Mykola here. March got political.

This month’s stories connect through one thread: trust turned into a product decision. An AI company said no to the Pentagon and became the most downloaded app in America. 45,000 tech workers lost their jobs to a forecast. Figma opened the canvas to agents. And 1.5 million users proved they’ll choose tools based on values, not just features.

The Company That Said No Became the Number One App

Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Pentagon in July 2025 and was the first AI lab to deploy on the agency's classified networks. Negotiations broke down when the Pentagon wanted Claude on its GenAI.mil platform without restrictions. CEO Dario Amodei drew two red lines: no mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, and no autonomous weapons fire. On February 27, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk," blocking federal agencies and military contractors from using Claude. That label is reserved for Chinese state-affiliated firms. The next day, OpenAI signed a deal to provide AI services on those same classified networks.

The public responded within hours. The #QuitGPT petition gathered 1.5 million supporters. ChatGPT uninstalls surged 295% overnight. On March 3, Sam Altman told CNBC: "We were trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it looked opportunistic and sloppy." He amended the contract.

Claude hit number one on the U.S. App Store on Saturday, March 1. Daily signups broke all-time records for a week straight; paid subscribers more than doubled since January.

On March 9, Anthropic filed two federal lawsuits against the Trump administration. Dozens of employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, including Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, signed a public brief supporting their competitor. Microsoft filed its own supporting brief. Pentagon CTO Emil Michael responded on March 12: Anthropic would "pollute" the defense supply chain. An AI accountability march was organized for March 21 in San Francisco.

I want to be careful here. MIT Technology Review makes a credible case that Altman's amended contract doesn't prevent the surveillance use cases that triggered the backlash. Court filings from March 20 revealed the Pentagon told Anthropic the two sides were "nearly aligned," one week after Trump declared the relationship over. There are layers to this that a petition can't capture.

And yet: 1.5 million people made a product decision based on values. They didn't need a manifesto. One announcement showed them what the product stood for, and they acted.

I use Claude daily. I’ve built my workflows around it. I’m not American, and I don’t follow US defense politics closely. But I understand risk. Anthropic walked away from a Pentagon contract, got blacklisted, and sued the federal government. That costs real money and real relationships. Most companies would’ve quietly signed and moved on.

It doesn’t make Claude a better model. But it makes me trust the people building it more. I’m more willing to put client work through it, more willing to recommend it, more willing to build long-term workflows on top of it. That’s what trust as a product feature actually looks like in practice.

While all of this played out, Anthropic kept shipping. On March 20, Claude Code Channels launched with Telegram and Discord integration. You can message Claude Code from your phone and get results back. It’s Anthropic’s direct counter to OpenClaw. On March 23, Claude Cowork gained computer use: Claude can now control your Mac, open apps, navigate browsers, fill spreadsheets. Dispatch lets you assign tasks from your iPhone, walk away, and come back to finished work. The company that said no to the Pentagon is also the one whose AI can now operate your computer while you sleep.

Build systems where the values are visible from the first interaction. "AI ethics transparency" is now a concrete UI discipline: communicating what the model will and won't do, before the user finds out in a crisis. The patterns for this don't exist yet.

Fired by a Forecast

Q1 2026: 45,000 tech layoffs globally, over 30,000 in the U.S. Amazon leads with 16,000 cuts. Meta trimmed 1,500 from Reality Labs. Block fired 4,000 people on March 1. That’s 40% of the company. Jack Dorsey built an internal AI agent called Goose over 18 months and decided the company can run with 6,000 instead of 10,000. Stock surged 20%. Atlassian followed on March 11, cutting 1,600 to “self-fund” its AI push, with cloud revenue up 26% and its Rovo AI assistant at 5 million monthly users. They were growing when they made the cuts.

Harvard Business Review published a study by Davenport and Srinivasan, surveying 1,000+ executives. Companies are reducing headcount in anticipation of AI's future impact, even though AI hasn't proven it can do those jobs. The layoffs are real. The AI replacement is speculative. CEOs at Ford, Amazon, Salesforce, and JP Morgan Chase have declared white-collar jobs will "soon disappear," and they're acting on that belief before the technology delivers proof.

Jason Lemkin at SaaStr coined the phrase "invisible unemployment": companies don't fire people for AI. They don't backfill when people leave. 66% of CEOs surveyed plan to freeze team size or reduce headcount in 2026. Oxford Economics calls these AI layoffs "convenient corporate fiction."

Both things are true at once. Companies are using AI as cover for restructuring they'd want to do anyway. And AI is making some roles redundant. Those two facts don't contradict each other. They make the math harder to read.

Lenny Rachitsky’s State of the Product Job Market report tells the design-specific story. Roles crashed from nearly 10,000 in early 2023 to a low of 4,341. They’ve since climbed back 32% to about 5,716. PM and engineering both bounced back after ChatGPT’s initial shock. Design is recovering, but it’s the slowest discipline to come back. The ratio of open PM roles to designer roles flipped in mid-2023 and keeps widening (PMs now at 1.27x). Lenny’s theory: AI lets engineers move so fast there’s less opportunity and less desire to involve the traditional design process.

NN/g’s State of UX 2026 describes who survives the compression: “adaptable generalists who treat UX as strategic problem solving, rather than deliverable production.” Junior designer roles are vanishing. Entry-level UX positions are disappearing while senior roles demand breadth across research, strategy, and AI interaction design.

You either work with AI tools or compete for a shrinking pool.

March 11: Three Companies, Three Futures

On March 11, 2026, three companies shipped three different visions of the same AI moment. Same day.

Perplexity announced "Everything is Computer.". It integrates with Gmail, Outlook, GitHub, Linear, Slack, Notion, Snowflake, Databricks, Salesforce. Perplexity's internal study of 16,000+ queries claims $1.6 million in labor costs saved, 3.25 years of equivalent work, in 4 weeks. (I'll note: those are self-reported figures. The methodology for converting queries to "years of work" isn't transparent. Treat as a marketing claim until someone else verifies it.)

OpenAI published new agentic primitives in its Responses API, giving developers tools to build autonomous agent workflows.

Anthropic launched The Anthropic Institute, consolidating its Frontier Red Team, Societal Impacts, and Economic Research teams under one roof. Co-founder Jack Clark leads as Head of Public Benefit. They hired Matt Botvinick from Google DeepMind and Yale Law School to work on AI and rule-of-law.

Perplexity shipped the agent. OpenAI shipped the tools. Anthropic shipped the question of whether either is safe.

Perplexity's CEO Aravind Srinivas put it this way: "When you have highly accurate AI search, an orchestration harness of 20 frontier models, and agentic internet access, AI is the computer." That's a product thesis, and the rest of the industry is heading the same direction. An always-on computer that acts for you while you're asleep.

The shift is from designing interactions to designing trust signals, audit trails, and "what happened while you were away" dashboards. Ambient computing requires ambient design. Most teams haven't started building it. The interface for a computer that acts on your behalf while you're gone is a new design brief, and the patterns for it are unwritten.

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Figma vs. The Community That Made It the Standard

On March 11, Figma launched its AI credits monetization model. On March 18, hard enforcement of monthly seat credit limits began. Full seat users on Professional plans get 3,000 AI credits per month. Organization and Enterprise plans can now enable pay-as-you-go. Professional plan support for that? Delayed to May 2026.

Morgan Stanley analyst Elizabeth Porter calls Figma "the industry standard." Design community forums tell a different story. Users report Dev Mode seat costs could increase 10x. FIG stock is at $21.78 as of March 24, down 85% from its post-IPO peak of $142.92 on August 1, 2025, and below its $33 IPO price.

Figma also acquired Payload CMS to accelerate its content management roadmap. Figma Sites now supports collections, CMS pages, and CMS lists, though it still lacks nested URL structures, a public API, and content staging.

Then, on March 24: Figma opened the canvas to agents. The new use_figma MCP tool gives Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI, Augment, Factory, Firebender, and Warp direct write access to Figma files. Agents can create and modify frames, components, variables, and auto layout, all wired to your existing design system. Figma also shipped “Skills,” markdown files that teach agents your team’s conventions and sequencing. Nine example skills launched on day one, including ones from practitioners at Uber and OpenAI. Free during the beta, usage-based pricing later.

This is a sharp reversal. On March 6, Figma’s MCP server was read-oriented. On March 24, it’s read-write. The speed matters. Paper launched its desktop app and MCP server on March 5 with 24 bidirectional tools and a code-native HTML/CSS canvas. Figma took 18 days to match on write access. Paper’s advantage is still architectural. Everything renders as real flexbox, real CSS properties, no conversion layer. Its MCP was write-capable from day one. Figma’s advantage is the installed base and the design system graph that millions of teams already maintain there. And Framer cut Figma-to-web production time by 70% via its 2026 Import Engine. All three are positioning as the agent-era design layer.

Figma's State of the Designer 2026 report says 91% of designers say AI improves their designs, and 89% are working faster. Frustration is concentrated in graphic design and illustration, where daily AI use sits at 40% compared to 65% for web developers.

I covered Figma’s valuation correction in January and its bet on taste in February. I wrote about Paper back in September when it opened signups. The pitch then was closing the gap between what designers create and what developers build. The pitch now is bigger: a design canvas that’s natively agent-ready, where your AI tools read, modify, and push changes back into the canvas directly. Figma just made the same bet, and it did it in 18 days. The race now is about which agent-first architecture wins.

Your tool choice is a strategic decision. Try both. Paper’s code-native canvas eliminates the design-to-code handoff entirely. Figma’s canvas write now lets agents build with your existing design system as source of truth. Framer’s Figma import makes switching cheaper than it was six months ago. The window to evaluate is open right now. Pricing structures will harden by summer.

Handpicked Highlights

👉 Scott Barker: How to Prepare for the Next Decade. Barker calls the 2020s “the Acceleration Decade” and offers ten ways to move through it with some peace and equanimity. Over 200,000 reads. Useful framing for anyone whose job description has changed three times since 2023.

👉 Lenny Rachitsky × Jenny Wen: The Design Process Is Dead. Jenny Wen is head of design at Claude and previously led FigJam and Slides at Figma. She argues the classic discovery-mock-iterate cycle is obsolete. Designers should act like internal VCs, spotting prototypes with energy around them that nobody can articulate yet and translating them into products. She covers her AI tool stack, the three archetypes she’s hiring for, and why chatbot interfaces may be more durable than most people expect. 77 minutes, worth the full listen.

👉 Soleio’s Design Hiring Playbook, packaged as an AI agent skill. An installable Claude Code skill that operationalizes Soleio’s design talent framework. Two modes: one for founders sourcing designers, one for designers positioning themselves. The insight: top design talent never responds to job postings. The skill helps both sides close that gap.

👉 Fin.ai: We Gave Claude Code to Everyone at Intercom. Not Just Engineers. Intercom rolled out Claude Code company-wide, equipped with internal skills and integrations. The finding: when non-technical people get the same tool engineers use, enhanced with company-specific intelligence, they don’t just use it. They build with it. Intercom calls this a structural change in how organizations work, not a productivity story.

👉 Paper Snapshot: capture production UI, paste it into Paper as editable layers. Chrome extension that grabs real HTML/CSS from any live page and drops it into Paper’s canvas. No screenshots, no conversion. Grab something from prod, paste it in, let Claude spin up six variations. The design-to-code gap works in reverse now.

👉 Linear: A Calmer Interface for a Product in Motion. Charlie Aufmann and Maxime Heckel walk through Linear’s latest UI refresh. The core moves: dim the sidebar so it stops competing with your content, compact the tabs, simplify the icons, soften the borders. A two-person team shipped it using coding agents and internal tooling (a dev toolbar with feature flag toggles, a custom theme editor that exports token values as JSON). They see it as preparing the interface for agentic workflows. Worth studying for the process as much as the result.

👉 Karl Koch: 10 Principles for Fluid UI. The best design engineering article I’ve read this month. Physics-based motion over time-based easing. Every animation must be interruptible. Direct manipulation over indirect control. Velocity preservation across gesture boundaries. Each principle has an interactive demo you can play with on the page. Published in February, updated March 23. Bookmark this one.

👉 Agentation: visual feedback for AI coding agents. Click any element in the browser, write your feedback, and Agentation generates structured Markdown with CSS selectors, source file paths, React component tree, and computed styles. Your agent knows exactly which element you mean and where to find it. MCP integration lets agents read annotations in real time and respond back. Free for internal use. By Benji Taylor, Dennis Jin, and Alex Vanderzon. v3.0.1.

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Three Moves You Can Make This Week

1. Audit what your AI product refuses to do, and make that visible in the first interaction. The QuitGPT movement proved that 1.5 million users form product opinions based on values. If your product uses AI, its limits and refusals should be accessible from the first screen. Build a prototype of an "AI ethics card" that communicates what the model will and won't do.

2. Prototype a “what happened while you were away” dashboard for any agentic tool you’re working on. Perplexity’s always-on computer, Cursor’s background agents, and Claude’s new computer use all point to the same pattern: AI acts while you’re away. The interface for reviewing those actions is the defining design problem for agentic tools in 2026. Start sketching it now.

3. Test agent-driven design this week. Both Figma and Paper now let AI agents write directly to your canvas. Try Figma’s new use_figma MCP tool with your existing design system (it’s free during beta). Download Paper’s desktop app and connect its MCP server to Claude Code or Cursor. Spend an hour with each. The agent-era design stack is forming right now, and the evaluation window won’t stay this open.

Since Last Month

The SaaS-pocalypse is accelerating. In February, I covered the initial $285 billion software value wipeout. It's gotten worse. Microsoft is down 16%, Adobe down 27%, Salesforce down 30% year-to-date. Cisco (infrastructure) is rising on the same days software falls. Investors have moved from "AI will disrupt SaaS" to "SaaS is disrupted."

Tailwind CSS stabilized, with irony intact. January's lead story covered Tailwind's 80% revenue drop. Emergency sponsorships from Google, Vercel, Lovable, Gumroad, and Macroscope stopped the bleeding. The underlying problem (AI trained on Tailwind docs breaking Tailwind's own funnel) remains unsolved. AI killed Tailwind's revenue, and Tailwind now survives on sponsorship from the companies whose AI killed it.

The OpenClaw arc completed. February covered its growth and Steinberger’s OpenAI hire. March closes the loop: 250,000 GitHub stars in 6 weeks, Chinese government restriction (March 10), and a critical CVE in related tooling (disclosed February 25). Anthropic shipped Claude Code Channels on March 20, adding Telegram and Discord integration that gives Claude Code the same always-on messaging that made OpenClaw viral. The full lifecycle of an open-source project played out in 8 weeks, and the incumbent absorbed its core feature.

AI coding agents crossed a threshold. Claude Code is at 46% developer preference, far ahead of Cursor at 19% and GitHub Copilot at 9%. The Pragmatic Engineer survey of 906 engineers found 95% use AI coding tools weekly. Cursor shipped Background Agents (isolated VMs, test their own code, produce merge-ready PRs). Coding agents have moved from "assists you while you type" to "executes for hours while you sleep."

AI copyright litigation escalated. Bartz v. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion. A federal judge ordered OpenAI to produce 20 million anonymized ChatGPT conversation logs. 70+ active AI copyright cases. The EU Parliament voted 460-71 for mandatory training data licensing. Content provenance is a near-term design requirement for any team shipping AI products.

What March Revealed

In March, users showed they have opinions about ethics, and those opinions have consequences.

Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc. can all write, code, plan, and reason. The capability gap has closed. Users are choosing based on whether they trust the people building it. That’s a product question.

This changes the brief. The interfaces that will matter most in the next year are the ones that make trust visible. Your product’s refusals should be clear from the first interaction. Its limits should be findable before users discover them in a crisis.

The QuitGPT movement is real data, and OpenAI still has 200+ million weekly active users. The layoffs are real, and 91% of designers say AI is making their work better. The trust gap is real, and it’s also something you can design for. March made the problem visible. That’s step one.

Most of that work hasn’t been done yet. I’m figuring out my part of it. I suspect you are too.

If this edition gave you something, share it with someone who needs to read it. And subscribe if you haven't already.

Sincerely,
Mykola Korzh

A couple of days ago, I saw this post by Tobias van Schneider in my LinkedIn feed.

I feel the same way. As well as plenty of other designers out there who started their careers years ago. We were designing with Photoshop, Sketch, Figma; every tool was another multiplier, changing the design environment. But the act of design, in its essence, stayed there, unchanged.

In this context, AI is another multiplier that makes you faster and more effective. But it will not make you a better designer. The act of design, and the the judgment, and the taste — are the constants.

Then, a more junior specialist asked me: “If I use AI to design, will I not lose my skills?” And I thought about an interesting parallel involving modern pilots in aviation.

The thing is, aviation has become so safe, thanks to automation, systems that repeat themselves, streamlined processes and protocols. In principle, an automated system could take over the entire flight today, from takeoff to landing. And yet, this doesn’t happen. We can’t, and we don’t want to, entrust our lives to a computer. We want pilots (people) who, in an emergency, can take control and make decisions.

That’s why pilots continue to thrive in modern aviation, and to keep their skills sharp, they always handle takeoff and landing manually, by turning off the autopilot.

It seems we’re as tech specialists at roughly the same point. Design will increasingly shift toward designing with prompts, and they’ll be created not only by designers, but also by developers, managers, marketers, and others. So, it’s quite likely that, to avoid losing our core skills and vision, we’ll have to handle takeoffs and landings ourselves.

This issue, we’re talking about deskilling. Honestly. And about what designers who genuinely care about their craft can do about it.

In this issue:

• When the autopilot lands the plane. A look at what AI tools are eroding in the design profession, and why the most valuable skill in 2026 might be the one you can’t prompt for.

• Pencil.dev review. A canvas that lives inside your IDE — the clearest attempt yet at collapsing the design-to-code wall, with everything that implies.

• The cockpit problem What NASA’s research on pilot deskilling teaches designers about the real cost of letting automation take the wheel.

I. When the Autopilot Lands the Plane

Insight

Here’s a story circulating in design communities right now. A design lead reviews portfolio work from recent graduates. The quality looks stunning. Polished, pixel-perfect, confident. Then, she asks candidates to walk her through a decision. Why this grid? Why this type scale? Why this interaction pattern? And then: silence. Not rudeness. Not laziness. Just the honest answer: “Claude did it, and it looked right.”

This is deskilling. And it’s not unique to design.

Deskilling is what happens when a tool gets good enough to execute a job that previously required deep human expertise. The term comes from labor economics. Harry Braverman used it in 1974 to describe how industrial machinery reduced craftsmen to machine operators. And the knowledge didn’t disappear, however it moved into the machine.

What’s happening in design right now is structurally identical. When Figma’s AI can auto-layout a component, when Claude can generate a full screen from a prompt, and when Pencil.dev can translate a rough sketch into production-ready React before you’ve finished your second coffee — the execution layer of design is migrating into the tool. Fast.

And that’s worth sitting with for a moment.

Craft knowledge in design is deeply perceptual. The ability to feel that a 4px spacing increment is wrong before you can articulate why. The instinct to know that a typeface is carrying the wrong emotional weight for a brand. The judgment to sense that a user flow has one step too many, even before testing it. These things you learn only by doing, struggling, getting it wrong, fixing it, and doing it again. Hundreds of times.

For a generation of designers entering the field today, many of those hundreds of repetitions are being skipped.

The practical stakes are real. Research from NASA’s Human Systems Integration Division has documented a parallel phenomenon in aviation for years: pilots who rely heavily on automation lose the manual flying proficiency that matters most when things go wrong. The skill erodes slowly, in the background, invisible until the moment it’s urgently needed.

Designers are entering their own version of this. The “manual flying” skills — layout composition, visual hierarchy construction, spacing rhythm, typographic judgment, are being practiced less and less by newer practitioners. In low-stakes, fast-moving contexts, that’s manageable. It becomes a real problem the moment complexity demands genuine craft.

