Token Fatigue: When Abstraction Eats Itself
In theory, design tokens were supposed to save us. They were the missing link between design and code, a neat…
Product Thinking for UI Designers: Decisions Beyond the Pixels
For a long time, the industry treated design like a relay race. The Product Manager (PM) would run the first…
AI as Art Director: Can Machines Develop Taste?
Let’s get this out of the way: AI doesn’t have taste. It has statistics. It knows what’s popular, what’s trending,…
Pixel Nostalgia: Why We Miss the 90s Web (Even If It Was Ugly)
It’s easy to laugh at the 90s web now — the blinking GIFs, Comic Sans banners, table layouts held together…
How “Liquid Design” Broke the iPhone and Forced Apple’s Great Reset
The launch of iOS 26 was heralded as a “Spatial Awakening.” Apple’s design team, led by the high-concept vision of Alan Dye,…
Exciting New Tools for Designers, February 2026
There are so many new – and good – tools for designers out there right now. From tiny bits of…
Why Designers Secretly Love Constraints (Even When We Complain About Them)
We like to pretend that creativity thrives in total freedom — blank canvas, infinite possibilities, pure artistic autonomy. But if…
Stop Asking ‘Is This on Brand?’ — It’s Killing Your Creativity
For a phrase that sounds harmless, “Is this on brand?” might be the quietest creativity killer in modern design. It’s the meeting-room…
Vertical vs. Horizontal Cards: The UX Tradeoffs That Shape Modern Interfaces
Cards are one of the most enduring UI patterns in digital design. They promise modularity, clarity, and adaptability—containers that can…
Density vs. Clarity: The Core Tension in Modern UI Design
Every generation of designers seems to rediscover the same paradox: the more information we can display, the less anyone can…
What Figma Got Wrong About Design Systems
When Figma first revolutionized collaborative design, it promised something that sounded irresistible: true consistency at scale. Design systems became the new…
Why Designers Are the New Bureaucrats
There was a time when design meant making something—actually making something. You’d open Photoshop (or, if you’re older, Illustrator 9), throw…
Exciting New Tools for Designers, January 2026
New year … and so many new tools to be happy about. This month’s list is teeming with fun options…
Your Brand Just Evolved: The Rise of AI-Generated Identities
For most of design history, a brand has been a fixed thing — a logo, a color palette, a tagline,…
7 Real Predictions for Web Design in 2026
Every December, design Twitter fills with lists of “hot trends” that sound like buzzwords generated by an algorithm: “AI-native ecosystems,”…
The Rise of the Invisible Designer
Somewhere between the Dribbble boom and the personal-brand gold rush, design became performance art. We stopped making and started marketing. The loudest designers…
Exciting New Tools for Designers, December 2025
As you can see from our roundup of new tools for designers this month, almost everything is based in artificial…
What is UI Design?
If you’ve ever used an app that was so beautiful and intuitive it just felt right, you’ve experienced the magic of…