A few weeks ago I published a deep dive into the multi-faceted design problems AI is exposing. There are points of leverage up and down the stack, each affecting the end user experience and contributing value. It’s an incredible time to be a designer.

I've gone back and forth on this. My default position is that in order to teach something "taste" from an aesthetics perspective you have to reduce it to such a point that it loses its quality. But there are concepts, interactive patterns especially, that felt novel and interesting when they first emerged and continue to persist as "tasteful" despite mass adoption - pull to refresh for one, ui affordances and haptics like a minor scale down when clicking a button, using a 10% opacity box shadow instead of a border. Why is it that every 20th designer has a portfolio derivative of @benjitaylor's personal site but the aesthetic doesn't feel tired yet, even if the reference is obvious? I think it's because the nice-ish aesthetics we've seen the models find appear to be arbitrary lucky guesses that they were trained to reproduce, instead of intentional decisions derived from the contextual source. There's a McMansion-feel to it, where you can tell the underlying concept is thoughtful but a cornice or narrow column stuck on the front porch of a brick house in the suburbs of St Louis just doesn't make sense no matter how tasteful the pattern itself is. My bet is on contextual relevance being the thing that ultimately matters, which is always the case with design. Who is my audience, what other references do they hold for this type of experience, how much is novelty rewarded, etc. Speaks to the need for us to continue investing in maturing the classification language/grammar of design.

Slow at first and then all at once

👋 If you ARE one of the few people thinking about the language and grammar of software interfaces (or design and brand systems, or expressive design) then I would love to tell you about the work we are doing on the model design team at Figma to augment creative workflows!

Focusing on whether we should work in pixels or code diminishes the actual product of design, which is how it is experienced by others. Cycle through whichever materials and tools best serve your ability to deliver something great. It's a process. This is a subtweet of an article that hit my feed today, which is comparing designers working in code to architects understanding the properties of marble. Sure, ok, designers need to understand the constraints and the feel of the material their work will be delivered through. That checks. But also, Architects think about how the sun will cast shadows across the building and within the rooms of its occupants. They think about how the wind will feel in the lobby when someone opens the front door. Or on the 50th floor. They think about the 80 year old and the 8 year old, and how the building will age. And how the building creates pockets for quiet reflection and community connection. How the smell of someone's meal will waft. They think about what it will look like bustling with visitors in June, and surrounded by snowdrifts in January. And how it will feel to exit and enter throughout the year by the mom carrying groceries, the young man in a wheelchair, the boundlessly energetic 17 year old, and the retiree. And how sound travels - what should stay private and what should be shared. And the touch of a door that has been heated by the August sun… A building is so much more than its foundation. It's material is ultimately the lives lived within it. The same is true for digital architecture (which is only getting weirder btw as software goes headless and digital products are increasingly ambient and multi-modal/adaptive). Diverge, converge, explore, question, write code, build journeys, touch artboards, iterate, refine All of these, and the tools where you perform them are valid in pursuit of the end goal. Work with your full palette.

Having AI write your Slacks and docs is like farting in an elevator. We all can smell it, we know who it's coming from, and we're too polite to say anything. But we'll laugh about it later. If you think you're getting away with it, you're not.

My timeline every 4 days

I'm keen to explore this from an observability perspective. From a human-centered lens, the saving grace of this explosion in intelligence comes from humans being able to understand and harness it. If reasoning can be made legible, superintellince may remain interpretable

Sense and Sensibility and You Can See Everything dropping together on the same weekend is my Barbenheimer

We're in the middle of a "discovering the double helix" type moment for understanding intelligence. This is incredibly cool

The kids are getting a @boardisfun for Christmas. If you have one, which are the best games you would recommend for an 11 and 13 year old?

I've got a type I guess. But any of these three are a go-to in the Campbell house

Duck broke his nose Bill issue

Give the Nobel prize to the person who invented putting showers in airport lounges

On a meta level I've been noticing a cool pattern when I work with Agent on the canvas, where I'm both in flow state but also more mindful in my work. There's a positive forcing function from having to articulate what I'm trying to achieve, but then the agent sweeps the repetitive stuff out of the way and I can just drive. I've felt this when coding as I've gotten better at multi-session management, and a few times I've even gotten close to that moment of "orchestrating coding agents" that my developer friends talk about. The more I work with Agent, blending context on the canvas and across tools with my own judgement, the more I feel how we really have the opportunity to augment our process and spend less time on the brunt work that, honestly, too often diminishes how people value our craft. I can pair with a PM or engineer and instead of my work looking like pixel pushing and interpreting *their* judgement through *my* hands, I can collaborate with them in a shared state to explore different ideas and let Agent be the pixel pusher. Lots going in continuing to improve our harness, developing our evals framework around the crux moments in the user journey, and expanding our infrastructure. It's incredibly engaging and fun work. (Also please drop me a note if you want to learn more! We are hiring across the team)

“Ideas will be the new currency” is my takeaway from this read (it's great btw)

Pangram integration with google docs, when?