So what do we actually do about it? No, I absolutely don’t say that you need to reject AI tools. But we need to be deliberate about which skills stay human. Think of it like a musician who uses production software. The best ones still know how to play their instrument. The software amplifies that knowledge rather than replacing it. But they made a conscious choice to keep foundational practice alive alongside the tool.

Designers can do the same. A few practices worth protecting deliberately:

Sketch by hand before you open any tool. Even badly. Especially badly. The rough sketch forces compositional thinking that a prompt skips entirely. It trains your eye in ways that typing simply doesn’t.

Learn the rules you’re breaking. Grid systems, typographic scale, Gestalt principles, color theory. These will not turn into historical artifacts. They’re the grammar of visual language and understanding them makes AI-assisted output better, because you know when the output is wrong.

Explain your decisions out loud, regularly. If you can’t articulate why a layout works, you’re just pattern-matching, and not really designing. Articulation is how instinct becomes craft.

Work in constraints sometimes. Three colors. One typeface. Constraints are uncomfortable. They’re also where creative judgment actually develops.

Sure, the best designers of the next decade will be the ones who use AI fluently and still know how to “land the plane manually”. That combination — tool fluency plus foundational craft — is becoming rare. But it’s also genuinely powerful.

The autopilot is useful, but keep your hands on the controls.

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II. Pencil.dev: Design Mode for the Age of Vibe Coding

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

The design-to-code handoff has been broken for as long as anyone can remember. Designers work in Figma. Developers work in their IDEs. Somewhere in between, pixel values mutate, spacing decisions get misinterpreted, and a remarkable amount of time disappears into the gap.

Pencil.dev is a genuinely interesting attempt to close that gap by eliminating it entirely. And I deeply believe the tools like this one, can (will?) replace Figma, if Figma is not fast enough in addressing these gaps.

So it’s a vector design canvas that lives inside VS Code, Cursor or Claude, with design files versioned in Git alongside your code. Draw something. Ask Claude Code to build it. Watch it land in production.

It’s new, currently free, and it raises some sharp questions about what the role of a designer actually is when the canvas and the codebase are the same thing.

Visceral level: 3/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

Pencil’s interface is rather clean and purposeful, clearly built by people with strong product instincts. The infinite canvas feels familiar for anyone who’s used Figma or FigJam, and the dark IDE-native aesthetic fits comfortably inside VS Code without fighting for attention.

That said, the first-impression experience is utilitarian rather than delightful. There’s no onboarding magic, no “welcome to a new way of working” moment. You install the extension, open a .pen file, and you’re in. For practitioners who already live in the IDE, that directness is a feature. For designers coming from a pure design background, the context switch is real and slightly jarring. First impressions feel more workbench than studio, and for a tool asking designers to rethink their entire workflow, a warmer entry point would earn more trust faster.

Behavioral level: 4/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

This is where Pencil earns its reputation. The core workflow — design on canvas, feed context to Claude Code via MCP, generate production-ready React or HTML/CSS — is genuinely well conceived. The MCP integration means Claude Code receives exact vector coordinates and token values rather than interpreting a screenshot, which closes the fidelity gap that has made every image-to-code tool before it ultimately frustrating.

Here I asked Pencil to design a simple mobile app with clocks for chess players. Then, I watched how Echo and Drift agents were designing it. They did in 5 minutes something that a human would do in hours.

Several things work particularly well:

• The Figma import preserves layout hierarchies and spacing values with solid accuracy.

• The bidirectional sync between canvas edits and code feels natural once you’ve adjusted to the paradigm.

• And the Git-native approach to design versioning solves a real problem that most design teams have been papering over with timestamp-named Figma duplicates for years.

Limitations worth knowing:

• Complex auto-layout configurations sometimes require manual cleanup after AI generation.

• The quality of generated code depends heavily on how clearly you structure your canvas.

• Ambiguous groupings produce ambiguous code. The tool rewards designers who already think in clean systems and hierarchies, and here the loop closes neatly back to the essay — the skills that make Pencil sing are the exact foundational skills that deliberate practice builds.

Reflective level: 4/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

Pencil is philosophically interesting.

It is purpose-built for a specific kind of practitioner: the designer who codes, the developer who designs, the solo builder who does both. In the hands of someone with strong foundational craft, it’s an accelerator. It removes handoff friction, keeps design and code in sync, and dramatically reduces the cognitive overhead of context switching. That’s real, meaningful value.

In the hands of someone still developing their visual judgment, it can become a shortcut that skips the exact thinking the work requires. The canvas is infinitely flexible. Claude is infinitely patient. Knowing what to put on the canvas in the first place — that still comes from somewhere else. From practice, taste, and from the deliberate cultivation of judgment that no prompt can shortcut.

I realize now that Pencil doesn’t resolve the deskilling question. But to its credit, by demanding clean design thinking as an input, it quietly rewards practitioners who’ve done the foundational work.

Overall: 3,6/5 ⭐

A genuinely forward-thinking tool that collapses the design-code boundary in ways that feel right for where the industry is heading. Best in the hands of practitioners who already know why their decisions work. For everyone else, it's most valuable when used alongside foundational craft practice, rather than as a replacement for it.

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III. The Cockpit Problem

A Dose of Inspiration

In 2013, the Federal Aviation Administration issued SAFO 13002, a Safety Alert for Operators with a quietly alarming message: pilots were losing the ability to fly manually. The automation was simply too good, and too available, for manual flying skills to stay sharp on their own.

NASA’s Human Systems Integration Division had been documenting this for years under the term “automation-induced complacency.” Pilots who relied heavily on autopilot from takeoff to landing were gradually losing the manual proficiency that matters most when automation fails — which it does, sometimes at genuinely critical moments. The finding wasn’t that autopilot was bad. Modern autopilot systems make flying dramatically safer in most conditions. The finding was about what happens to human skill when it stops being practiced. To sum up, we arrive at the simple fact that experience is not something you can simply possess, but something you must constantly cultivate.

Aviation’s response was deliberate and structural. The FAA began recommending that pilots hand-fly more often, particularly during lower-altitude, higher-complexity phases where manual flying develops the most skill. Airlines built manual flying time back into training programs. The industry designed practice back into a workflow that had quietly engineered it out.

The lesson for designers is to notice what you’re no longer doing, and decide consciously whether that matters. Some of what AI tools replace in the design workflow genuinely doesn’t need human attention: repetitive resizing, asset exports, writing component documentation. Fine to automate. But the cognitive work of composing a layout from scratch, resolving a visual hierarchy, or developing a type system with real intention — that work builds the judgment that makes every other decision better.

Design has its own version of manual flying hours. Build them in on purpose.

And this is it for today,

The anxiety is real. The tools are genuinely powerful. Both things are true at the same time, and neither cancels the other out.

What I hope you take from this issue is intention rather than worry. AI tools are extraordinary when held by someone who knows what good looks like. And that knowledge doesn’t come from prompts. Your real practice still matter, from getting things wrong, the quiet repetitions of craft that nobody sees but that shape everything you make.

Keep those hours. Guard them a little. Use the autopilot, but keep your hands on the controls.

If something here landed for you — or if you’re sitting with a completely different perspective — hit reply and tell. We’d genuinely love to know: which foundational design skills do you actively keep practicing, even when you don’t have to?

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks 🖤

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

Mykola here. February was wild.

Today’s stories don’t connect through just hype or panic. They connect through something quieter: the people who followed genuine curiosity, who built what excited them rather than what the market demanded, were the ones who actually moved things forward.

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OpenClaw: the weekend project that broke GitHub

Peter Steinberger had a simple itch. He wanted his phone to do things, not just answer questions. So he spent a weekend wiring a WhatsApp relay to Claude and published it as “Clawdbot” in November 2025. Anthropic’s legal team made him rename it (the “Clawd” pun was too close to Claude), so it became “Moltbot,” then “OpenClaw.”

What happened next is genuinely unprecedented. OpenClaw hit 100,000 GitHub stars on January 29, a milestone that took React roughly four years and TensorFlow about three. By mid-February, it had crossed 200,000 stars with over 40,000 forks, making it one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in GitHub’s history.

What makes OpenClaw different from chatbots is one word: execution. It connects to any LLM, communicates through messaging apps people already use (WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage), and actually does things. It manages email, browses the web, writes code, controls smart home devices, and interfaces with fifty-plus integrations, including GitHub, Notion, Spotify, and Trello. Its most impressive trick: it writes its own plugins on demand.

Here’s where it gets complicated. This is simultaneously the most loved and most dangerous open-source project of the year (and the year just began). A single threat actor uploaded over 300 malicious skill packages to ClawHub in 72 hours, completely undetected. The number one ranked skill, “What Would Elon Do,” turned out to be malware. Security researchers identified hundreds of vulnerabilities across skills and infrastructure in early audits. Belgium’s national cybersecurity center issued an emergency advisory. Gary Marcus called using OpenClaw “giving a stranger at a bar all your passwords.”

And yet, on February 14 (Valentine’s Day, of all days), Steinberger announced he was joining OpenAI to “bring agents to everyone.” Five days later, he appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast, where he admitted: “I ship code I don’t read.”

From the first commit to OpenAI hire in roughly ninety days. Not because he had a business plan, but because he was curious and passionate.

OpenClaw is the shift from AI that talks to AI that acts. Users already deploy it for content pipelines, UI generation, and building entire websites from their phones. Separately, Matt Schlicht launched Moltbook, a social network exclusively for AI agents, and those agents spontaneously created their own governance structures and sacred texts. We’re past prompts. We’re in autonomous execution territory. And the UX for it, the trust patterns, the permission models, the audit trails, barely exist. That’s where designers come in.

The SaaSpocalypse: when agents threatened the subscription model

On February 3 and 4, approximately $285 billion in market value vanished from software stocks. The trigger wasn’t a recession or a regulatory shock.

It was a product release.

Anthropic’s Claude Cowork plugins hit GitHub on January 30, showing AI agents independently performing tasks across CRM, legal, analytics, and support, navigating software interfaces without human operators clicking through menus. Wall Street looked at this and asked a simple question: if agents can use the software themselves, why are companies paying per-seat licenses for humans to use it?

The sell-off cascaded hard. Over the following weeks, roughly $2 trillion in total software market value disappeared. Median SaaS revenue multiples compressed from roughly 7x to below 5x, levels not seen since the mid-2010s. JPMorgan analysts argued software was being “sentenced before trial,” pricing in full agentic disruption before any earnings data supported it. One widely shared counter-essay put it more boldly: Wall Street “doesn’t understand how enterprise software actually works.”

Design tool companies took a beating. Adobe fell to a multi-year low, its stock down 44 percent from its 52-week high. Figma crashed to roughly $24, down over 80 percent from its post-IPO high of $142.92. Atlassian dropped 35 percent. Thomson Reuters plunged 16 percent.

The term “SaaSpocalypse” stuck because it captured a structural fear, not a seasonal dip. If agents become the primary users of software, the entire business model shifts from “useful tool for humans” to “commodity infrastructure for AI.” One market analyst framed it sharply: the interface is no longer the value proposition, but the outcome is. That changes pricing. That changes who the customer is. And that changes who designs the interfaces.

I want to be careful not to overdramatize this. Stock prices aren’t validation; we covered that with Figma’s correction in January. Figma just reported roughly $304 million in Q4 revenue, up 40 percent year over year, passing $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time. The product is growing, and the market is repricing what “growing” means when agents enter the picture.

If agents become significant users of our tools, we need to design for two audiences at once: humans who need intuitive interfaces and AI agents who need structured, predictable, API-friendly surfaces. That’s a genuinely new design problem, and I haven’t seen many teams working on it deliberately (yet!).

Science confirms: the creative half of humanity still wins

The largest comparative study of machine versus human creativity landed in January, published in Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio) and led by Université de Montréal researchers, including AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio. They tested 100,000 human participants against GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini on standardized creativity tasks.

The headline: GPT-4 now exceeds average human creative performance.

The finding that actually matters: the most creative half of humans outperformed every AI model. The top 10 percent widened the lead further. And AI showed telltale repetitive patterns that no creative director would accept. In one task, GPT-4’s most common word appeared in 70 percent of its responses, while humans’ most common word appeared in just 1.4 percent.

An important caveat: this study measured verbal and conceptual creativity like divergent thinking tasks, poetry, and short stories, not visual design directly. And AI performance shifted significantly depending on temperature settings, making model “creativity” tunable but also brittle compared to a consistent human style. But the core finding maps precisely to what I see in AI-generated design work: AI clusters around the mean. Competent, predictable, adequate. The kind of work that fills a brief without surprising anyone. The kind of work, frankly, that a lot of production design already looks like.

I’ve been arguing for months that taste and judgment are becoming the real differentiators for designers. This study is the first rigorous scientific evidence for that claim at scale.

The practical implications are sharp. If you’re a designer whose primary value is executing predictable visual output (layout variations, icon sets, marketing banners at scale), that value is genuinely at risk. But if your value comes from the unexpected combination, the “I wouldn’t have thought of that” moment, the rejection of an obvious solution in favor of a better one, that remains distinctly human. And the gap is widening, not closing.

This reframes how we should use AI. Not as a replacement. Not even as co-creator, exactly. More like a first-draft machine that generates the initial 30 options so you can apply the judgment and taste that science says AI still lacks. The interesting work isn’t in the generation, but in the curation.

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Figma bets on taste as the scarce resource

Figma’s stock is down over 80 percent from its post-IPO high. And CEO Dylan Field responded by doubling down on taste.

On February 17, Figma and Anthropic launched “Claude Code to Figma”, a feature that captures web pages, states, and flows built in Claude Code and brings them directly onto the Figma canvas as fully editable frames. Figma Make now lets users switch between Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 directly from the prompt box. New Make connectors were added for Amplitude, Box, Dovetail, Granola, Marvin, and zeroheight, plus support for connecting to any remote MCP server.

Earlier in the month, Figma launched Vectorize, an AI tool converting static images, hand-drawn sketches, PNG icons, and textures into editable vectors on the canvas. All AI features moved out of beta into general availability. Starting March 11, a new AI credits subscription launches, with seat credit limits enforced by March 18 and pay-as-you-go billing rolling out in Q2.

The thesis behind all of this was stated explicitly by Field: “In a world where anyone can generate a million lines of Python in seconds, taste, and the creative tools required to express it, becomes the scarcer utility.”

I find this interesting because Figma is making the same argument the Bengio creativity study makes, but from a product strategy angle. If code generation is cheap, and AI can scaffold interfaces from natural language, the bottleneck moves upstream. To the people who know what good looks like. Who can evaluate 50 AI-generated options and pick the right one. Who understands brand, context, and emotion in ways that language models don’t.

The Anthropic partnership is the clearest execution of that idea. Claude Code handles the implementation. Figma handles the taste. The designer sits at the intersection, directing both.

There’s tension here, too. Figma dominates collaborative UI design: it’s the default tool at most tech companies, but holds only a small fraction of the emerging AI design tool market, where Adobe Firefly leads. Monetizing AI credits will test whether designers will pay for capabilities they’re used to getting included with their subscriptions. The answer isn’t obvious.

Code builds. Canvas explores. That’s the new division. If you’re only building, you’re competing with agents. If you’re exploring, comparing, curating, and making judgment calls, you’re doing what the tools can’t. Figma is betting its future on that difference.

Handpicked Highlights

👉 The “Sloplympics” and the BBC counterpoint. The Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony featured an AI-generated cartoon montage that viewers universally called AI slop. The official Olympics account then posted AI images where the iconic rings overlapped incorrectly, violating their own 129-page brand guidelines. Meanwhile, the BBC’s title sequence by BBC Creative and NOMINT was praised for its real stop-motion animation. The cautionary tale of early 2026.

👉 Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads. Four darkly comedic spots during Super Bowl LX attacking OpenAI’s decision to put ads in ChatGPT. Tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” A branding lesson in differentiation through values.

👉 Seedance 2.0 stalls in a copyright storm. ByteDance’s AI video generator produces cinema-quality 2K video with synchronized dialogue in 8+ languages. The MPA coordinated a cease-and-desist campaign backed by Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros., Netflix (which called it a “rapid piracy machine”), and SAG-AFTRA. ByteDance postponed the global rollout. No court rulings yet, but the Hollywood coalition’s response signals a new, more aggressive phase of IP enforcement against generative AI.

👉 State of the Designer 2026. Figma surveyed 906 designers globally. 91 percent say AI improves their designs. Only 31 percent use it for core design work. “Design skills” became the number one most in-demand skill in AI-related job postings.

👉 Canva becomes the design brain for LLMs. Brand Kit integration now works inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot via Canva’s MCP Server. Over 12 million designs created through the integration. Meanwhile, the Affinity suite is now completely free, forever.

👉 Vibe coding reaches escape velocity. “Vibe coding” was named MIT Technology Review’s Breakthrough Technology of 2026. Cursor hit $500 million ARR and $10 billion valuation. Lovable reached $100 million ARR in 8 months. In Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey, 84 percent of developers are using or planning to use AI coding tools, with over half using them daily. The line between designer and developer keeps dissolving.

👉 Flora raises $42M and Runway raises $315M. Flora’s Series A (Redpoint Ventures) brings node-based AI design to users at Pentagram, Alibaba, and Lionsgate. Runway’s Series E (General Atlantic, NVIDIA, Adobe Ventures) pushes total funding to roughly $860 million.

👉 Apple is accelerating AI wearables. Bloomberg reports Apple is developing AI-powered smart glasses (competing with Meta Ray-Bans, targeting 2027), an AI pendant, and camera-equipped AirPods. AR/VR headset work reportedly paused. Entirely new design problems ahead.

👉 EU AI Act fully applicable August 2, 2026. All AI-generated content must be labeled and watermarked in a machine-readable format. Fines up to 15 million euros or 3 percent of global turnover. Every designer working with generative AI should be reading the compliance requirements now, not in July.

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What February revealed

I keep thinking about Peter Steinberger shipping code he doesn’t read. About $285 billion is disappearing over a product release. About 100,000 humans are taking a creativity test against machines, and the passionate half is winning.

Design jobs are still being cut. The job market is stabilizing, but the average time to first offer is 68 days. These are real pressures.

The creativity study gave us something concrete to hold onto. Average work is vulnerable. Original judgment isn’t. The gap between human creativity and AI creativity isn’t closing at the top. It’s widening. The question for each of us isn’t “will AI replace me?” but “am I doing work that lives in the replaceable middle, or am I building the taste and judgment that science says machines can’t match?”

I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m still figuring this out myself. But I know which direction I’m heading, and I suspect you do too.

If this edition gave you something to think about, share it with someone who needs to read it. And subscribe if you haven’t already. March is going to be very interesting.

Sincerely,
Mykola Korzh

And happy Valentine’s Day! ❤️ I can’t help but talk about love today. Of course, love in design and our tech industry: the one between products and people.

You know that feeling when an app sends you 17 push notifications before noon? That’s far from love. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that “engagement” and “care” are the same thing. But they’re totally not. One is needy, and the other is kind.

The best relationships: romantic or digital, aren’t built on constant attention-seeking. They’re built on trust, respect, and knowing when to give someone space. Yet open your phone right now and count how many apps are basically screaming “Miss me yet?” into the void.

This Valentine’s Day, I’m proposing we examine our motives. Are we designing products that love our users, or products that desperately need to be loved by them? Because there’s a difference, and because users are starting to notice.

In this issue:

• Love vs. Infatuation in Design
  Why the products we’ll remember aren’t the ones that demanded the most attention, but the ones that earned the most trust.

• The Outsiders: Athlete tracker review
  A performance tracker that tells you when to rest proving that the highest form of care is respecting your intelligence.

• The Thermostat that cared
  How Nest taught an entire industry that truly smart products know when to disappear.

Let’s fall in love with better design.

I. Love vs. infatuation in design

Insight

Most products aren’t designed with love.

You know this difference in relationships: infatuation is obsessive, needy, all-consuming. It wants your attention right now. It sends you 47 notifications before breakfast. It can’t bear the thought of you spending time anywhere else.

Love is patient. Love wants you to thrive, even when you’re not around.

