy shop specializing in embroidered map patterns.
The iPad stands as the only worthwhile drawing tablet, while drawing displays offer both budget and premium options for artists who prefer desktop applications.
Apple has further reduced the transparency of its Liquid Glass design elements—like navigation bars and buttons—to improve readability following earlier complaints that the interface was too hard to see through. While the change may enhance usability, some users feel Apple is abandoning the original, more striking visual style, calling the update a step backward.
A new hands-on video reveals a sleek, ultra-thin dummy model of the upcoming iPhone 17 Air in black, showing a stark contrast to the bulkier iPhone 17 Pro Max. The iPhone 17 Air features a much thinner design, a single rear camera, and a full-width camera bar.
SpongeBob SquarePants is the latest pop culture icon to be featured on U.S. Postal Service Forever stamps, with four playful designs debuting on August 1 in Times Square. Designed using Nickelodeon artwork, the stamps celebrate the beloved cartoon's cultural impact, now officially recognized with government-issued postage.
UX design has become overly reliant on data and metrics, leading teams to prioritize A/B testing small changes over innovative, human-centered problem-solving. While analytics can show what users do, they fail to reveal why users behave in a certain way, missing crucial emotional and motivational context that qualitative research provides. Effective UX requires balancing data insights with creativity and intuition, using metrics as a starting point for deeper exploration rather than the final decision-maker.
Figma has evolved into a powerful tool that encourages engineering-centric workflows, with features like Auto Layout and Dev Mode promoting early structure and polished prototypes. While these tools offer efficiency, they risk limiting creative exploration by narrowing the design process too early, contributing to a homogenized digital design landscape.
Good system design prioritizes simplicity, reliability, and the use of well-established components, favoring boring, maintainable solutions over clever or complex ones. Key principles include minimizing stateful services, designing around hot paths, using background jobs and caching judiciously, and ensuring systems fail gracefully with strong observability and clear separation of responsibilities.
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Figma's Brand Studio team spent 10 months developing Config 2025's visual identity, which is centered on expressive animated glyphs crafted from basic shapes. Designed to span digital screens, physical activations, and merchandise for over 10,000 attendees, the identity centered on craft and creative expression, aligning with product launches like Figma Draw and Sites, which feature dynamic glyphs with inner and outer elements that respond to each other and transform entire compositions.
St John's College at Cambridge has undergone a major rebrand by SomeOne to better reflect its blend of historic legacy and modern relevance. With a new visual identity centered on the idea of being “the home of big ideas,” the rebrand includes a redrawn crest, a flexible monogram, a cinematic visual style, and a revamped website aimed primarily at prospective students, all designed to convey the college's vibrant, forward-looking spirit while honoring its prestigious past.
Moopi is a whimsical chair collection that draws inspiration from playground equipment to evoke childhood memories in adult spaces.
The floppy disk icon remains widely recognized as "save" with 83% of users understanding its meaning, despite most having never used actual floppy disks.
Framer offers students free access to its website-building platform, including hosting portfolios worth $180 per year. Students receive full access to Framer's Design Canvas, CMS, unlimited use of Wireframer and Workshop AI tools, plus thousands of free templates. The program requires enrollment verification and allows students to reapply every 11 months while maintaining their student status.
A new leaked image reveals a clearer look at the iPhone 17 Pro's redesigned Apple logo, which will be centered on the glass portion of the device rather than the phone's full body. The iPhone 17 Pro is also expected to feature a two-tone design with an aluminum frame and camera bump, while retaining a glass panel for MagSafe and wireless functions, marking a subtle but notable design shift.
H&M launched AI-generated fashion models created as virtual "twins" of real human models, allowing them to maintain creative control over their digital counterparts. The clothing retailer uses these AI models to showcase products across multiple outfits, reducing the need for human models in photo shoots. H&M emphasized that the technology supports, rather than replaces, their human-centered creative approach, though fewer human models will be needed to produce the same volume of fashion imagery.
Product Design Architecture is shaped by eight core user behaviors that determine how information is accessed, with match extraction being one of the most widespread behaviors requiring filtering, comparison, and listing mechanisms. Products like Airbnb and Shazam demonstrate how understanding these behaviors helps teams design coherent systems and spot opportunities for improvement. AI will likely transform search-heavy products the most significantly, while having a minimal impact on exploration-based products, as it excels at handling specific criteria but offers less value for vague, low-effort interactions.
Apple's new "Liquid Glass" design language has sparked confusion and criticism, with many finding it visually inconsistent, functionally unclear, and overly prescriptive, prioritizing aesthetic gimmicks like translucency and rounded elements over usability and clarity. Apple's increasingly homogenized and restrictive design system sacrifices individuality, legibility, and developer freedom in favor of a bland, corporate uniformity that diminishes both app identity and user experience.