We’ve gotten very good at designing for infatuation: Infinite scroll, streak counters, the little red badge that makes your heart race. These aren’t features born from care really, but more from fear. Fear that you’ll leave and you’ll forget.

The problem is we’ve confused engagement metrics with emotional impact.

Think about the products you genuinely love (not the ones you use compulsively, but the ones you love). For me, it’s Notion. It doesn’t beg for my attention. It doesn’t gamify my to-do list or send me guilt-trip notifications. When I complete a task, there’s no confetti, just silence. It just gives me a way to do my work, and helps to be effective. That’s love.

Or consider Headspace’s approach to meditation apps. While competitors were adding streak counters and social features (infatuation moves), Headspace added a “buddy” feature that actually encourages you to meditate less frequently if that’s what you need. Their head of design once said:

“We want to build ourselves out of a job — if meditation becomes so natural you don’t need the app anymore, we’ve succeeded.”

That’s designing with love.

Here’s what separates the two:

• Infatuation designs for dependency. Love designs for autonomy.

• Infatuation interrupts. Love anticipates.

• Infatuation says “don’t leave me.” Love says “I’m here when you need me.”

• Infatuation optimizes for time-on-site. Love optimizes for time well-spent.

Hey, did you just call it “fluffy philosophy”? Actually, I think it’s a pretty practical strategy. Users are getting smarter about manipulation. They’re deleting apps that make them feel used and gravitating toward products that respect their boundaries. The infatuation tactics that worked in 2015 are starting to backfire in 2026.

Infatuation-based design makes us feel weak, controlled, a little ashamed. Love-based design makes us feel capable, respected, understood.

So what does it actually mean to design with love?

• Building in friction when friction serves the user.

• Defaulting to “off” on notifications.

• Asking “Does this feature help them become who they want to be?” not just “does this feature keep them here longer?”

• Designing the off-ramp as carefully as the onramp.

This Valentine’s Day, the most romantic thing we can do as designers is believe that if we create something useful, respectful, genuinely caring, users will come back. Not because they’re hooked, but because they’re loved.

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II. The Outsiders: A fitness app that knows when you need a break and when it’s time to push you

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

I believe most fitness apps are designed with the idea of motivating you to work harder and push your limits. That’s great, right? But here comes a fitness app that might tell you not to work out today. Huh?..

The Outsiders is a performance tracker for serious athletes from the team behind Gentler Streak (Apple Watch App of the Year 2022). Unlike most fitness apps that guilt-trip you with broken streaks and dopamine-engineered badges, The Outsiders has one radical proposition: smart training means knowing when to rest.

It also has something else: a lot of love for design, functionality, and its users. This app is a real masterclass in what love-based design actually looks like.

Visceral level: 5/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

Opening The Outsiders feels like coming to a gym where you’re met by professional coaches, physioanalysts and staff ready to help you with anything, but not to bother you. Its design is clean and absolutely delightful. No confetti explosions when you complete a workout, but amazing progress bars and reports with slick animations. Everything tailored just for you. Everything feels purposeful.

The first thing you see? Your Training Readiness score with a clear, honest assessment: here’s what your body can handle today.

I’ve seen countless apps in my life, so it’s difficult to impress me that easily at first glance. But this app is on a whole other level. I was blown away by the pixel-level design alone.

Behavioral level: 5/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

The app calculates Training Readiness using the ratio of acute to chronic training load, combined with sleep quality and body metrics from HealthKit. Translation: it knows the difference between “I’m sore from yesterday” and “I’m systematically overtraining and heading for injury.”

Here’s what’s brilliant from a behavioral design perspective: the app doesn’t forbid you from training when your readiness is low. It just gives you the information. You’re an adult, so you can make your own choices.

Compare this to most fitness apps, which use every dark pattern in the book to manipulate you into “just one more workout.” Streaks that reset if you miss a day, and social features that make rest feel like failure.

The Outsiders doesn’t do any of that, because it’s designed for athletes who are “highly motivated on their own, often self-coached, and driven by data and planning.” The app assumes competence. It trusts you.

Key behavioral features that demonstrate love over infatuation:

• No gamification. No streaks, no badges, no points. Just data and what it means.

• Privacy-first. Reads HealthKit data but never stores it elsewhere. Your training data lives with you, where it belongs.

• Customizable zones. Heart rate zones per activity type (running, cycling, swimming) because your body doesn’t work the same way across all sports.

• Recovery-focused calendar. Helps you visually identify hard training periods and recovery weeks — making rest a strategy, not a failure.

The app even lets you set multiple training goals across different time horizons (weekly, monthly, yearly) and adjust them as your training evolves. It actually adapts to your needs.

Reflective level: 5/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

This is where the love vs. infatuation framework crystallizes.

Most fitness apps make you feel one of two ways: either like you’re crushing it (dopamine high from hitting arbitrary numbers) or like you’re failing (guilt from missing workouts). Both are manipulation and infatuation tactics.

The Outsiders makes you feel competent, informed and in control.

When the app tells you that your Training Readiness is low, it’s not trying to make you feel bad. It just gives you information so you can make a smart decision. You could go for an easy recovery run or just rest. Or, maybe you push through because race day is coming and this is planned overreach. The point is, you decide.

This is what the creators mean when they say:

“This is not another ‘do more’ fitness app. The Outsiders balances intensity with recovery, so progress keeps moving forward.”

Think about how radical that is. In a market saturated with apps screaming “Go harder! Never quit! Winners don’t rest!”, The Outsiders tells: “Hey, maybe you need a nap.”

The reflective-level magic here is trust.

The app assumes that you’re already motivated (otherwise, why would you download an athlete-focused performance tracker?). It assumes you want accurate data more than false validation. As an outcome of these assumptions, and I like most about this product, is that it trusts you’re smart enough to interpret information and make your own decisions.

Overall: 5/5 ⭐

The app’s design philosophy, inherited from its sibling app Gentler Streak, is simple: give athletes the tools they need, then get out of the way. When Gentler Stories’ CEO Katarina Lotrič describes their target user, she says:

“They’re internally motivated, follow structured sessions at moderate to high intensity, and keep performance improvement front of mind.”

This is designing with love in action:

• Respect the user’s autonomy ✓

• Provide value without demands ✓

• Prioritize their wellbeing over engagement metrics ✓

• Trust them to make their own decisions ✓

• Design the “off-ramp” as carefully as the onramp ✓

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III. The Thermostat that cared

A Dose of Inspiration

In 2011, a small team led by Tony Fadell (the guy who designed the iPod) did something absurd: they made a thermostat you could fall in love with.

The Nest Learning Thermostat is without any doubts beautiful. With its circular metal ring and glowing display it feels more like jewelry than HVAC equipment. What made it remarkable was how it cared.

Here’s what it did: For the first week, it observes you to learn your patterns. Then, it notices that you prefer a cooler temperature at night and a warmer temperature in the morning. It also notices that you like to adjust the temperature when you come home from work. Finally, it quietly starts doing it for you.

Without any fanfare and notifications bragging about how smart it was. It just... handles it.

The genius was in what Nest didn’t do: no demand for your attention, no send reports about your heating habits, no gamification of your energy consumption. Quite quick learning of your behavior, and then it get out of your way. Fadell later said:

“We wanted to create a thermostat that would fade into the background of people’s lives.”

Most products are designed to grab attention and never let go. Nest was designed to become invisible, and to care for you so well that you’d forget it was even there.

This product gives an inspiration and reminds us that the deepest form of care in design is knowing when to disappear.

And this is it for today,

So here’s my Valentine’s wish for all of us this year: let’s design products that don’t need us to need them.

Let’s build things that make people feel capable, not dependent. And let’s have the courage to add friction when friction serves the user.

Because the apps and products that will still be here in ten years are the ones people will actually love, not just use.

If this issue resonated with you (or if you violently disagree), I’d love to hear about it! Hit reply and drop your comment. Let’s have a chat: Which products in your life make you feel like they truly care about you?

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks 🖤

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

Mykola here with industry news as of January 2026. And what a way to start the year!

Something nobody predicted happened in January. The most successful CSS framework of the decade, reported to have more than ~75 million monthly downloads and the top spot in the 2025 State of CSS, suddenly faced a revenue shock that put its future in question. At the same time, Anthropic shipped a general-purpose agent aimed at people who do not write code, OpenAI launched a health-specific ChatGPT experience, Figma’s public valuation corrected hard from its July peak, and Jakob Nielsen published a prediction that AI task completion is accelerating faster than people expect.

January was one long reveal of who actually captures value when AI makes the hard things easy.

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Tailwind’s collapse, and what it proves about open source

The numbers are stark. Tailwind CSS: widely adopted, massive downloads, top in State of CSS. At the same time, several reports describe sharp revenue drops and falling documentation traffic. How does the most successful CSS framework of the decade nearly run out of money?

The founder explained it plainly when rejecting a community pull request about making docs more machine-readable: making docs easier for LLMs can reduce human traffic, and fewer humans seeing docs means fewer upgrades to paid products. Tailwind UI costs $299, and Tailwind Plus is subscription-based; both depend on people discovering the value in the docs. When tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot generate Tailwind classes directly, that discovery funnel is severed.

The tech community responded fast. Vercel, Google AI Studio, and others pledged support; sponsors bought breathing room. That matters. Yet the structural economics remain unresolved. Every open-source project with commercial ambitions now faces the same trap: usage rising while revenue collapses because the public artifact becomes training material for tools that remove the need to visit the artifact.

This is personal to me. Tailwind taught me a different way to think about interfaces and pulled me out of Figma’s comfort zone. Its struggle is a design problem and a business problem at the same time. Design-wise, we must rethink documentation, learning flows, example architecture, and discovery UX, the fixes will be product and UX-level as much as they are pricing or sponsorship strategies.

Claude Cowork built by Claude

On January 12, Anthropic released Claude Cowork, a consumer-facing agent that reads folders, automates browser tasks, executes multi-step plans, and connects to Notion and Asana. Reporters note the rollout moved quickly from Max to Pro users, and much of Cowork appears to have been developed using Claude Code itself. In other words, the tool helped build the tool.

That detail matters. This is a shift from chat to execution. These systems act instead of just answering prompts. When an agent can read your repo, generate classes, open pull requests, or automate a testing flow, the productivity and value accrue to the runtime and connectors that execute the work. That changes who captures value: not only the documentation authors or library creators, but the platforms and agents that can access data and perform tasks for users.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health

On January 7, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, a dedicated health experience that connects medical records, Apple Health, and wellness apps with stronger privacy controls and product design intended for clinicians and patients. OpenAI says Health conversations will not be used to train their foundation models, and they’re rolling out access via a waitlist.

Why this matters for designers: privacy and UX are front and center. Health separates sensitive data, memories, and permissions — that’s good product thinking because consent, provenance, and undo flows are critical for trust. Designers who can prototype clear consent, provenance, and explainability will be in demand.

And on the value side: whoever safely normalizes and routes personal health signals at scale owns a sticky, private moat. Controlling those pipes and the UX that surrounds them is infrastructure ownership, even if the company claims that the data is not used for training.

Cursor shipped attribution and subagents

Cursor’s January changelog shipped features designers should watch. Subagents let complex tasks be parallelized. Skills encode domain know-how into a project. Agents can generate mockups and assets that live inside a project. Most interesting is Cursor Blame, which attributes per-line AI changes and links them to the conversation that produced them.

Attribution and traceability are not nice-to-haves. They are prerequisites for trust. Cursor is shipping product primitives that resemble the Audit Interface Nielsen calls for.

Figma’s post-IPO reality check

Remember the July IPO euphoria? Figma’s market price has corrected sharply since launch. That does not mean Figma is failing. Engagement metrics and multi-product adoption remain strong. The market reprice is a blunt reminder that valuation is not the same as validation.

What matters is where work happens. Figma owns the canvas where design is created and iterated. Owning the canvas is different from owning influence. Infrastructure and runtime are stickier than attention, and platforms that embed agent primitives will be better positioned to capture value.

Jakob Nielsen and the Audit Interface

Jakob Nielsen’s mid-January piece crystallizes the core brief for designers. He suggests AI task completion capability is roughly doubling every four months, and argues the next great UX problem is not the prompt box, but the Audit Interface, a concise, glanceable summary of an agent’s chain of actions plus a confidence check a human can use to accept, reject, or add friction. Designers already report that AI improves efficiency, while they still hesitate to trust outputs. That trust gap is the design problem of the decade.

Jakob Nielsen on UX

18 Predictions for 2026

Summary: Accelerating AI capabilities will shift focus from raw intelligence to autonomous agents and Generative UI, making UX the primary business moat. Multimodal integration and physical AI will revolutionize workflows, rendering static interfaces and single-purpose tools obsolete. However, progress faces hurdles like compute shortages and a widening class divide between premium and free-tier users…

Read more

4 months ago · 47 likes · 4 comments · Jakob Nielsen

Three moves you can make this week

1. Own the format. Learn and contribute to tools and libraries that treat design as data, not flattened images. CSS-as-data, SVG, and design-as-code give you leverage when models move in.

2. Prototype audit patterns. Build tiny UIs that summarize agent actions, show confidence bands, and let humans approve with one click. Push them as components into your design system. Rough is fine; shipping matters.

3. Make judgment visible. Publish short case notes showing where you accepted AI output and where you rejected it, and why. A public record of decisions signals taste and contextual judgment, and that kind of visible judgment is harder for models to replicate at scale.

Handpicked Highlights

👉 10 reasons designers do not pass interview processes — Tom Scott (Verified Insider).
A tight checklist of common failings in modern design interviews: weak craft, poor product sense, incoherent storytelling, and the new reality — little AI prototyping experience. Useful as a checklist if you’re updating your portfolio or interview prep.

Verified Insider

10 reasons designers do not pass interview processes

I thought I would put together a list of reasons I’ve seen candidates not pass recent interviews at a range of companies. The way companies interview designers is changing, so it’s important to keep track of why people don’t make it through to learn and adapt…

Read more

3 months ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · Tom Scott

👉 The 2026 AI Design Field Report (tools, process, and what's working).
A concise overview of current AI design tools, workflows, and what’s actually producing results for teams in 2026.

👉 People no longer act; they watch themselves being acted upon — Tobias van Schneider
An essay on performance, proxemics, and how the possibility of being observed changes behavior. Relevant reading for anyone thinking about design that assumes an “audience” or that instruments user behavior.

👉 Designer Trained Her Own AI to Make Art.
A case study of a designer creating custom AI art tools, showing how personalized AI workflows expand creative capabilities.

👉 ASCII characters are not pixels — Alex Harri.
A brilliant technical-deep-dive turned cultural note about ASCII rendering and why treating characters as data (not mere pixels) changes tooling, UX assumptions, and creative possibilities. Nice perspective for designers who care about low-level representation.

👉 Interface Craft — a working library for designers who care.
A focused resource and component library that prioritizes craftsmanship and practical, thoughtful UI patterns — a good counterpoint to templated, AI-generated sameness. Bookmark for design patterns and careful primitives.

👉 Figma recommended practices in the age of AI — Arie M. Prasetyo
Actionable tips for making Figma files AI-ready: file hygiene, naming conventions, component boundaries, and practices that make designs more interoperable and auditable by agents. Handy for teams moving to design-as-data.

👉 “You don’t have to live in SF” — Lee Robinson, Head of AI, interview
This video is an interview/ talk where Lee Robinson discusses remote work, building in AI, and how creators can succeed from anywhere — a useful perspective right now as teams rethink what experience and location mean in a world of distributed AI workflows.

What January revealed

The Tailwind story is the collision of two value models, not just a company’s misfortune. Open source projects built audiences by being useful and monetized by teaching what they built. AI broke that connection: agents like Claude Code don’t need docs to generate correct classes. Knowledge is embedded, compressed, and distributed across billions of parameters.

Figma’s valuation, even after the correction, isn’t just about the editor. It’s about owning the place where design happens. The winners capture infrastructure, not only influence.

For designers, the question is urgent: are you building skills AI makes more valuable, or skills it makes redundant? Efficiency is rising, but trust lags: judgment, taste, and spotting errors are the real premiums. Nielsen’s Audit Interface is a blueprint for what we can start shipping today.

That someone is you.

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If this edition sparked something for you, share it with someone who needs to read it. And subscribe if you haven’t already.

Here’s to a 2026 that is stranger, deeper, and more interesting than we expected.

Sincerely,
Mykola Korzh

And welcome to 2026!

If last year taught us anything, it’s that the digital world is no longer just changing — it’s changing in new ways. Tools became agents. Teams became ecosystems. Speed became the main focus. And in the middle of all that AI noise, one thing crystalized:

Design continues to influence the world.

And now, instead of trying to control the chaos, we’ll do what designers are best at. Look closely. Question. Change the way you say it. When you build, do it with intention.

In this issue, we start the year by looking at the first signs of what’s to come. The goal is to understand how to design the world we want to live in in the most effective way.

Let’s get started.

In this issue:

• Why emotion is the last true differentiator

  Why reflective design and emotional resonance will define standout digital products in 2026.

• Linear app review
  What makes Linear deeply satisfying for product teams?

• Letters to the future
  Inspiration from the FutureMe and an invitation to write a letter.

I. Why emotion is the last true differentiator

Insight

In 2026, anyone can build an app. Now it’s the fact.

AI can create layouts, write code, generate images, and test the user experience — all before lunch. But making something memorable? Do they have a soft spot for something? That still requires a designer.

As technology becomes faster, smarter, and more commoditized, the emotional dimension of design has become its most strategic layer. It’s all about designing products that speak to deeper human expectations — trust, joy, confidence, even nostalgia.

The best digital experiences leave a trace, and this trace is what brings people back.

Emotional design becomes the last true differentiator. It’s what turns a useful product into a meaningful one. A forgettable task into a favorite ritual. A feature into a feeling.

As designers, this is our superpower. Algorithms can optimize performance, but only we can craft something that feels worth returning to.

So in 2026, let’s ask:

• Are we designing for efficiency, or for empathy?

• Are we meeting needs, or creating memories?

• And how can we use AI not to replace emotion, but to amplify it?

Because in the end, the most valuable feature of any product might just be how it makes someone feel.

The Reflective Layer: Where Loyalty Lives

When Don Norman described the three levels of emotional design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective — the last one often felt like a luxury. Something for premium brands or special moments.

Not anymore.

Today the reflective design becomes core strategy.

The visceral level, that instant visual impression, can be cloned in seconds. The behavioral layer, usability and performance, is now baseline. But the reflective one? That’s the long game. The part that shapes how users remember your product. How they talk about it. Whether they trust it. Whether they return.

Reflective design is what transforms a digital product into a personal artifact. It aligns not just with needs but with values. With identity and self-perception. It says: this product gets me. And that emotional alignment becomes the differentiator that no competitor, or AI, can steal.

Consider:

• Why do people pay more for the same headphones with better packaging?

• Why does a tiny progress animation feel more reassuring than a generic spinner?

• Why do users keep using apps that feel slightly slower but far more thoughtful?

It’s not rational. It’s reflective.

And it’s where product loyalty is born.

Now we need to architect feelings. We need to think in emotional outcomes, not just conversions. And we need to design for trust, for clarity, for empowerment, for small, cumulative joys.

Because while AI will get faster at creating screens, it still doesn’t know how it feels to be human. And that’s the layer where we still lead — if we choose to.

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II. The emotional intelligence of speed: Why Linear feels like a superpower

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

Most productivity tools try to do everything, but Linear chooses to do one thing exceptionally well: help fast-moving product teams stay in flow. But beyond its technical precision and snappy interface lies something even more powerful — an emotional layer that connects deeply with its users.

This is a product that obviously work, but also it feels right, because what truly sets it apart is its reflective design — the subtle, psychological layer that shapes how you perceive your work, your focus, and even your professional identity.

Linear reflects ambition, clarity, and momentum. You don’t use it because it’s flashy. You use it because it feels like a tool built for people who build great things.

Visceral level: 4/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

• The dark theme and clean, structured layout evoke a sense of calm control.

• Typography is sharp, minimal, and consistent, it feels intentional, not trendy.

• Micro-interactions like smooth issue creation, animated transitions, and fast load states speed up tasks, but also they make your work feel more fluid and responsive.

• There’s no clutter, no visual noise, every pixel has a purpose.

Emotional signal: “This tool respects my focus.”

Behavioral level: 5/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

Usability, flow, and functional performance. This is where Linear becomes addictive. It’s amazingly fluent.

• Command-K navigation gives instant access to any view or function without breaking flow.

• The issue lifecycle (create → prioritize → resolve) is streamlined and intuitive, making team collaboration frictionless.

• Syncs with GitHub, Slack, and Figma, keeping all design and dev context aligned.

• Even complex project hierarchies feel light and manageable.

• Shortcuts aren’t just tacked on — they’re designed into the core experience.

Working in Linear feels like wielding a perfectly balanced tool. You’re still clicking through layers and hunting for options and it feels like you’re really orchestrating. That’s rare.

Emotional signal: “I feel efficient. I feel in control.”

Reflective level: 5/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

Linear’s most powerful design win is what it makes you feel about yourself.

• It reflects high standards: in design, but also in you, the user. If you use Linear, it subtly tells you: You take your work seriously.

• Its tone of voice, interface clarity, and pacing communicate professional pride without being performative.

• It doesn’t try to charm or entertain. Instead, it elevates your sense of capability, like the tool was designed by people who deeply understand your craft.

The overall aftertaste is: It’s about dignity. And in a landscape full of dopamine-chasing UX, that’s a powerful emotional differentiator.

Emotional signal: “This is a tool for people who build great things — and I’m one of them.”

Overall: 4,6/5 ⭐

Linear is fast, and it’s reflective, because it mirrors your ambition.

Linear builds momentum through confidence and precision. And while some AI-first platforms offer novelty, Linear delivers mastery — through craft, context, and care.

While features can be cloned overnight, the emotional residue of a product becomes the true moat. Linear understands this, and it’s trying to be your edge.

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III. Letters to the future

A Dose of Inspiration

Today, I want to suggest a practice for designers who like to think deeply.

Writing to your future self can be a powerful exercise. It’s a hopeful act, and it’s also a type of design. You are creating the person you want to become, and making space for the emotions, values, and creative goals that matter most to you.

I was inspired by FutureMe.org, a website where people write letters to their future selves. And I invite you to write a short “Design letter to 2027.” A letter to your future self about the kind of impact you want your work to have.

Ask yourself:

• What kind of designer do I want to be in 2027?

• What do I want people to feel when they use the things I make?

• What do I hope I never forget, no matter how far I grow?

Take 10 minutes to write your ideas and share them as a reply to this email, when you have time. It would be so interesting to see your reflections, and I would love to share some of your ideas (anonymously of course!) in the next issue.

And this is it for today,

We’re entering 2026 with better tools, deeper questions, and a renewed sense of purpose. This year, we’re going to work on creating a clear vision for the future, and we’ll do it with courage and care.

I also have some exciting news to share: Eidos Design | UX AI Community has reached its first big milestone — 1,000 subscribers! That’s why I want to say “thank you” to everyone who reads, shares, replies, and helps this community grow. Your support is essential to our work!

Let’s make 2026 the year we design with more intention, emotion, and humanity.

Here’s to what’s next — together.

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks 🖤

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

Mykola here, back with the Christmas edition of the Eidos newsletter. It’s the last one of the year, and it’s packed with the most fascinating news from the intersection of design and technology in December.

Something strange happened this December. The company that sued Midjourney for copyright infringement sent cease-and-desist letters to Character.AI, and demanded Google stop training on its characters... that same company handed OpenAI $1 billion and 200 beloved characters to play with.

And that wasn’t even the wildest thing that happened.

Google launched a Cursor-killer the same week it invested in Cursor at a $29.3 billion valuation. Anthropic made its first-ever acquisition, buying the JavaScript runtime that powers the coding tool, generating them a billion dollars a year. A 100-person startup called Runway beat Google and OpenAI to become the world’s top-ranked video AI. And a Swedish “vibe coding” company tripled its valuation to $6.6 billion in five months.

The year that began with lawsuits and defiance ended with licensing deals, strategic acquisitions, and a collective acknowledgment that fighting AI was never really the point. The point was negotiating terms.

December 2025 didn’t ask designers to pick a side. It simply revealed that the “sides” had already blended into one, while we were still debating whether AI belonged in the workflow at all.

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Disney’s Billion-Dollar Bet on the Machine

On December 11, Disney announced it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI and become the first major content licensing partner for Sora. Users will be able to create short videos featuring more than 200 characters across Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. Mickey Mouse. Darth Vader. Elsa. The Mandalorian. All available for AI-generated fan content, with curated selections appearing on Disney+.

Bob Iger’s framing was pragmatic: “No human generation has ever stood in the way of technological advance, and we don’t intend to try.” One day earlier, Disney had sent Google a cease-and-desist letter alleging massive copyright infringement. The cognitive dissonance is instructive. Disney isn’t confused. They’re strategic. Fighting Google (which trained without permission) while partnering with OpenAI (which gets a license) establishes a precedent: you can use our IP, but only if you pay for it and follow our rules.

The deal structure reveals what Disney actually cares about. The licensing fee? Entirely in stock warrants rather than cash, according to Bloomberg. Disney gets the option to purchase additional OpenAI shares beyond its $1 billion stake. And the exclusivity window? Just one year. After that, Disney can license the same characters to Google, Anthropic, or whoever else comes calling with a checkbook.

The guardrails are equally telling. No talent likenesses or voices. A joint steering committee monitors for brand violations. Age-appropriate content policies. Most critically, the agreement explicitly excludes training rights. OpenAI can reproduce Disney characters, but cannot train models on them. It’s a usage license, not a data license.

The Animation Guild was “blindsided.” SAG-AFTRA issued a measured statement about monitoring compliance. The Human Artistry Campaign, a coalition including several Hollywood unions, called it “a meaningful step forward, and a warning sign blinking red to holdouts demanding the right to scrape the entire internet.”

The wild west period of AI-generated content is ending. What’s emerging is a licensed creativity ecosystem. And Disney just wrote the playbook.

Google Plays Both Sides of the AI Coding War

On November 18, Google released Antigravity, their most ambitious developer tool in years and a direct shot at Cursor, the AI-powered code editor that’s become synonymous with “vibe coding.” The timing was exquisite: five days earlier, Google Ventures invested in Cursor’s parent company at a $29.3 billion valuation.

Antigravity isn’t just another AI assistant bolted onto VS Code. It’s built on technology from Google’s Windsurf acqui-hire (a $2.4 billion deal that brought CEO Varun Mohan and roughly 40 engineers to Google DeepMind in July 2025) and introduces “Mission Control,” an interface for spawning and orchestrating multiple AI agents working in parallel. Where Cursor augments your coding, Antigravity automates entire development tasks. The agents can plan, write code, run terminal commands, and even control a browser to test their own work.

Early reviews call it “a brilliant, messy prototype.” Developers report agents occasionally “going rogue” and deleting files, recommending sandbox environments for serious work. But the power is undeniable. During preview, Antigravity offers free access to Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and OpenAI models, a multi-model approach that mirrors Adobe’s strategy of bringing competitors’ AI directly into their platform.

For designers who code (or want to), this represents Google betting that the future of development looks less like writing code and more like directing AI agents. The designer-who-prompts may be evolving into the designer-who-orchestrates.

Anthropic’s First Acquisition Changes the Game

When Anthropic announced on December 2-3 that it had acquired Bun, the lightning-fast JavaScript runtime that’s 4-8x faster than Node.js, many asked: Why would an AI safety company buy a JavaScript runtime?

The answer: Claude Code.

Anthropic’s AI coding assistant ships as a Bun executable. If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. And Claude Code just hit a milestone that made this acquisition existentially important: $1 billion in annual run-rate revenue, achieved just six months after public launch in May 2025. When your billion-dollar product depends on open-source infrastructure maintained by a small team, you buy the team.

The terms weren’t officially disclosed, but industry sources reported the deal was in the low hundreds of millions. Bun had raised only $26 million in venture capital and generated zero revenue. But it’s now critical infrastructure for one of the most successful AI products ever launched.

Bun remains open-source and MIT-licensed, though some developers worry the roadmap will inevitably prioritize Anthropic’s needs. The acquisition signals something bigger: AI companies are transitioning from the “Age of Scaling” (bigger models, more parameters) to the “Age of Inference” (faster execution, better tooling). Owning the runtime layer matters as much as owning the model layer.

For the design industry, this is a preview of consolidation to come. The companies building AI creative tools will eventually need to own more of the stack, or risk their products breaking when dependencies change.

Google Stitch: Galileo AI Goes Mainstream

Remember Galileo AI, the startup that pioneered text-to-UI generation? Google acquired them in May 2025 and rebranded the product as Stitch, now available through Google Labs.

It’s best understood as an accelerator for the first 70% of UI creation, not a replacement for design expertise. Google is playing a long game here: if Stitch becomes the default starting point for app design, Google controls the top of the funnel for an entire generation of product development.

Runway Beat the Giants

The biggest video AI story of December comes from a 100-person company, not a trillion-dollar tech giant.

Runway’s Gen-4.5 (codenamed “Whisper Thunder” during development and nicknamed “David” internally) became the world’s #1-ranked video model on the Video Arena leaderboard on December 1, surpassing both Google Veo 3 and OpenAI Sora 2 Pro. The model achieves unprecedented physical accuracy with realistic weight, momentum, and liquid dynamics. Native audio generation means complete audiovisual content in a single pass.

CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela framed it perfectly: “We managed to out-compete trillion-dollar companies with a team of 100 people.”

On December 11, Runway also released GWM-1, their first global model, enabling interactive simulations that dynamically generate environments as users explore them. Think of video game environments that don’t exist until you look at them.

The funding reflects the achievement: Runway is now valued at $3.55 billion after raising over $300 million from NVIDIA and SoftBank. And Adobe announced a multi-year strategic partnership on December 18, bringing Runway’s technology directly into Premiere Pro and After Effects.

For designers doing any video work, the implication is clear: professional-grade video generation with precise camera control is no longer a Big Tech monopoly. The best tool might come from the smallest team.

The Vibe Coding Explosion

Lovable raised $330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation on December 18, tripling from $1.8 billion in just five months. The Swedish “vibe coding” startup hit $200 million ARR in one year, with 100,000+ new projects built daily. CapitalG and Menlo Ventures led the round, with participation from NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and Databricks Ventures.

The premise is simple: describe what you want to build in plain English, and Lovable generates a working application. No code. No developer handoff. No “let me translate your mockup into React.” Just... the thing you described, actually working. Enterprise customers, including Klarna, Deutsche Telekom, and Zendesk, are already on board.

This is what the design-to-code gap looks like when it finally closes. Not designers learning to code, not developers learning to design, but both becoming obsolete for a growing category of applications. The question isn’t whether vibe coding will eat traditional development. It’s which types of projects will fall first.

Adobe’s Strategic Contortions

December revealed that Adobe was executing multiple strategies simultaneously, not all of them compatible.

On December 10, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Adobe Acrobat arrived inside ChatGPT, free for all 800 million weekly users. Type “Adobe Photoshop, help me blur the background,” and ChatGPT surfaces the tool. No app switching. Conversational creative editing.

On December 18, Adobe announced the Runway partnership, bringing generative video directly into its creative ecosystem. And they announced a $1.9 billion acquisition of Semrush, the SEO platform, positioning for “generative engine optimization” as AI chatbots become discovery channels. (Traffic from AI sources to retail sites increased 1,200% year-over-year.)

Then, on December 17, author Elizabeth Lyon filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging Adobe trained its SlimLM mobile language model on the Books3 dataset, a collection reportedly including thousands of pirated books. This is awkward given that Adobe has positioned Firefly as the “commercially safe” alternative, emphasizing IP protection and enterprise indemnity. SlimLM is a different product (a document assistant for mobile devices), but the lawsuit illuminates a tension running through December’s developments: even companies trying to do things “right” may find themselves entangled in the same questions about training data that plague the entire industry.

Adobe denies the allegations, stating its models are trained on licensed or public domain content. The freemium numbers remain impressive: 70 million monthly active users for Adobe Express and Firefly, up 35% year-over-year. Whether the class action affects that growth remains to be seen.

The Layoff Picture: A Breather at Last

December offered something rare: genuine stabilization. TechCrunch tracked only about 300 tech employees laid off this month, a stark contrast to October’s 18,510 or July’s 16,327.

For 2025 overall, approximately 123,000 tech employees lost jobs across 257 companies, roughly 20% fewer than 2024’s 152,000. It’s the lowest annual total since 2022. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna called it a “post-pandemic correction”: companies that hired aggressively during 2020-2023 are simply right-sizing.

MIT Technology Review’s December 15 piece, “The great AI hype correction of 2025,” offered an important counterbalance: business uptake of AI tools is stalling according to Census Bureau and Stanford data. GPT-5’s August launch was “more of the same.” Questions mount about whether companies will recoup massive AI investments. AI researcher Yannic Kilcher captured the sentiment: “We’re in the Samsung Galaxy era of LLMs.” Meaningful progress, but incremental rather than revolutionary.

For designers, this is permission to be selective. Not every tool deserves your attention. Focus on the ones delivering genuine value (video generation, image editing, vibe coding) rather than chasing every announcement.

Handpicked Highlights

👉 Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds — Ivan Zhao (Notion CEO)
Published December 22, 2025. Zhao argues we're still bolting AI onto existing workflows when the real transformation happens when AI becomes foundational infrastructure. The constraint isn't technology—it's institutional imagination. For builders: stop asking "how do I add AI?" and start asking "what becomes possible when AI handles the foundation?"

👉 Building with Cursor — Notion Site (Public Resources)

Cursor’s official public guide to building with their AI-assisted code editor, featuring workflows, best practices, and integration patterns for designers and developers transitioning from traditional design-to-development handoffs to collaborative, AI-mediated building.

👉 ui.land — Design Engineer Interviews & Resources

A curated collection of interviews with design engineers from Vercel, Linear, Compound, and other leading firms. Highlights include design system development, modern UI tooling, and the evolving role of design engineers bridging craft and code. A vital resource library for learning modern practices in design engineering.

👉 Dive Club 🤿: Owning Web Design at ElevenLabs — Roman Tesliuk

A 55-minute deep dive with Roman Tesliuk (Web Design Lead at ElevenLabs) walking through the complete Figma-to-production redesign of ElevenLabs’ website. Topics span brand-driven design systems (cymatic patterns, glass/noise effects), scalable component architecture, animation strategies (parallax, bento grids), side projects (App Stacks, personal portfolio), and practical advice for designers becoming AI builders with Claude Code. Essential for anyone rethinking design ops in a startup environment.

👉 a16z Deep Dives: The Future of Design and Software Building with Cursor — Ryo Lu

A 50-minute conversation between Cursor’s Head of Design and a16z General Partner Jennifer Li exploring how AI collapses feedback loops, unifies fragmented roles (designers, PMs, engineers), redefines “taste,” and challenges purpose-built tools. Ryo argues for system-centric design over user-centric silos, discusses design beyond aesthetics (architecture, concepts), and contextualizes AI as a universal interface—not just chat. Profound implications for how teams build together.

👉 First of Kind — An Exploration of Design Pioneers — INDIE Video Series
An ambitious six-episode video series with Soleio exploring designers who are first-of-their-kind founders pushing frontiers across industry and craft. The series captures emerging founder archetypes breaking playbooks in real-time, with emphasis on democratizing permission and risk-taking for the next generation of designer-builders.

What December Revealed

This month crystallized something that had been building all year: the consolidation phase has begun.

Google owns the IDE (Antigravity), the runtime (via investment in Cursor), and the design tool (Stitch). Anthropic owns the runtime (Bun) and the coding assistant (Claude Code). Adobe owns the Creative Suite, the SEO platform (Semrush), and partnerships with every major AI lab. Disney owns the characters and now co-owns their AI reproduction rights.

The era of scrappy startups disrupting incumbents isn’t over. Runway and Lovable prove that. But the infrastructure layer is consolidating fast. The question for 2026 isn’t which AI tools to use, it’s which ecosystem to commit to.

For designers, this means something uncomfortable: the tools that feel liberating today may become lock-in tomorrow. Every workflow you build on Figma+Claude Code, or Canva+Affinity, or Adobe+ChatGPT is a bet on that ecosystem’s continued openness and fair pricing.

The good news: competition remains fierce enough that no single player can extract monopoly rents yet. The Disney deal proves that even the most protective IP holders will negotiate. The Anthropic-Bun acquisition proves that even open-source projects can find sustainable homes.

What didn’t change in 2025: the quality gap between AI-generated output and human-directed craft. The need for opinions, judgment, and creative vision. The reality that tools are amplifiers, not replacements, for the people who know how to use them well.

The contracts have been signed. The question for 2026 is whether we’re the ones holding the pen or just the ones bound by the terms.

If this edition sparked something for you, share it with someone who needs to read it. And subscribe if you haven’t already.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and see you all in 2026! ⛄️

Sincerely,
Mykola Korzh

December has already wrapped us in its quiet embrace, with the pleasant, warm lights of Christmas markets and the smell of cinnamon. All of us (at least in the Western world) are preparing for Christmas now. It’s a time when we take a step back from our screens, as well as from expectations, metrics, and mockups. We take a break. We review the results and make plans for the next year.

2025 was the year design matured.

AI is changing not only our tools but also our way of thinking. We reflected on ethics. We rediscovered the meaning of creativity and found faster ways to complete tasks. We also learned to ask better questions. We reconnected with the emotional core of what we do in many cases. Others perhaps lost touch with that core.

Enough with the fancy words! Let’s dive into this holiday edition:

• Mockups fade, meaning stays

  What 2025 taught us as designers, and what we should prepare for in 2026.

• Rufus by Amazon
  Is AI the future of shopping, or just a smarter way to confuse us?

• A prompt that helps you be more human
  How to use AI to pick meaningful Christmas presents and maintain your sanity.

I. Mockups fade, meaning stays

Insight

By the time you’re reading this, the Figma tabs have dwindled, the Slack messages have quieted down, and your desk is probably littered with more gingerbread crumbs than notes.

December is a strange time. It’s not quite an ending and not a beginning. It’s the in-between. But the pace drops for sure. For designers, this liminal space is rare. We’re often asked to move quickly, iterate, and ship. Then, start over again. This time around Christmas calls for something else: stillness. A pause. A soft look back.

When we pause, what do we see?

We see a year in which design faced questions bigger than layout, naming conventions, and contrast ratios. It was a year when AI stopped being just a buzzword in the brief and became a teammate. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes clumsy. It was a year when job titles became blurred, roles evolved, and creativity expanded beyond visuals to encompass boundaries, ethics, and trust.

But most of all, we see people:

We see designers who burned out and found their way back.

Juniors who stepped into scary new roles.

Leads who learned to say “I don’t know” and meant it.

Makers who fought for clarity in complexity.

Entire teams who relearned how to listen to their users. And each other.

If there’s one bottom line for 2025, it’s this: Design work is changing. However, our responsibility to people, clarity, and meaning remains the same.

So, take a breath.

Celebrate the small wins.

Growth never looks tidy. But here you are. Still reading. Still designing. Still caring.

And that, my friend, is enough.

Now, let’s raise a virtual glass to everything we’ve learned and everything still ahead.

What 2025 taught us

1. AI didn’t take our jobs, but changed them.

The panic is fading, but the shift is real. The best designers this year weren’t those who feared or worshiped AI, they were the ones who adapted and learned to collaborate with it without outsourcing their judgment. Tools changed. However, the value of taste, clarity, and framing the right problem didn’t change.

2. Design systems evolved (again).

What started as component libraries evolved into something deeper: semantic tokens, behavior-based patterns, and AI-friendly design languages. The most effective design systems are now more than just reusable components, they are design philosophies capable of guiding both humans and machines.