Randy Hunt, head of design at Notion, emphasizes the importance of culture, communication, and curiosity in both design leadership and team dynamics, highlighting how rituals like biweekly "Design Lightning" sessions foster collaboration among highly capable, entrepreneurial designers. He sees AI not as a threat but a design opportunity, stressing thoughtful, user-centered integration over trend-chasing, and advocates for preparing future designers with flexibility, entrepreneurial spirit, and a deep understanding of craft, business, and marketing.
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A product designer's LLM-assisted workflow has evolved since December 2024, with the role shifting toward code reviews and tool orchestration rather than traditional design work. The current toolkit includes Subframe, UX Pilot, Figma with Dev Mode MCP server, Cursor for development, and Claude/Gemini for architecture and debugging. The key breakthrough was providing rich context to tools like Cursor, transforming prototyping from weeks-long design cycles into hours-long code iterations that put users directly into real experiences.
America250 is a nonpartisan initiative organizing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, aiming to create the most inclusive commemoration in U.S. history. Its visual identity features a flowing red, white, and blue ribbon forming the number 250, symbolizing unity and celebration, and is supported by the “America's Invitation” campaign, inviting citizens to share personal expressions of what America means to them.
Tripadvisor's rebrand, led by creative studio Koto, centers on authenticity and community, emphasizing real stories, photos, and voices from travelers to reflect its evolution from a review site to a full-scale travel platform. With a refreshed visual identity—including a dynamic owl mascot, warmer color palette, and user-generated imagery—the brand leans into its human roots, rejecting generic design trends in favor of a more personal, relatable, and experience-driven approach.
Google Arts & Culture Lab launched Moving Archives, partnering with the Harley-Davidson Museum to animate still archival photographs using Veo AI technology.
Comic artist Lee Carter, who has contributed to 2000 AD for 18 years and recently worked on Jupiter's Legacy, operates from a cluttered home studio filled with action figures, art supplies, and personal mementos.
Ferrari lost a trademark dispute with Malaysian energy drink brand Wee Power over the use of horse imagery in its logos. The High Court ruled that Wee Power's design, which features two red horses facing each other with a 'W' background, didn't infringe Ferrari's prancing horse trademark. Ferrari was ordered to pay legal costs but has filed an appeal at the KL High Court.
Leaked hands-on images of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 suggest a noticeably slimmer and more refined design, with a chassis around 4.5mm thick when open, making it sleeker than its predecessor and more competitive with rival foldables. The camera array has also been redesigned. It now features slim silver rings, instead of the bulky black ones on the Z Fold 6, and has a bold new “Blue Shadow” color. An EU label leak indicates the device will retain similar battery life. Full details are expected at Samsung's Unpacked event on July 9th.
Lovable, a fast-growing Swedish AI startup focused on building web apps from text prompts, is reportedly raising over $150 million at a near $2 billion valuation, just months after a $15 million pre-Series A round. The company, founded in 2023, has quickly scaled to $50 million in annual recurring revenue within six months of launching its product, drawing comparisons to competitors like Replit and Bolt. Lovable recently launched a beta AI agent for automated code editing and debugging, adopting a usage-based pricing model aligned with industry trends and investor expectations.
Traditional marketing and storytelling have lost their effectiveness as power has shifted from brands to consumers through the rise of short-form video and creator culture. "Trustnomics" is a four-step framework where trust becomes the essential currency for brand growth in an era of indistinguishable real and AI content. This approach emphasizes identifying key product moments, treating products as content, building repeatable systems over scalable campaigns, and operating through a trust-focused flywheel rather than traditional marketing funnels.
Data tables in enterprise applications require careful design to help users scan, understand, and manipulate structured information effectively. Key design practices include proper content alignment (left for text, right for numbers, and center for icons), clear visual contrast with bold headers and subtle row separators, and essential functionality such as sorting, filtering, and pagination for large datasets. Advanced features, including column resizing, show/hide options, drag-and-drop reordering, hover states, bulk actions, horizontal scrolling, proper link styling, and inline editing with error handling, enhance usability and give users control over their data viewing experience.
The ongoing debate over design titles, reignited by Shopify's decision to drop specialist roles, reflects a deeper issue: the design community's tendency to create false dichotomies that fragment rather than advance the discipline. In an era shaped by AI, the future of design depends not on defending labels, but on embracing design as an integrative, cross-disciplinary practice rooted in synthesis, adaptability, and human-centered problem solving.
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Decofy is an AI-powered home design platform that helps you virtually decorate your space. It takes a photo of your room and instantly generates a professionally designed look with real furniture and decor.
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