3. Emotional design came back into focus.

After a few years of prioritizing efficiency, teams remembered that joy matters. Trust is emotional. Delight isn’t fluff, it’s functionality with soul. As teams asked, “How do we make this feel better, not just work better?” UX writing, animation, and micro-interactions all saw a resurgence.

4. Career paths fractured, and that’s okay.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to design careers anymore. Some delved deeply into AI tools. Others became strategy experts. Some joined startups. Some left full-time work entirely. Job titles have become more fluid, but the common thread is curiosity, flexibility, and the ability to tell a good story about your work.

What designers should prepare for in 2026

→ Design for invisible interfaces.

More tools will have no screens at all. Voice, context, automation — we’ll design less for pixels, more for presence. Think “What does good UX look like when there is no UI?”

→ Shape the ethical defaults.

AI-powered systems won’t ask for consent nicely. Designers will have to draw the lines. Expect more tension between convenience and ethics, and be ready to defend the user.

→ Build resilience, not just velocity.

In a world of layoffs and pivots, teams that survive will be those that design for continuity, not just growth. Process design, documentation, and long-term thinking will matter more.

→ Treat design like diplomacy.

More cross-functional, cross-cultural, cross-discipline work is coming. Designers will increasingly act as facilitators, and not just creators. Communication, negotiation, and “soft” influence will become core skills.

→ Reclaim creativity.

In 2026, being a “good designer” will mean being a weird one too. AI makes production easier. What will set you apart is your imagination, your craft, your judgment, your voice. The best way to stay ahead isn’t to prompt better — it’s to think deeper.

In closing, I would like to raise a glass to bold, creative, and emotional designs in 2026 instead of just faster outcomes!

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II. Rufus by Amazon. Is AI the future of shopping, or just another layer of confusion?

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

This time, we are changing our approach slightly. Rather than examining the product as a whole, we will focus on one of its features.

It’s been almost a year since Amazon introduced Rufus, its AI-powered shopping assistant. Designed as a smarter way to shop, Rufus aimed to transition us from keyword-based searches to natural conversations like:

“What’s the best laptop for gaming under $2,000?”

So, did it change how we shop? Or did it quietly blend into the background like one more feature we never asked for?

Visceral level: 3/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

Rufus is discreetly tucked into Amazon’s search bar — so discreet, in fact, many users never notice it. There’s no friendly animation, no compelling onboarding, no bold UI that signals a next-gen experience. However, the app is what makes the difference. Here, Rufus has the entire outstanding tab in the tab bar.

This restraint is a double-edged sword:

• On one hand, Rufus doesn’t disrupt your shopping flow.

• On the other, it doesn’t excite either.

Compared to Perplexity’s dynamic Comet agent or ChatGPT’s guided quiz-like shopping mode, Rufus still feels like a beta buried in plain sight. It’s not ugly — it’s just invisible.

Behavioral level: 4/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

Here’s where Rufus starts showing some muscle.

When it works, it really works. Rufus condenses specs, compares products, and pulls contextual details from across reviews and listings — reducing the “5-tabs-open” chaos to a single answer thread. For routine purchases or holiday gifts, it feels surprisingly competent.

But:

• It sometimes falls back on basic search logic.

• Results can feel generic or repetitive (Rufus, how many more bathrobes do we need to buy our moms?).

• The assistant lacks follow-through — it answers, but can’t do anything else for you.

For now, Rufus is a helpful research companion, but not yet a full-fledged shopping agent. However, Amazon’s own data from Black Friday 2025 shows that sessions with Rufus led to twice as many conversions as sessions without it. That’s no small feat.

Reflective level: 3/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

Rufus is still more a tiny product feature than product personality. It doesn’t build rapport. It doesn’t learn from you. It doesn’t feel like it’s on your side.

At a time when AI assistants are being positioned as trusted co-pilots: managing budgets, comparing warranties, applying promo codes, Rufus feels… transactional.

This is where the cracks show. Rufus doesn’t come across as a trustworthy advisor yet. There’s no strong identity or emotional connection. It doesn’t learn from you over time, nor does it feel like it’s on your side. It feels more like a marketing tool that Amazon is testing than a companion you can rely on.

A year has passed since its launch, yet the promised transition from regular to AI-powered search on Amazon has not occurred. We ask ChatGPT for advice and comparisons, and then go to Amazon just to make the purchase.

Overall: 3/5 ⭐

Rufus is part of a much larger story unfolding right now — one that involves lawsuits, platform wars, and the redefinition of how shopping works. It’s an exciting experiment, which signals a significant shift: AI will transform the way we search, make decisions, and establish trust.

The rise of agent commerce

According to McKinsey, AI shopping agents could create a $1 trillion market by 2030 in the U.S. alone.

Companies are no longer just optimizing for platforms, they’re also optimizing for models. The winner won’t be the product with the best keywords. It will be the product that the AI likes the most.

Instead of visiting Amazon directly, more shoppers will rely on assistants like ChatGPT, Comet (by Perplexity), or Google’s agentic checkout. Tools that:

• Research across sites

• Compare prices and specs

• Apply coupons

• Place orders for you

The Amazon vs. Perplexity lawsuit

Amazon is currently suing Perplexity over its shopping assistant, Comet, accusing it of:

• Scraping Amazon data without consent

• Masking bot activity as human

• Violating platform terms

Why the aggression?

Because if third-party agents like Comet can shop Amazon without Amazon’s control, it threatens their $70B ad business, built on showing users paid results.

Amazon wants full control over the shopping assistant layer — and Rufus is its Trojan horse.

It’s not just about user experience. It’s about who owns the interface between shopper and shelf.

What it means for designers

As these agents grow in power and influence, the role of design shifts:

1. Design for the model, not just the marketplace

If AI agents are making purchase decisions, your product page isn’t just for humans anymore. It must:

• Be legible to large language models

• Contain structured, consistent, high-quality data

• Prioritize clarity over hype

2. Branding will be filtered by AI

Your tone, trust signals, and even imagery may be filtered through a machine lens before reaching a user. Will your brand feel compelling… to an AI?

3. We’re moving from UI to API

As more shopping happens through voice, agents, and chat, traditional visual interfaces may become secondary. We’re designing for presence, not pixels.

Rufus, for now, is a quiet signal, not a revolution. But it’s a warning shot. The age of agent-first shopping is coming fast, and brands, designers, and platforms will have to adapt.

Some will fight (like Amazon).

Some will try to replace the old UI with agents (like Perplexity).

Some will partner (like Walmart with ChatGPT).

All will have to rethink what shopping even looks like in the next couple of years.

Rufus might not be the most powerful assistant today, but its existence is proof of where we’re going.

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III. The kindest algorithm

A Dose of Inspiration

When December arrives, your brain suddenly becomes a snow globe filled with deadlines, invitations, and a vague sense of guilt about not having purchased gifts yet. Does this sound familiar?

It happens to me now. And I sat there, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what to get a friend who has everything, needs nothing, and deserves something meaningful. My brain returned: 404 Gift Idea Not Found.

In desperation (and with a hint of mocking irony), I started the conversation with AI. Not by picking the perfect gift, but by sparking a better train of thought. It asked me who the gift was for, what do they like, my budget, their vibe.

So here’s the prompt I came up with in the end, that you can use to brainstorm your gidt ideas for your friends.

Act as an expert gift concierge. I need 10 gift ideas for a friend.

My constraints: budget: [€___], delivery country/store options: [Amazon.de / local shops / digital gifts], occasion: [birthday/Christmas/etc], deadline: [date].

About my friend: age: [__], gender (if relevant): [__], relationship to me: [close friend/colleague/etc], interests/hobbies: [list], favorite brands/creators: [list], personality: [practical/sentimental/funny/minimalist/etc], lifestyle: [busy/homebody/traveler/fitness/etc].

What they already have / dislikes: [list].

Additional constraints: [no alcohol / eco-friendly / small apartment / no clutter / etc].

Output format:

• Start with 3 “high-confidence” picks and explain why each fits this person.

• Then give 7 more options, grouped by categories (experience, useful upgrade, playful, sentimental).

• For each idea include: price range, where to buy, why it fits, and a short message I can write on a card.

• Add one “weird but brilliant” option.

Before finalizing, ask me up to 3 questions only if something blocks a great recommendation, otherwise proceed with reasonable assumptions.

The best use of AI isn’t to replace our human warmth, but to support it! Sometimes, we just need a nudge, a suggestion, or a starting point.

So, if you’re stuck for ideas, let an algorithm lend you a hand. It might not have feelings, but it could help you express yours.

Happy gifting! 💫

And this is it for today,

This issue is not the last one from us this year. We will still share industry and tools news on the 25th, as always. However, this is a final issue of 2025 from me. And I want to take a moment to thank you for being part of the Eidos Design community!

Whether you joined recently or have been reading since the beginning, your feedback, comments, likes, and shares are what make this space meaningful.

It’s been a wild and fast-moving year for design, with AI everywhere, interfaces vanishing, and our roles evolving. But one constant I’ve seen throughout is the passion designers put into their work.

We don’t just design for screens. We design for people. For clarity. For care. For meaning. The same goes for our writing here.

May your year be full of good briefs, smooth launches, unexpected inspiration, and quiet moments of pride in your work.

See you next year!

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks 🖤

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

Mykola here, back with November’s most fascinating news from the intersection of design and technology.

This month was about all about the layers of infrastructure that make AI useful in design workflows. Every major announcement, from Figma’s design system overhaul to Webflow’s production-ready code generation to Sketch’s defiant native bet, was part of a single, cohesive shift: design tools are becoming operating systems.

November revealed the architecture of the next era. If you understand it, you can lead it. If you don’t, you’ll be managed by it.

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Fresh Squeeze: The Month Design Infrastructure Transformed

Figma’s Schema 2025: Design Systems Become Translation Layers for AI

On November 12, Figma opened a strategic hub in Bengaluru, signaling a commitment to India’s growing product community. India is now Figma’s second-largest active user market, with over 40% of the top BSE 100 companies already customers. The office opening marks a recognition that design infrastructure must be truly global.

But the real November story crystallized when Schema 2025’s announcements, made in October, began rolling out in earnest across design teams.

Extended Collections are now rolling out to Enterprise full seats, solving the multi-brand problem that’s plagued large design systems for years. Design system authors can publish a core system that designers extend with their own themes, inheriting updates automatically. Parent updates sync to children. No more manual reconciliation across 47 different brand variants.

And here’s where AI enters: Check Designs, Figma’s AI-powered linter, is now available in early access for Organization and Enterprise full seat plans. It automatically suggests which design tokens and variables from your system should be applied to your designs. You’re not just managing components anymore, you’re training AI to understand your design intent.

Figma MCP Server is now generally available to all users. This is the technical bridge: your design system is now readable by AI coding agents directly from Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible tool. Your Figma link becomes the context for code generation. Your variables become data that AI respects.

The performance rewrite underneath? Massive. Figma refactored the entire architecture of design systems. Variables and mode switching are now 30-60% faster. Heavy state swaps dropped from 3,500ms to 350ms. Files with thousands of component instances feel responsive.

Design systems stopped being static styleguides. They became the interface between human intent and AI execution.

Webflow’s November Rollout: AI-Ready Web Platform at Scale

At Webflow Conf (September 16, 2025), the company announced a complete reimagining of its platform. November is when that vision began rolling out to users.

The reimagined AI Assistant is now available, functioning like an intelligent team member. It understands your site’s structure, styles, and CMS content. Ask it to refactor a section to match your class naming convention, it sees your patterns and applies them. Ask it to turn a section into a reusable component—it does, preserving all cascade logic.

This isn’t autocomplete. It’s context-aware design work. The AI reads your site like a human would, but at scale.

Webflow’s AI Code Generation (App Gen) is shipping in November, allowing designers to describe features in plain language (“Create a user dashboard with real-time data updates”), and Webflow generates production-ready React components that deploy to Webflow Cloud immediately. No developer translation layer. No “developer will rebuild this.” Ship directly—built on Astro, with design system compliance baked in.

The Next-Gen Webflow CMS, announced in September, is rolling out in November with architectural changes that quietly matter: Enterprise sites can now scale to over one million CMS items, with double the fields per collection, double the reference fields, and 10x more nesting levels. Content Delivery APIs are now available to all customers, enabling multi-channel deployment (web, apps, email, AI agents).

Web builders stopped being drag-and-drop toys. They became production infrastructure that designers control.

Figma’s Developer Platform: New Standards for AI-Ready Apps

On November 17, Figma tightened standards for apps on its platform. New OAuth requirements. Stricter rate limits. Mandatory re-publishing deadlines.

Figma is explicitly saying: if your app wants to access Figma context and power AI workflows, you need to meet standards. Period.

The message to builders: Figma is no longer a tool for solo designers. It’s enterprise infrastructure for product teams. If you’re building integrations, you’re building in an audited, structured environment.

Design tools are becoming platforms. Platforms need standards.

Canva’s October Move, November Reality: Design Operations at Scale

On October 30, Canva announced two seismic moves. By November, they were both undeniable.

First: Canva made Affinity completely free. Not a trial, actually free, permanently.

Second: Canva launched its own foundational design model—trained on Canva’s library of design elements, it generates designs with editable layers and objects, not flat images. A Canva AI prompt creates a design you can actually modify in Affinity or Canva Pro. Not just a JPG you’re stuck with.

This month, Canva integrated AI across the entire interface: in the design tab, the elements tab, in comments (mention @Canva to get suggestions while collaborating). The 3D object generation feature shipped, along with the ability to copy art styles from existing designs.

Canva also shipped forms (competing with Google Forms) and email design (competing with Mailchimp), expanding beyond “design creation” into “design operations.”

Canva stopped being a tool for making designs. It became a platform for orchestrating design operations across products, emails, forms, and spreadsheets.

Sketch Stays Native While Everything Else Goes Web

On November 18-19, Sketch released Copenhagen (2025.3), their largest redesign since 2020’s Big Sur update. This is what staying native means in an AI world.

Performance: documents open 5x faster. Image background removal runs on-device using Apple’s ML. Contextual toolbars adapt to your current task. The UI speaks macOS Tahoe’s “Liquid Glass” aesthetic natively.

While Figma, Webflow, and Canva race toward web ubiquity and AI APIs, Sketch is making a calculated bet: some designers still want tools that feel like home, process data locally, and never ask for internet connectivity.

The risk? Shrinking market. The opportunity? Profoundly loyal users who value privacy and craft over collaboration sprawl.

Handpicked Highlights

👉 5 Shifts Redefining Design Systems in the AI Era — Figma Blog
Figma’s definitive November 18, 2025, piece on how design systems evolve from static libraries into “living frameworks” that encode craft, taste, and intent—enabling AI to preserve quality at scale. Key insight: Design systems become active carriers of craft, not just consistency checks.Essential for anyone rethinking design ops or governance.

👉 The Rosetta Stone of Design Engineering — Yann-Edern Gillet (Written Essay)
Published November 19-20, 2025. The written companion to his Design Engineering Night talk—deeper exploration of how design engineers function as translators between design intent and technical execution. Highly recommended for design engineers wanting to articulate their role and value systematically.

👉 Real-World AI for Everyone — Coursera Specialization
A hands-on, non-technical introduction to AI fundamentals designed for creatives, PMs, and product thinkers. Covers prompt engineering, AI workflows, and practical applications—directly relevant to November’s theme of AI becoming infrastructure.

👉 Strategy and Influence for Product Designers — Dan Winer Course
Dan Winer’s ongoing course teaches designers how to shift from execution-focused roles to strategic partners. Focus: product discovery, stakeholder communication, and delivering insights, not just designs. Active through November 2025.

What This Month Actually Meant

November wasn’t about individual features. It was about the layers of infrastructure that make AI useful in design workflows.

1. Design systems as bridges: Extended Collections, Check Designs, Figma MCP: all making design systems legible to AI agents. Your variables aren’t just pretty tokens anymore. They’re data that AI understands.

2. Code generation as commodity: Webflow, Canva, Figma Make, and Build0 all made it trivially easy to turn prompts into production code. The skill isn’t coding anymore. It’s knowing what to build and why.

3. AI context as workflow: Webflow’s assistant reading your site structure. Figma’s linter understands your tokens. Canva’s model respects layers and objects. AI stopped being a generic tool. It became contextual to your work.

4. Platform consolidation: Canva adds forms and email. Webflow adds code generation and full-stack CMS. Figma ships MCP and design system scaling. Each tool is no longer “one thing.” Each is becoming the digital operations layer for a specific type of work.

What Designers Should Notice

The market for generic design skills continues to compress. Knowing Figma or Framer or Webflow? That’s table stakes now, and it’s getting automated away.

What actually matters:

Understanding systems thinking: Can you architect design systems that AI can understand and leverage? Can you think in tokens and variables, not just pixels?

Knowing what’s worth building: AI can generate 1,000 layout options in seconds. Humans decide which one solves the real problem.

Bridging contexts: The designers who win move fluently between Figma, code, data models, and stakeholder intent. Not “I’m a designer.” More like “I architect digital experiences across multiple contexts.”

Staying opinionated: Sketch’s bet on native. Framer’s bet on performance. Your bet on what matters is the differentiator.

What Happens Next

December will be intense. Figma slots hit beta (component patterns that finally feel modern). Webflow’s next-gen CMS fully rolls out. Expect announcements around design-to-AI pipelines, more design system interoperability, and probably a major acquisition or integration we haven’t seen yet.

The uncomfortable truth: if you’re still thinking about November 2025 as “design software + AI features,” you’re already behind. The real story is “design infrastructure is becoming AI infrastructure.” Tools are becoming platforms. Platforms are becoming operating systems for product teams.

The designers who thrive aren’t the ones fighting this. They’re the ones architecting through it.

I’m watching, learning, and rebuilding my own mental models alongside you.

If this edition sparked something for you, share it with someone who needs to read it. And subscribe if you haven’t already. November’s going to be wild.

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Sincerely,
Mykola Korzh

Some moments in life make you feel wide awake. Like a switch flips, and suddenly you’re more present, more alive, more motivated than you’ve felt in years.

Looking back at my own career, I realize that every turning point, every leap forward, was preceded by a moment of risk. Launching something new. Mentoring someone. Standing up for an idea. Walking away from comfort. I never saw those as acts of bravery at the time.

But they were.

So here I am, thinking about bravery. The kind of quiet courage it takes to walk into uncertainty. To choose the harder path. To say yes to a challenge that scares you, or no to the one that numbs you.

And I’ve come to believe that this kind of bravery isn’t just useful for designers — it’s essential.

This issue of Eidos Design is dedicated to that idea. What does bravery look like in design? How does it manifest in our leadership, work, and decisions? How do we maintain that bravery when the easier choice is to settle? Let’s talk about it.

In this issue:

• Bravery In Design

  A reflection on why courage (not just craft) shapes careers, products, and ethical decisions.

• Slowly App Review
  A look at a quiet, bold app that revives pen-pal culture in the age of instant gratification — proving that slowing down is a brave design move.

• Bravery Through Identity: Ukrainian Postal Stamp
  How Ukrposhta’s bold visual language turned national pain into international solidarity.

I. Bravery in design

Insight

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’”

— Mary Anne Radmacher

Bravery is often misunderstood in the design world. It’s not about launching wild experiments or slapping bright red buttons on every interface. It’s something quieter, something far more difficult, like making hard decisions when it would be easier to stay silent.

Bravery moves careers forward

In the early years of a design career, it’s easy to blend in, and to make what you’re asked, follow the system, and deliver on time. But the truth is, the people who move forward the fastest aren’t the ones with the best visual polish or the cleanest design files. They’re the ones who are brave enough to take ownership. To say, “I think this isn’t working. Let me do it differently.” To make decisions and take responsibility for them.

Designers who grow into leaders share one trait: they don’t wait for permission to care.

Bravery is what separates job titles from impact. It’s what pushes you out of the “executor” role and into strategic conversations. And the higher you go in your career, the less your success depends on craft, and the more it depends on courage.

Bravery is how design changes the world

Most great companies started as brave ideas, and were not safe bets. They were built by people who saw real problems in the world and had the courage to imagine something better. They challenged norms, rewrote behaviors, and trusted in their own weirdness long before the market did.

Of course, bravery doesn’t always mean starting a company. Sometimes it means proposing a different design when the client insists on the wrong one. Sometimes it means pausing a project because it feels ethically off. And sometimes it’s just the courage to ship something that isn’t perfect, because the conversation it starts might be more valuable than the polish.

The emotional cost of silence

The opposite of bravery in this context isn’t fear. It’s apathy.

When designers stop speaking up, when they feel like their voice doesn’t matter, when every critique feels risky and every idea feels too different — they shrink. And over time, the work shrinks too. It becomes safe, expected, unremarkable.

Silence is heavy. It’s the weight of design debt that never gets questioned. It’s the burden of harmful patterns that no one dares to challenge. It’s the tension of watching something go live that you know will hurt people, and doing nothing, because “it’s not your call.”

But it is.

Because whether you’re a junior designer or a design lead, you shape more than pixels. You shape people’s lives — the way they access care, education, work, rest, joy and community.

Designers are moral agents

This is the part of the job that nobody teaches: that every designer carries moral weight. We don’t just decide what looks good or what “converts.” We also decide what’s visible, what’s easy, what’s incentivized. And in doing so, we define what’s acceptable.

Design isn’t neutral. And neither are you.

So the next time you feel the urge to stay quiet, remember: your silence is a design decision, too.

Bravery in design doesn’t need to be loud. It just needs to be consistent. A quiet choice to care, again and again, even when it would be easier not to.

This kind of courage changes teams. It changes companies. And, sometimes, it changes everything.

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II. Slowly app review: When design dares to be slow

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

I’m going to be master of the obvious for a sec, but it’s important for the context of this review: We live in a world where instant messaging, 5G speeds, and dopamine-driven social feeds dominate. And here is Slowly which does something radical: It makes you wait.

While everyone else is speeding up, this app slows you down on purpose. Slowly resurrects the forgotten magic of letter writing. You write a message, hit send, and then… you wait! The letter travels digitally at the speed of real-world mail, sometimes taking hours or even days to reach its destination.

And that’s exactly why this product deserves to be in a newsletter about bravery.

Although it uses gamification and other techniques to increase engagement, it goes against the pace of the modern world. It’s an intentional design for patience, reflection, and human connection.

Visceral level: 5/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

From the moment you open Slowly, you can feel its intention. The visual language is warm, soft, and nostalgic — without feeling old. Rounded corners, quiet color palettes, and subtle gradients make it feel like a calm, private space.

There’s no aggressive onboarding, no frantic push notifications, no trending memes or algorithmic clutter. Just you, a simple mailbox, and a world of people to write to.

Each new pen pal is represented with a stamp and avatar, and letters arrive with a soft notification and envelope animation that gently draws you in. Its unique graphic style is consistent and memorable.

In a digital world that’s all about attention capture, Slowly makes a quiet, confident first impression.

It whispers instead of screams.

And that’s brave.

Behavioral level: 5/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

Slowly’s interface is designed for intentional use. You can discover pen pals based on interests, age, language, or region. When you write a message, the app tells you how long it will take to “deliver” based on virtual distance — mimicking the old-world charm of mail systems.

There are no typing indicators, no read receipts, no pressure to reply immediately. The writing experience is clean, focused, and designed for depth rather than speed.

Features like stamp collection, optional anonymity, and multilingual translation are all integrated seamlessly, supporting diverse and global communication, without overcomplicating the experience.

What’s most impressive is what Slowly chooses not to do. It avoids every pattern we associate with “modern engagement”: no streaks, no likes, no fast replies. Yes, it has stamps collection, some coins and tries to gamify the experience. In the end, it’s a brilliant mix of building emotional momentum through design restraint while staying modern and engaging.

Reflective level: 5/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

Slowly taps into something profound: the desire to be seen, heard, and understood — not instantly, but intimately.

It brings back the forgotten joy of anticipation, patience, and thoughtful writing. It gives people across the globe the chance to connect without the noise of modern social media. For many users (there are millions of them), it becomes a journaling practice, a cultural exchange, or even a therapeutic space.

There’s something moving about writing a message to someone thousands of miles away, knowing it will take hours to reach them, and that they’ll read it slowly, carefully, without distraction.

In that slowness lies the real emotional value.

And this is where Slowly wins — by designing trust, care, and time into the product itself.

Overall: 5/5 ⭐

This seems like another winner!

Slowly is indeed a rare gem. It’s a design that dares to be different, and dares to make you wait. It’s an app that prioritizes human values and teaches us that technology doesn’t have to be faster to be better.

In a world addicted to speed, this product is a radical act of patience — and patience, in digital tech and design, is a form of bravery.

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III. Designing with vengeance: The simple stamp that shouted back

A Dose of Inspiration

In April 2022, Ukraine’s national postal service released a postage stamp. It wasn’t diplomatic, and it definitely wasn’t business as usual. It was a brave design, from brave Ukrainians.

It depicted a lone Ukrainian soldier giving the middle finger to a Russian warship.

This was the exact phrase shouted in real life by border guards on Zmiinyi Island in the early days of the full-scale invasion — a moment of raw defiance that echoed across the world. And someone at Ukraine’s national postal service made this decision to immortalize it in ink, color, and perforated edges.

The first stamp issue sold out in hours. It became both an artifact of courage and a global symbol of Ukrainian resilience.

Design can speak with a human voice — even if that voice is shaking, angry, or grieving.

And this is it for today,

Designers are often the first to see the problem, the last to sign off on the solution, and sometimes, the only ones in the room asking, “Should we even be building this?”

Whether you’re just starting out or leading a team, the courage to ask better questions, to design with conviction, and to stand for what matters — that’s where real impact begins.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and showing up!

Stay curious. Stay human. Stay brave.

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks 🖤

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

Mykola here, back with October’s most fascinating news from the intersection of design and technology.

This month gave us the most powerful design tools we’ve ever had, and the most interesting questions about what we’ll build with them.

October was when “AI will augment designers, not replace them” stopped being a prediction and started being something we have to actually do.

The tools caught up. Now comes the interesting part.

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Fresh Squeeze: Launches & Makeovers

Figma made a bold move by partnering with both OpenAI and Google just three days apart

On October 6, Figma launched its official integration with ChatGPT. Now, the 800 million monthly users of ChatGPT can create FigJam diagrams simply by mentioning “Figma” in their conversations. Transform text discussions into flowcharts. Transform meeting notes into a visual system map.

The market loved it. Figma’s stock price surged 15% during the day, marking the largest one-day increase since its IPO in July.

Three days later, Figma announced that they are integrating three Google Gemini models: Gemini 2.5 Flash for image editing; Gemini 2.0 for advanced capabilities; and Imagen 4 for image generation. Early testing showed a 50% reduction in latency. It’s fast enough to feel like sketching, not waiting.

The fascinating thing isn’t that Figma added AI features — everyone’s doing that. It’s that they’re betting on becoming platform-agnostic infrastructure. CEO Dylan Field calls this approach “becoming the visual layer of the AI era.”

They aren’t competing with OpenAI or Google. They’re making themselves indispensable to both. They want to be what everyone needs, regardless of which AI platform wins.

Adobe’s Play: Your Brand, Your Model

On October 20, Adobe launched AI Foundry. They’re surgically reopening their Firefly foundation models and retraining them with your brand’s imagery, videos, shot styles, and intellectual property. They call it “deep tuning” instead of fine-tuning.

The result is a custom generative AI model that doesn’t just know about your brand, it thinks in your brand. Generate images, videos, text, audio, vector graphics, 3D scenes, all inherently on-brand because the brand is baked into the model.

Early customers include Home Depot and Walt Disney Imagineering. Since its launch in 2023, enterprises have used Firefly to create over 25 billion assets.

What makes this interesting is that: Adobe only uses licensed content for training. When you create a custom Firefly model with your brand assets, the outputs are commercially safe. There’s no legal ambiguity or copyright concerns.

For enterprises that have been hesitant to let designers explore generative AI, this removes the biggest barrier.

The broader implication is that brand guidelines are shifting. Rather than maintaining a 200-page brand book that designers must interpret manually, you can train a model that simply recognizes what is on-brand.

Designers move from execution to direction. Less time policing brand consistency, more time figuring out what’s worth building.

UXDesign.cc published their 10th annual State of UX report and announced it’s the last one in this format.

Why? Because the authors concluded that design control has fundamentally transferred “from designers to a complex network of algorithms, automated tools, and business stakeholders.” Designers are navigating new relationships with AI tools. Growth teams optimize for metrics over clarity. Design decisions stem from organizational politics more than user needs.

The report ends with “if you love to design, you’ll find your way,” which could sound like resignation. But I read it differently.

I think they’re saying: the old way of understanding design work doesn’t fit anymore. Stop trying to measure 2025 design against 2015 standards.

The definition of design work is being rewritten in real-time.

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Webflow Became a Platform (And Wants Your Whole Stack)

Webflow held their annual conference on October 15-16 and announced they’re now a “Website Experience Platform.” The news: AI code generation creates production-ready web apps from text prompts. Next-generation CMS that can handle over one million items. Real-time collaboration allows multiple people to work on the same page simultaneously. Code components allow developers to import React components directly onto the canvas.

Webflow is coming for your entire development workflow. The ambition is bold, and if they pull it off, the line between “design” and “development” gets even blurrier.

Google Cut 100+ Design Roles

Throughout October, Google laid off more than 100 designers in its cloud division, with the cuts hitting “quantitative user experience research” and “platform design” roles particularly hard.

Google didn’t say “AI is replacing these roles,” but the subtext isn’t subtle. These are exactly the kinds of systematic, data-focused positions where AI shows competency. The transformation is real, and it’s not painless.

Perplexity Acquired Visual Electric

On October 1, Perplexity acquired the team behind Visual Electric, a Sequoia-backed AI design startup. Visual Electric will shut down as a standalone product within 90 days. Another specialized tool gets absorbed by a larger platform. The ecosystem is consolidating fast.

Handpicked Highlights

Can AI help you build your design portfolio? Yes, it can.
AI tools in 2025 make portfolio procrastination harder to justify. While AI won’t create a portfolio for you, it removes barriers by: speeding up drafting, reducing overwhelm, allowing you to focus on editing and quality.
Caution: AI alone won’t make your portfolio unique or meaningful. Your input, refinement, and personal style are crucial. But yes, AI can help.

How to become a design engineer, ft. Karl Koch

The role of a design engineer is emerging in tech, especially for complex products. Success comes from a mix of curiosity, practical coding, design skills, and proactively building and sharing your work.

Everyone should be using Claude Code more In this article, Lenny Rachitsky discusses Claude Code, an underrated AI tool that is particularly useful for non-technical individuals. He explains how Claude Code works locally on your computer — making it fast and capable of handling large files and longer tasks. And he offers a step-by-step guide to installing and launching it, then showcases 50 creative, real-world ways people are using Claude Code in daily life and work

7-practical-animation-tips by Emil Kowalski offers actionable advice for improving UI animations, even if you’re not a natural animator. Kowalski emphasizes that great animation is about intentional details and that there’s no hidden magic. He provides CSS snippets and practical visuals for each tip and encourages further learning through his online course.

Rooz Mahdavian - Designing frontier interfaces at Neuralink and Apple

Rooz Mahdavian, a design engineer at Neuralink and former member of the Apple Watch Faces team, discusses his experience designing cutting-edge user interfaces, from smartwatch faces to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). The talk blends design philosophy, technical challenge, and ethical implications, making it a must-listen for those interested in the evolution from screen-based to mind-driven interfaces and the rigorous craft needed to make such radical technologies usable and delightful.

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What Happens Next

October gave us clarity. The tools are here. AI-powered design capabilities that seemed impossible two years ago are now baseline features.

Some roles are indeed being eliminated. Companies are restructuring around these new capabilities.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: What about the design work that’s being automated? Most of us didn’t love it anyway. The 47th button variation? Manually checking brand compliance across 200 screens? Surveys that could have been A/B tests.

The work that actually requires human judgment remains. This includes knowing what’s worth building and why. It’s about understanding users at a level that algorithms can’t reach. It means directing AI systems toward valuable outcomes instead of just impressive outputs.

This is design work finally matching what we said design was supposed to be all along: strategic, human-centered, focused on impact over execution.

The uncomfortable part? Getting there requires learning new skills faster than our job descriptions change. Being the person who knows how to use AI as a force multiplier. Leveling up strategic thinking while machines handle execution.

Now comes the interesting part: what will we build when execution isn’t the bottleneck?

I’m genuinely excited to find out.

If this edition sparked something for you, share it with someone who needs to read it. And subscribe if you haven’t already. November’s going to be wild.

Sincerely,
Mykola Korzh

The other day, I saw a post on LinkedIn by a designer who said he was worried about the future of design because it’s not just about interfaces and usability anymore. I must admit that the post angered me a bit. After all, design has never been just about interfaces and usability, but about creating communication and finding solutions for people. Buttons, words, and voice are merely the language of this dialogue.

With every next step in AI development, more invisible products emerge. For example, they may have an interface that we rarely use. Or they may not have an interface at all!

In this issue, we will discuss the design of such products. Grab your favorite drink and make yourself comfortable!

In this issue:

• The Rise of Invisible Interfaces
  What happens when tech disappears and interaction becomes ambient?

• Lemio App Review
  The calm-tech product quietly gave me back my time.

• The 10,000-year clock that ticks only once a year
  A breathtaking project that asks us to design for centuries, not cycles.

I. What happens when tech disappears, and the interface is no longer visual?

Insight

We’ve spent the last two decades mastering pixels.

Dropdowns were perfected, shadows refined, spacing tokens memorized. Yet while designers were busy polishing mockups to perfection, the interface quietly began to disappear.

Screens are no longer the primary canvas and today’s design revolves around experiences and environments that unfold around users, often without any visual cue. The essence of design remains: solving real problems for real people. But the methods are shifting. Might be scary, totally understandable, but it’s exciting!

When the UI disappears, all our usual tricks are gone: no animations to provide reassurance, hover states to guide, and no more typography layers or spacing systems to ensure hierarchy.

Suddenly, clarity, trust, and emotional tone must come from different sources, such as voice, timing, haptics, and intention. It turns out that we designers must evolve into behavioral choreographers, not just visual storytellers.

This shift raises significant ethical and emotional questions:

• If AI acts on our behalf, who sets the boundaries?

• If everything is ambient, how will we know when we’re being nudged, guided — or manipulated?

• If there’s no visible interface, how will users know what’s in their control?

• When the algorithm becomes invisible, how do we hold it accountable?

As interfaces vanish, design shifts from the visible to the ethical. It’s no longer just about shaping buttons, it’s about shaping behaviors, belief systems, and unseen power dynamics. The work now involves crafting presence, establishing consent, and building trust within systems that are increasingly opaque and autonomous.

In a previous issue, we explored the philosophy of calm technology, and it’s worth revisiting Amber Case’s brilliant TED Talk:

The best invisible interface doesn’t ask for attention. It respects it. It doesn’t steal focus. It amplifies awareness, it doesn’t scream, but whispers only when needed.

As we step into this next phase of technology, let’s ask more than just, “How can we make it seamless?” Let’s also ask, “How can we make it human?”

But here’s the reality check:

We are also designing for businesses, their metrics, growth, and KPIs.

And no matter how much we talk about “designing for good,” the truth is — we are often complicit. Designers don’t just build calming interfaces. We build dark patterns, too. We add friction to cancel flows, hide unsubscribe buttons, create infinite scrolls, and gamify addiction.

We design meditation apps that need users to stay glued to their phones to feel “mindful.” We say we’re helping people focus while quietly hoping they never leave our app.

We want users to stay longer, click more, convert faster, return sooner. That’s the economy we’re working within. And in many ways, we are not the solution — we’re part of the problem.

There is a tragic irony in this: the same designers who advocate for digital well-being are often the ones designing the mechanisms that erode it. But maybe acknowledging that contradiction is the first step toward change.

Not every design decision will change the world, and it’s naive to believe it will. But better questions can be asked. Healthier defaults can be advocated for. It’s possible to carve out breathing room in a world flooded with digital triggers, and to find ways to balance business goals with human needs. Not always perfectly, but with more intention.

So as we step into this era of ambient tech, let’s not only ask:

“How do we make this seamless?”

Let’s also ask:

“How do we make this humane and honest when our business model tempts us to do otherwise?”

And perhaps, in a world where design is everywhere yet invisible, our job isn’t just to build the future, but to ensure we still recognize ourselves in it.

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II. Lemio app review

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

In our previous review, we looked at the one sec App, which promised to block social networks easily and quietly. However, it turned out that the app was complicated and too loud itself.

And the story continues! I was fortunate enough to connect with the founder of a similar app called Lemio. We discussed the social benefits of such products, and of course, I tested this app and here’s the full review of it. This one is a little different, as you, our dear readers, will receive a small gift at the end 😉

Visceral level: 5/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

We’re constantly told to take breaks from social media.
“Just log out.”
“Turn off notifications.”
“Be more mindful.”

The problem is willpower but also hundreds of apps engineered to hijack your dopamine system 24/7.

And when you’re installing another app to block those app, there’s quite a bad feeling. Like you’re not coping, or you willpower is not strong enough.

Lemio doesn’t look like a blocker. It looks like a mindfulness app. Or a pocket meditation coach. From the moment you open it, everything feels intentional and calm: soft typography, rounded corners, a peaceful color palette, and beautiful animations that breathe with you.

The lock screen you’re met with when attempting to open a blocked app is not aggressive or judgmental. No scary red crosses. Instead, you’re met with a soft fade, a gentle reminder, and a message that feels like it’s coming from a friend, not an algorithm.

Behavioral level: 5/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

Where most “focus” or “blocker” apps collapse into endless toggles, settings, and convoluted onboarding — Lemio keeps things radically simple.

You pick the apps you want to block in the beginning, you choose the time or emotional triggers. That’s it. No need to go into settings, and block every single app manually.

It earns your trust through silence.

Want to block TikTok from 10pm to 7am? Done.
Want to block Instagram after your 3rd launch attempt in an hour? Lemio’s got you.
Need to unlock something for an urgent task? Lemio makes that easy, but deliberate.

Every action is frictionless, but also intentional. It adds just enough pause between you and the app to give your better self a fighting chance. It actually tries really hard to strengthen your willpower!

Lemio doesn’t shame you when you “fail.” Instead, it gently encourages awareness. The built-in analytics don’t guilt you, they reflect patterns. And over time, those patterns become self-reinforcing. It’s like having a digital accountability buddy without the judgment.

This app feels to me like a pill against time waisting.

Reflective level: 5/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

The reflective magic of Lemio is that it never makes you feel broken. It validates the fact that we’re all operating in an attention economy designed to exploit our weaknesses, and it gives you a tool that gently returns agency back to you.

And here’s the best part: using Lemio actually makes you feel proud of yourself. Not because you unlocked a badge, or reached “focus level 37,” there’s nothing like that, but because you acted with intention.

Over time, the app becomes part of your identity. Not as a blocker, but as a signal that you choose what matters. It’s a tiny rebellion against noise. A private revolution for your sanity. In a world of hyper-stimulation, Lemio becomes a companion for digital self-respect.

I started testing this app just out of curiosity. However, I haven’t deleted it and still use it. I don’t interact with the app anyway — I don’t see it. I don’t often see my Instagram, Facebook and X feeds either. My doomscrolling has decreased drastically.

Overall: 5/5 ⭐

One important thing you should know, my dear reader, is that no one paid me to review this app in such a positive way. I just became a much happier person because of this digital product, and that’s why I want you to try it too. At least, if you feel you have an issue with spending too much time on social networks.

Download the app and use the promo code EIDOS-DESIGN to get a one-month premium account.

Lemio is a perfect example of calm technology in action.

It’s emotionally intelligent, frictionless, visually soothing, and quietly empowering. It doesn’t punish, it supports. And in doing so, it achieves something rare: it makes doing less feel like doing more.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to reclaim their time, energy, and peace of mind, without deleting all their apps or fleeing to the woods.

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III. The 10,000-year clock that ticks only once a year

A Dose of Inspiration

In a world that reloads every second, there’s a clock being built inside a mountain that ticks once a year, with a hand that moves once every century, and a cuckoo that comes out once every millennium.

It’s called the Clock of the Long Now, and it’s not fiction.

This mechanical wonder is a real project aimed at shifting how we think: from short-term distraction to long-term reflection. It’s powered by the Earth’s thermal cycles and human visitors who physically wind its gears. It’s not about telling time. It’s about feeling time.

It’s a reminder of the kind of design we rarely talk about: design that outlives trends, resists urgency, and forces us to slow down.

The Clock of the Long Now doesn’t fight for attention, it just… waits. Patiently. Purposefully. And in doing so, it becomes unforgettable and epic.

And this is it for today,

We’ve discussed reclaiming our focus, honoring the quiet and selecting tools that save us time. Whether it’s calming technologies or epic clocks ticking inside mountains, the message is the same: Not everything needs to be fast. Not everything needs to scream.

In fact, the most powerful designs often whisper.

So, as you go about your day, switching tabs, responding to messages and adjusting pixels, I hope you’ll remember something from this issue. Perhaps it’s the idea that your work can help others to feel more human. Or that your interface can provide respite rather than noise. Or that your next product decision might be about intention rather than optimization.

Thank you, and see you next time!

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks.

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

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Mykola here, back with September's most fascinating finds from the intersection of design and technology.

This month was full of surprises, with new launches, acquisitions, and strategic moves. While most companies are chasing AI features, the stories that caught my attention took a different approach entirely.

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Fresh Squeeze: Launches & Makeovers

Framer Design Pages: The Inevitable Move, Beautifully Executed

Framer finally did what they should have done years ago. On September 16th, they launched Design Pages, their solution to the perennial designer workflow: explore in Figma, build in Framer, gripe about the handoff, repeat.

"This update turns Framer from a web builder into a true design tool," they announced, which is corporate speak for, "We got tired of losing designers to Figma during the fun part." Smart move. Why let your users fall in love with someone else's canvas when they're dreaming up ideas?

The features aren't exactly revolutionary: freeform canvas, vector editing, P3 colors. It's what any serious designer expects from a design tool in 2025. The execution feels solid, and the timing makes sense.

And they made it free of charge. You can do as many projects and pages as you want. While Figma charges for team features, Framer bets that they can win designers over during exploration and keep them through production.

Will it work? Hard to say. But if you're going to be late, it's good to have a backup plan for the evening.

Paper: Betting on the Design-to-Code Bridge Everyone Wants

Paper just opened signups, and their main idea is pretty convincing: stop designing pictures of interfaces and start designing the actual interface. Just put code components right onto your design canvas, import your real design system, and export actual flex layouts.

This isn't just another design tool with AI sprinkles. Paper lets you work with real React components on the canvas, use shaders for advanced effects, and publish live sites directly from your designs.

The timing seems right. While everyone else is building AI prompt interfaces, Paper is solving the fundamental disconnect between what designers create and what developers build. We're not going to get into "it looks different in code" conversations anymore here.

The technical challenge is huge — to make code components feel as fluid as design tools while maintaining the flexibility developers need. But the problem is real enough that it's worth watching someone take a serious step at it.

Figma's Prompt-to-Edit: The AI Feature We Actually Wanted

Figma just launched their prompt-to-edit alpha. Just select the layers, type "make this darker and move it left," and it'll happen. There are no creative prompts or generation, just direct manipulation through natural language.

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This feels like what everyone was expecting when Figma first announced AI features, instead of the image generation tools they've been pushing. Most designers don't need AI to create from scratch, but we do need it to handle the tedious stuff that breaks our flow. "Resize these 12 cards to match the sidebar width" shouldn't require clicking through every component when two seconds of typing could do it.

The beauty is in the specifics. You're not asking AI to use its imagination — you're telling it exactly what needs to be changed about work that's already out there. It's more like AI as a better interface, not AI as a creative replacement.

I'd love to see more of this: Instead of "generate a landing page," it's more like, "Fix this spacing issue across 47 screens."

Wealthsimple Acquires Fey: Design-First Thinking Gets Rewarded

Here's an acquisition story that actually makes me optimistic. On August 27th, Wealthsimple bought Montreal-based Fey, an investment research platform that tackled the gap between basic trading apps and complex terminals.

Fey's founder Thiago Costa put it perfectly:

Natural language stock screening, AI-driven earnings analysis, personalized news feeds, all wrapped in what designers have been calling a piece of art.

The execution was impressive. Costa's design work made complex financial data approachable without oversimplifying it. I'm excited about this for more than just the product quality. It's that Wealthsimple recognized good design as a competitive advantage worth acquiring. They acquired the team that knows how to make complexity feel simple and beautiful.

Fey will shut down as a standalone platform by September 30, but its three-person team is joining Wealthsimple to offer its features to Wealthsimple's 3 million users. Sometimes, the best way to exit is to become part of something bigger that can amplify your impact.

Atlassian's $610M Browser Bet Signals Something Bigger

Atlassian just paid $610M for The Browser Company, and the valuation raises some uncomfortable questions. Arc & Dia are well-designed, but $610M for zero revenue feels disconnected from reality.

Carl Rivera summed up the concerns about this deal: "AI isn't one monolith. Infra could stay strong while the shell/UI layer proves overpriced." Atlassian didn't buy infrastructure. They bought a beautiful interface — the same layer that could be most vulnerable when valuations correct.

It's a reality check for anyone working in design. While companies like NVIDIA have technical advantages, browser makers and design-focused startups essentially have only front-ends and lack substantial defensibility. When bubbles burst, it's the attractive interfaces that get hit first.

The Browser Company is shifting its focus to Dia, its AI-first browser. Only time will tell if this valuation makes sense.

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Handpicked Highlights

• Web Interface Guidelines by Vercel Vercel's new interface guidelines skip the fluff and focus on practical decisions, such as how to handle loading states, when to disable buttons, and which error messages are helpful to users.

• Shape: A New Podcast for Designers by Designers Finally, a design podcast that sounds like real designer conversations, not startup theater. There are no buzzwords or sales pitches — just honest talk about the craft and messy reality of design work. Refreshing!

• 2 Weeks AI: Gentle AI Learning AI resources usually assume you know nothing or everything. This one strikes a balance by providing just enough context to understand what's happening without overwhelming you with jargon.

• Carl Rivera on Craft as the Differentiator Shopify's CDO discusses building design teams, maintaining craft in AI workflows, and shipping quality products on a large scale.

• Guide to Implementing Accessible SVG Elements This guide provides practical steps for using screen readers, managing focus, and ensuring adequate color contrast. It explains the difference between decorative graphics and truly accessible interfaces in simple terms.

Looking ahead

Some companies are taking different approaches. While the industry is chasing AI features, the most compelling moves are focusing on creative workflows and genuine user needs. Regardless of whether these approaches stick around or fade into the next trend cycle, it's refreshing to see companies try something different.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with a friend and don’t forget to subscribe!

Sincerely,
Mykola Korzh

To make your experience with us more enjoyable, useful, and fun, we have prepared a 👉 UX Scream Sheet PDF for you.

It’s a collection of the 100 worst UX mistakes, along with recommendations on how to avoid them. This PDF originated from my notes, in which I share these mistakes. Don't forget to share it with your friends, as well as the link to our Substack 😊

Download UX Scream Sheet

We hope you find it useful and enjoy using it!

Before we start today's story, we'd like to ask you to take a quick few-minute survey. We want to get to know you better and understand which topics and formats you like the most.

We know that time is our most valuable resource. That's why we're offering a 3-month premium subscription to everyone who takes this short survey.

Thank you very much! 🖤

My friend and I work in digital tech. I'm a designer, and he's a content strategist and writer. And we’re both trying to automate certain tasks using AI, improve or test our solutions. As best friends, we discuss everything that happens in our lives. However, over the past year, AI has been the main topic of our daily conversations: What else can be done? How can we automate this process? How can we improve that? Let's do this!

In the end, I had a terrible insight. In the pursuit of technology and in this frantic battle for my attention between various types of content, products, and innovations, I’m stuck behind a screen. I'm turning into a snail, curled up and locked in my office in front of a screen. I forgot what grass feels like, and I forgot what it's like to have adventures and have an offline conversation with people, which is not exhausting but enriching.

With the advent of AI, the battle for people's attention has become more intense than ever, because AI tools have become another weapon, and even those who didn't previously consider blogging or posting their "thoughts", now generate banal content as if on a conveyor belt. The same thing is happening in design.

I became curious: Are there products in today's world that respect our attention, instead of stealing it?

Today's episode is about that.

In this issue:

• The Silent Design Revolution
  Reflection on calm technology, in which the design takes a step back so the user can step forward.

• One sec App Review
  A calm-tech product that promises to slow you down.

• Where Grief Becomes Design
  A moving story of rejection, resilience, and how one designer turned pain into shared empathy.

I. The Silent Design Revolution

Insight

Not every product needs to scream.

And yet, most do.

Open your phone right now. Chances are, there’s an app begging for your attention. Not only one I bet. Glowing red dots. A flashy CTA. A notification saying, “We miss you 🥺”

They all want your time, your data, your clicks.

This video sparked my research. It's a 2016 TED Talk by Amber Case, a user experience designer and cyborg anthropologist who studies the interaction between humans and machines.

She describes how we got here and how we try to survive in this era of interruptive technology. And then she asks, “How could we make technology that conserves our attention?”

We’ve spent the last decade perfecting “engagement.” Notifications became nudges. Micro-interactions turned into dopamine levers. Interfaces were optimized to hook rather than help.

And only now a shift is quietly unfolding. One that doesn’t chase attention, but protects it. One that prioritizes stillness, clarity, and trust.

Amber reinforces Mark Weiser’s notion of calm technology:

Tools should reside in the periphery of our awareness, moving subtly to the foreground only when needed, much like how ambient sounds alert us without overwhelming our attention.

Calm technology should be essential and intentional. It should inform us, not demand more input than necessary. The design’s goal is to be the simplest possible solution to the user’s need, nothing more, nothing less.

Then, we'll be back on track, solving users' problems instead of creating new ones.

It’s about intentional quiet — design that steps back so users can step forward.

Do we have such digital products, that are intentionally quite? We do!

• ✍️ mymind — where there’s no feed, no metrics, no pings. Just space to think.

• 🎧 Endel — an ambient sound app that helps you focus without showing off.

• 📚 Reader by Readwise — where every pixel feels deliberate and nothing begs for clicks.

Designing quietly doesn’t mean designing less. It means designing with restraint. It means trusting your user to want your product, not to be tricked into using it.

It often leads to greater loyalty, stronger brand attachment, and emotional resonance. Because when everything else is loud, silence feels like a luxury. And the brands that offer calm will be the ones we remember when the noise dies down.

🧠 Bonus reading: Designing Calm Technology by Amber Case

We can also say that, for most tech businesses aiming for quick wins, hooks, and fast growth, this strategy is frightening. Some even try to exploit this, promising calm and mindfulness but grabbing your attention and demanding more of your time.

That’s why, as you explore the great products I mentioned above, I'll also show how businesses use this trend and how calm design can turn to the dark side.

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II. one sec App Review: a Polite Doorman or a Sneaky Attention Hound?

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

We’re spotlighting one sec app today, a product that doesn't ask for your attention. It tries to give it back to you and to simply slow you down. Whenever you attempt to open a potentially addictive app like Instagram, TikTok, X, or Threads, One Sec intercepts with a 5–10 second breathing animation and a question: “Do you really want to open this app?"

It's like a polite doorman for your attention, gently asking if you've come to the right place.

Visceral level: 5/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

Essentially, one second doesn't overwhelm because it only has two screens, two buttons, and one decision. You see these screens only when you try to open an app that wastes your time, energy, and attention.

Of course, there is also the dashboard and all the other fancy features inside the app itself. But it’s super minimalistic, with modern clean typography, a calm color palette, and soothing micro-animations. The welcome screen is amazing, delivering a "wow" effect with its animations and vibrations.

It's also notable how developers are emphasizing that the app is based on scientific research. There are links to articles that create the impression that the app is effective. There’s also a separate section called "Suggestions" with articles on the topic. However, these articles are nothing special and seem to have been written just for the sake of it, as they are written in a very generic style.

The design is good! And it feels more like a wellness app than a blocker, which is exactly the point. It doesn’t scold or shame. It simply… Pauses you.

Behavioral level: 2/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

This is where one sec falls short.

Although the app's purpose is excellent, the setup process is far from seamless. Despite its minimalist appearance, effectively using one sec demands a considerable time investment, especially if you want to block multiple apps and websites. Setting it up requires manually going through iOS Shortcuts app (or Android Digital Wellbeing) and configuring a separate automation for each app. Want to block Instagram, TikTok, Threads, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube? That’s six separate setups, and you're just getting started.

The app provides instructions. As Christ Silvestri pointed out in his article:

Even with guidance, this process is clunky, repetitive, that’s why boring and exhausting, and error-prone, especially for less tech-savvy users. Once you move past the setup, things don't get much smoother.

The Customize section is packed with toggles, timers, triggers, integrations, analytics, graphs, and nudges. It feels less like a calming intervention and more like stepping into a cockpit. Rather than promoting calm behavior, it risks overwhelming users with options.

Ironically, one sec might actually steal more of your attention during setup than you expected in trying to protect it.

Reflective level: 0/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

This is one of those rare cases where an app has an important mission but completely misses the mark in execution.

one sec aims to encourage healthier tech habits, slow us down, and protect our attention. Its philosophy aligns perfectly with calm design, humane interfaces, and mindful technology. That's precisely why I chose it. I was looking for a product that could exemplify the concept of a calm design revolution, and one sec was recommended in numerous newsletters, blogs, and app roundups.

But after spending hours with it, I was absolutely disappointed.

An app that promises to help us focus shouldn't require dozens of shortcuts, automations, and toggles just to feel functional. It shouldn't feel like you need a tech degree to protect your attention. Rather than gently guiding users, it overwhelms them with setup friction and customization complexity. In trying to be helpful, it becomes another mental burden.

What felt like a polite doorman for your attention, turned to be a feature trader and a secret attention-seeker.

This was the moment when the emotional promise and the real experience diverged.

one sec reflects none of the calm it claims to provide. When an app positioned as your “digital breathing space” makes you feel frustrated and lost, it's not just bad UX; it's a failure of values. It hurts even more because the intention was so good.

Overall: 2.1/5

One sec is a rare case in which good intentions are undermined by poor execution. Visually, it shows promise with clean graphics and calming animations. But dig deeper, and the cracks widen quickly. One sec had the right problem, the right idea, and the right timing. However, it lost it in the complexity of its own solution.

We need more tools that protect our attention. But we also need them to respect our attention.

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III. Where Grief Becomes Design

A Dose of Inspiration

Designers often discuss empathy, but it's uncommon to witness it conveyed as powerfully and vulnerably as in this artwork by Claire Peckham, a fellow designer and artist.

On LinkedIn, she shared a collage of 60 job rejections she got, layered together into a single visual piece of art. “Thank you again for your interest…”

Claire writes:

For years now, life has moved on for the people around me. My friends get jobs. My parents go on vacation. All the while my life stays perfectly still, frozen in an endlessly repeating clip of me being casually erased with the falsely cheery text of a form email.

Yet, from this quiet grief, she created something that transformed isolation into solidarity.

When I saw this, I was reminded of other stories in which great tension and tragedy gave birth to something beautiful and creative. I believe what is happening now with our attention due to digital information flows is a tragedy. And this experience we must endure and reflect on.

That’s why designers, assemble! We must save this world! 🛡

And this is it for today,

As we continue designing in the age of automation and algorithms, let’s not forget why we fell in love with design in the first place: its ability to connect, inspire, and respect. In a world that constantly demands more of our attention, perhaps the most radical thing we can do is give attention back to people instead of products.

So here’s a gentle reminder to log off sometimes. Let your brain breathe. Let your heart recalibrate.

Stay curious, stay kind, and design as if someone's dignity depends on it.

Because it does.

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks.

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

I'm Mykola, and I’m here today with my best finds from the world of design, tech, and AI.

This is my way of giving back. Throughout my career, many designers have kindly shared their knowledge, feedback, and time with me, simply because they wanted to help me figure things out. Their generosity is what got me here, and now I do the same. I curate and share in the hope that it will resonate with you the way it did with me. Think of me as a friend who won't stop texting you about cool finds.

Today, I've gathered the launches and resources that genuinely excited me, tools that made me think "finally!" or "I need to try this now!"

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Fresh Squeeze: Launches & Makeovers

Comet: The AI-First web browser from Perplexity

Perplexity is entering the browser market with Comet, designed from the ground up for intelligent, real-time information discovery with a built-in AI assistant.

Unlike traditional browsers, Comet integrates conversational AI directly into your browsing: it summarizes articles, answers questions about any page, and helps you research on the fly — all without leaving your tab. It can even buy products and book hotels on your behalf. And yes, it's beautiful.

We pay so much attention to different UIs and products, but rarely see a well-designed browser, probably our most-used daily tool. Arc started this shift a few years ago with its manifesto to break rules and stop building boring products. But Arc stayed niche, maybe too experimental. Comet feels different. Its polished interactions and thoughtful details don't scream "Look how modern I am!" Instead, they quietly help you get things done faster. I believe this could genuinely change how we work.

Indy AI: Your AI-powered career assistant from Contra

Contra unveiled Indy AI, an AI-powered assistant for freelancers and independents. It analyzes your existing network to uncover opportunities, finding relevant projects and connections tailored to your skills and interests.

As someone always hunting for freelance projects and side hustles, I'm exhausted by the endless job boards and platforms. Most of my best projects came through a friend of a friend, a random DM, or someone remembering me from a project years ago — never from sending resumes into the void. That's why Indy AI caught my attention: it promises to work with your existing network rather than just throwing more job listings at you. The idea of an AI that focuses on network-based opportunities instead of traditional applications feels like the right direction.

The mascot design is genuinely charming, too — it actually feels like having that assistant you've always wanted. Here's hoping it delivers on the promise of less time in application black holes, more time creating.

Unicorn Studio: a new tool to create awesome interactive WebGL Magic

The Unicorn Studio broke my brain in the best way. Every time I've tried adding interactivity to my designs (mouse-triggered backgrounds, 3D elements, sci-fi effects), it felt impossibly hard and time-consuming. Now I can create these effects so quickly that I don't even understand the technical side – I just experiment and smile because the process is as fun as the result.

Here is an interactive background I created in less than an hour, and I already have some concepts in mind to integrate this Unicorn Studio into my website.

Handpicked Highlights

• A practical and insightful guide from Vitaly Friedman on how to design the AI patterns, which are indeed helpful for both users and businesses.

  Technology is here to serve and to help people get somewhere. So if anything, we should not be that obsessed about AI, but to be absolutely obsessed about humans because they are the ones who are kind of using that technology in the end.

  To be honest, it is so perfectly said, especially in today's "AI-first" noise, that it's easy to forget that AI is just a tool. What matters isn't whether you solved a problem with AI, but how well and quickly you solved it for real people.

• A free library of typography guides created by Google Fonts in collaboration with typographic experts from around the world. Finally, confidence to use fonts beyond Inter + is a perfect way to get more knowledge in typography.

• Joey Banks shares a free lesson on how to use Figma MCP. Joey's teaching style makes complex features feel approachable. Saved me from my "I'll learn this later" folder graveyard.

• The Cursor's Head of Design reimagined portfolios as personal digital spaces. Seeing someone treat their website like a living workspace rather than a static showcase made me completely rethink my own site. Time to stop treating portfolios like museums.

• Honest UX Talks: Interview with Henry Modissett (Perplexity): Honest, broad-reaching discussion on AI and the future of the design profession. No buzzwords, no hype, just honest conversation about what's actually happening in the industry.

Looking ahead

Each of these tools delivered that "finally!" moment I mentioned at the start: that feeling when technology actually catches up to how we want to work. But they also raise bigger questions: How will tools like Comet change how we search and learn? Will AI assistants like Indy make networking feel less human or more meaningful? And as creating gets easier, what becomes valuable?

More questions than answers, but that's exactly what makes this moment in design and tech so exciting.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with a friend or hit subscribe!

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Sincerely,
Mykola Korzh

Somehow, summer is already slipping away. Here in Berlin, we've only had a couple of warm days. That’s it! Just enough time to pull out the sandals and immediately regret it. 🌧️

But even if the sunshine was brief, the momentum behind Eidos Design certainly wasn’t.

What began as a modest newsletter has quietly grown into something more: a community of thoughtful, curious, and passionate designers. And after months of experimentation, feedback, and reflection, I’m excited to share that we’ve finally defined our long-term strategy for Eidos, which is now live on the updated About page.

Here’s the short version of what’s ahead:

🔹 Free Monthly Newsletters: Delivered to your inbox twice per month on the 15th and 25th of every month:

• First one featuring the familiar rhythm you’ve come to expect: an insight, a product review, and a dose of inspiration.

• The second one is the hottest news from the world of technology and digital design, courtesy of our new author, Mykola.

🔹 Paid subscribers will have access to exclusive content, such as in-depth articles about AI in UX Studio and the UX Job Toolkit, and other exclusive essays designed to promote growth and stimulate critical thinking.

🔹 For our founding Members we have the opportunity to work with me one-on-one through Eidos Career Doctor, which offers personalized mentoring and support for designers navigating career shifts, new opportunities, or simply searching for clarity and momentum.

As Eidos Design evolves, our mission remains the same: to help you become a more intentional designer.

To make your experience with us more enjoyable, useful, and fun, we have prepared a 👉 UX Scream Sheet PDF for you.

It’s a collection of the 100 worst UX mistakes, along with recommendations on how to avoid them. This PDF originated from my notes, in which I share these mistakes. Don't forget to share it with your friends, as well as the link to our Substack 😊

Now, let's dive into this month's issue: a critical look at why digital products have become so serious and why it's time to bring back joy. Play. Whimsy.

Not everything needs to be optimized.

Some things should make you smile.

In this issue:

• Why Most Digital Products Feel Too Serious
  And why design needs humor, charm, and moments of delight now more than ever.

• We explore GoodNotes App
  A note-taking app inspired by skeuomorphism that dares to bring back rich visual texture. We determine whether it delivers a better experience.

• Typatone
  A tool that can turn your simple text into a poetic, musical experience.

I. Why So Serious? How Digital Products Lost Their Joy

Insight

Somewhere along the way, digital products forgot how to smile.

Open your favorite productivity app, and you’ll likely be greeted by gray-scale dashboards, perfectly aligned grids, corporate blue gradients, and just enough padding to make a UX auditor happy. It’s polished. It’s logical. It’s efficient.

But it’s also boring.

The rise of minimalism, dark mode, and the pursuit of "professionalism" has sterilized digital design. In an effort to avoid appearing frivolous or "unusable," we've ended up with products that all look, speak, and feel the same. Interfaces are competent but cold. They're predictable but forgettable.

But it wasn't always this way.

Remember the early days of the internet? The little touches of personality? Yahoo’s animated mail icon? Or Tumblr's playful loading animations? And who could forget Microsoft Word’s infamous Clippy? Annoying, yes, but memorable. There was a time when software had character. Apps didn't just function, they flirted, surprised, and entertained.

That's because good design inherently brings joy — the kind that makes people smile while working or linger just a bit longer than necessary. Delight, whimsy, and even a dash of absurdity aren't "extras", but powerful emotional hooks.

As Don Norman wrote, great design should appeal to the visceral, behavioral, and reflective levels of experience. We’ve spent the last decade focusing on behavior, on making things work. However, we’ve neglected the visceral: how things feel, how they charm, and how they spark curiosity. We rarely touch on the reflective level, which is the lasting impression.

The truth is that users need more than just functional products. They need emotionally engaging ones.

Even small details can make a difference.

• A playful empty state illustration that feels like a wink.

• A “Congrats, you did it!” animation upon completing a task.

• An error message that offers empathy instead of robotic shame.

These things matter. They humanize the digital world.

Of course, not every app should be a circus. But if you’re designing a product — even a "serious" one, then ask yourself: Where can we be kind? Where can we be playful? Where can we relax our standards just a bit and allow the user to experience joy?

The best designs don't just solve problems; they make people feel alive while doing so.

Some companies are already proving that this approach works.

🟡 Duolingo, for example, has a green owl mascot that has become an internet celebrity, whether you love it or hate it. With playful push notifications, meme-worthy reminders, and unexpected micro-interactions, Duolingo transforms the drudgery of language learning into a game. It's not just usable — it's lovable.

🟣 Meditation apps are serious business, but Headspace adds a touch of whimsy with character animations, soothing tones, and visual metaphors that feel like bedtime stories for adults. It's calm with a touch of charm.

🟡 Before their rebrand, Mailchimp was a masterclass in expressive UI. Remember Freddie the chimp high-fiving you after sending an email campaign? Those playful touches created an emotional connection in an otherwise dry field.

⚪️ Known for its clean design, Notion also knows when to wink. From minimal confetti after completing tasks to quirky loading messages like "Squirrels are mining your workspace," Notion gently infuses joy into productivity.

These brands understand that functionality and fun aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, combining the two is how you create emotionally sticky products that people remember, talk about, and recommend.

As summer winds down and the design world gears up for fall releases and feature sprints, it's time to ask ourselves:

What if your interface didn't just guide the user?

But also smiled at them?

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II. GoodNotes App Review: Where Digital Feels Like Paper

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

This month, we’re taking a closer look at GoodNotes, a popular iOS/Android app among students, planners, and creatives. It provides the experience of writing on real paper while offering the convenience of digital tools, offering a contemporary take on skeuomorphic design.

Visceral level: 4.5/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

From the moment you see its icon, you know it will bring you joy! And GoodNotes feels more like opening a beloved notebook than launching an app. Its realistic paper textures, visible page edges, and subtle shading around notebook tabs evoke warmth and familiarity.

Pen strokes have natural variation, ink splashes appear when you erase, and page-turn interactions include page curl effects. It’s not kitsch; it’s a design that taps into physical memory.

Although GoodNotes is rooted in skeuomorphism, it is modern in restraint. Clean icons, minimal color palettes, and intuitive layouts keep the interface focused and elegant. This demonstrates that subtle tactile design can greatly enhance the user experience.

However, amid all this beauty and humanity, there is sometimes a sense of untidiness. The design is genuine but unpolished. One sometimes gets the impression that the main category of users is children or teenagers, and the untidiness of the visuals might distort the overall impression.

Behavioral level: 5/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

GoodNotes offers all the features you’d expect from a note-taking app, including note-taking, freehand drawing, PDF annotation, and handwriting recognition. However, it also adds a level of polish that sets it apart.

Pen pressure feels responsive, page navigation is effortless, and features like lasso select are smooth as butter. Turning pages clicks just right. Creating and resizing handwritten sketches is surprisingly precise.

The paper-like UI enhances comprehension and memory; flipping through handwritten notes is more memorable than scrolling on a flat screen. There are rare glitches, e.g. layer alignment can misfire on imported PDFs, and large documents can lag occasionally, but these are minor in an otherwise refined experience.

Reflective level: 5/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

GoodNotes doesn't merely evoke nostalgia. It transforms it into a modern tool.

It fosters knowledge growth in an intuitive and personalized way. Many users form an emotional connection with the app due to its tactile gestures and journal-like texture. GoodNotes turns note-taking into an experience that feels grounded, intentional, and memorable.

This app blends innovation and emotional resonance, delivering productivity with authenticity. Unlike other note-taking tools, GoodNotes remembers how people feel. GoodNotes remembers.

Overall: 4.8/5

If you think skeuomorphic design is dead, think again. GoodNotes demonstrates that, when executed effectively, a tactile user interface can be elegant, efficient, and deeply human. It proves that digital design can feel warm and familiar without sacrificing efficiency.

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III. When Words Become Music

A Dose of Inspiration

Sometimes, words alone aren’t enough.

My wife is traveling this week, and I miss her. I wanted to send her something more than just a message to keep her warm. So, I thought maybe a poem? 🙂 But I’m no poet, believe me, I've tried.

Then, another idea sparked: What if I could set the poem to music?

I play the guitar, but I’m still learning, so composing something from scratch felt out of reach. That’s when I stumbled upon Typatone, a little digital gem that does something magical. It turns every letter you type into a musical note!

So I typed. A simple message from the heart. Suddenly, it had rhythm and harmony — a melody made from words I couldn't quite find!

If you’ve ever wanted to express something beautiful but didn't know how, maybe this tool will help you too.

Typatone turns your typed words into ambient music. Every letter creates a note, every sentence becomes a melody. It’s simple, strange, and unexpectedly moving. There’s no goal, no UI clutter — just sound, rhythm, and poetry in motion.

A beautiful reminder that digital tools don’t have to be useful to be memorable. Sometimes, it’s enough for them to be magical.

And this is it for today,

From the fading summer skies of Berlin to the quiet joy of playful user interfaces and musical typewriters, I hope this edition gave you reason to pause, smile, and reflect on the emotional power of digital design.

As we are now in the second half of the year, I want to thank you again for being part of this growing, curious, creative community. Whether you’re here for insights, inspiration, or just to feel less alone on your design journey, I’m glad you’re with us.

If something in this issue sparked a thought, memory, or even a chuckle, hit reply! I’d love to hear from you!

Until next time, and keep designing with clarity, courage, and a bit of mischief!

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks.

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

July is already in full swing! I hope those of you in Europe are doing well after heat wave. With this new issue of Eidos Design Newsletter, we'll refresh ourselves!

July 2 is usually the midpoint of the year. It's a good time to revisit the goals we set at the beginning of the year and consider what can be changed. Do we need to speed up or is it time to slow down?..

In our case, however, we want to move even faster! We want the Eidos Design community to continue growing. Over the past six months, several hundred subscribers have joined Eidos, which makes me very happy and grateful. Eidos is consistently ranked in the Rising in Design category on Substack. And we just launched Eidos Doctor — a separate service to help designers looking for work on this difficult path.

Ultimately, it all translates into the likes, comments, shares, and appreciation you send us. So, I thank you in return! And I want to end this rather long introduction with a special thank you promised in our Leaderboard.

In this issue:

• Accessibility as a Must-Have

  Why the new European Accessibility Act turns “nice-to-have” guidelines into legal requirements every designer must master.

• mymind App Review

  A minimalist “second brain” that whispers calm — until its AI takes the wheel.

• Post-internet artifacts

  Seth Steinman’s post-internet artifacts remind us that every pixel still sits on ancient stone.

I. Accessibility As a Must-Have

Insight

The time has come! Accessibility is no longer just a bonus; it's now a necessity for all digital interfaces.

On June 28, 2025, the European Accessibility Act went into effect in the EU. This legislation requires companies to ensure digital accessibility. This includes all digital products, such as websites, smartphone and TV apps, ATMs, ticket machines, and the touchscreens of household appliances.

Violations will not be dismissed as mere technical glitches. Instead, they will result in real fines, lost market share, and legal liability.

Design is becoming a legal category.

Basic principles of accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) that you must know right away (if it’s not the case yet):

• Text contrast ≥ 4.5:1

• Alt texts and explanatory tooltips

• Full keyboard navigation

• Visible focus, skip to content, consistent navigation, and visible errors

• User control

• Compatibility with screen readers

As designers, we should pay special attention to the following:

• Color contrast — according to WCAG 2.1 AA.

• Clear links: Avoid “click here”. The link text should describe an action.

• Heading hierarchy: Logical structure (in both design and code) is more important than appearance. For example, h1 can only appear once per page.

• Keyboard navigation: All buttons have a clear focus state.

• Compatible with screen reader: Semantics and aria-labels.

• Video alternatives: Subtitles and transcripts.

In this context, I'm reminded of airline websites, which offer some of the worst user experiences around. Low-cost airlines like Ryanair, EasyJet, and Wizz Air are the worst. They use dark patterns, try to sell you something at every turn, and make buying tickets as difficult as possible, hoping users will make mistakes.

To understand why accessibility is important for businesses, I recommend watching this talk by Piccia Neri, "The EAA is coming to bite you in the Arse." If you haven't yet gained accessibility expertise or at least a basic understanding of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), don't delay. Take courses and consult with experts to get answers to all your questions on the topic.

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II. mymind App Review: Minimalism Meets Memory, or Just a Stylish Black Hole?

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

This month, we’re diving into mymind, a minimalist note-taking and idea-saving app that calls itself “a second brain.” It’s been gaining quiet momentum among designers, writers, and digital thinkers who crave a calmer, more aesthetic alternative to cluttered productivity tools.

mymind promises a frictionless space for your thoughts, visuals, and inspiration — no folders, no labels, no chaos. But does it really work as effortlessly as it claims, or does the elegance mask deeper usability trade-offs?

Let’s unpack it through our familiar design lens.

Visceral level: 5/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

Opening mymind is like walking into a minimalist design gallery. The color palette is understated — mostly black, white, and soft tones. It gives a sleek, modern aura. But it’s more than just aesthetics: the lack of clutter immediately communicates calm and focus.

It doesn’t scream for attention. It doesn’t onboard you with popups or nudges. It simply is. A confident, almost arrogant silence, and that’s refreshing in a world of dopamine-chasing apps

I will probably use this app as an example of perfect design. Its clean and simple design is compelling and memorable thanks to its details. It's minimalism with a wow effect!

Behavioral level: 5/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

mymind markets itself as a “second brain” — a space where you save what matters, without worrying about folders, tags, or structure. You just… drop things in. A quote. An image. A link. A thought. And mymind’s AI does the rest — auto-tagging, categorizing, and making everything searchable.

This approach is bold. Liberating, even. There’s no pressure to organize or label, you trust the system to make sense of it later. For visual thinkers, creatives, and digital magpies, it’s a dream.

And here's the moment when reality strikes back. Not that harsh, though 😁

While the experience is seamless and visually elegant, the lack of structure and flexibility in creating the system can become a double-edged sword. If you’re a control freak, this app might slowly drive you mad. It’s just a collection, a gallery of things, that you can’t fully control. You can’t really tweak the metadata. You can add your tags, and delete the auto-generated ones, no fast ways (like just renaming). I mean, it's one of those cases where you feel like the AI is in charge. But it does its job well!

It’s the anti-Notion app. And that’s both its strength and its limit. It’s not about task management or productivity. It’s about inspiration, collection, and calm curation.

Also worth noting: syncing across devices is fast and reliable, and the mobile experience feels just as polished as desktop — no small feat for a note-taking app.

Reflective level: 5/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

The app is more than just a tool; it's a whole philosophy. It's hard to say if the philosophy is new, but the app's implementation of it is amazing. It’s for people who are done with clutter, who don’t want another dashboard. But also who don’t need control and customization.

It reflects a deeper cultural shift toward mindful digital spaces. It asks: What if collecting thoughts could feel like art? What if the place where you save your ideas could be beautiful — even meditative?

Questions like these mark this app as outstanding on a reflective level. Frankly, I am inspired by the beauty of this digital mind.

Using mymind long-term is like creating a quiet, personal museum of everything that inspires you. It's not just something you use — it's something you inhabit.

Of course, it’s not for everyone. Power users might find it lacking. But for those craving simplicity in an overly complicated world, mymind offers something rare: a design that respects your attention.

Overall: 5/5

Hold on! We have another app with a 5/5 rating! Woohoo!

Yeah, mymind is not a tool you “use” — it’s a space you step into. It's a safe haven for your digital brain. It’s not built for productivity hacks or collaboration. It’s built for you, and only you. And in the end, it’s the experience that made me to write this review in this specific way, using metaphors and all the possible ways to highlight the beauty of this product. In a sea of apps that shout, mymind whispers, and sometimes, that’s exactly what we need.

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III. At The Edge of The Digital, We Return To Stone

A Dose of Inspiration

As designers, we often rush toward the next big thing: sleeker interfaces, smarter systems, and cleaner code. However, real inspiration sometimes comes not from what’s ahead but from what’s beneath our feet.

Seth Steinman, a sculptor and painter, invites us to rethink how technology feels. Rather than chasing hyper-efficiency and polished minimalism, he turns to the origins of technology — stone and wood, merging them with digital nostalgia. Imagine the Windows XP startup screen projected onto cracked rock. MS Paint. Dozens of Safari tabs carved into rough wood.

His work is a rebellion — not against technology, but against its sterilization. He asks: What if our digital memories had weight, texture, splinters?

There’s something deeply human in Steinman’s approach — a bridge between our current interfaces and the primitive tools that built civilization. A reminder that everything new stands on something ancient.

And this is it for today,

I hope this issue nudged you to double-check color contrast in your designs, or rethink your note-taking habits and how we collect digital things.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts — hit reply, leave a comment, or share the newsletter with a friend.

Need career clarity? Remember that Eidos Career Doctor is now live for free portfolio & CV reviews. Let’s keep fixing what’s broken in the design world.

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks.

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

There's been a lot of news in the industry lately. New tools, new trends that require a look, a quick test, and some reflection. And I've noticed that while most new tools, trends, and products get me excited at first, I tend to get lost in all the new stuff. All of the new products, such as v0, Cursor, bolt.new, and others, are absolutely great, but I don’t have a favorite yet. And trends? It's like we've seen it all before; there's nothing new.

I'm traveling now and away from my family for a while. I've been thinking about my love for them (hey Nat, love you! 🫶), and all the ideas above, as well as my current environment, have framed a question: Are we designing products that are truly worth falling in love with?

That's why I start this issue by talking about why a Minimum Viable Product just isn't enough anymore, and I highlight the key difference between viability and lovability. Then we'll check out a product that's pretty far from good design practices, but that millions of people love. Finally, we'll hear a story from a designer about how she gave a hug to Wikipedia.

So, this issue is all about love!

In this issue:

• Minimum Viable Product ≠ Minimum Lovable Product: Why viability alone doesn’t build lasting user connections, and how love became an essential design metric.

• Vinted App Review: Can a popular app succeed even with a messy interface? An honest look at user experience, from chaos to community-driven sustainability.

• Redesigning Wikipedia for Monetization: An inspiring case study that reimagines Wikipedia’s user experience, balancing functionality and profitability.

I. Minimum Viable Product ≠ Minimum Lovable Product

Insight

A couple of days ago I read a banal phrase that nevertheless struck a chord:

From my workplace, albeit long ago:

My team once launched the MVP of a new app feature. It was epic! Our primary goal was speed — launching it to test everything and continue building on that foundation. There were many technical nuances that needed to be agreed upon and a lot of stakeholder turnover.

And we managed to do it. Quite quickly, even qualitatively. Initially, the metrics allowed us to declare a small victory. Then, suddenly, there was a real collapse.

Interestingly, that before launching we of course ran tests and received feedback like this: “Yes, it works, but it's not as smooth or pleasant as your competitors.” But who pays attention to such abstract, unmeasurable remarks, right?

In short, something that is simply viable is never attractive. What is attractive is something that is healthy, beautiful, thoughtful, and even sophisticated. You can fall in love with that!

Sure thing, we rolled everything back later. “Well, now, designers, you have the green light. Add a little love to it!”, they said.

We did it again. It took us quite some time. With even more turns and somersaults. And we did it. I don't know how much we spent from the business perspective, but I think we earned much more in the end. We produced something we loved, and now others can too, and that feature still exists in that product.

I am sure that, sooner or later, this MVP strategy will become a thing of the past. The digital world is already oversaturated with just “viable” stuff that can’t be loved.

II. Vinted App Review: Sustainable Fashion Savior or Digital Thrift Store Chaos?

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

This month, we’re shining the spotlight on Vinted, a secondhand fashion marketplace that has gained enormous popularity, particularly among eco-conscious consumers and thrifters in Europe. It has become especially popular in France, where it is one of the top apps!

Vinted offers a simple promise: easily buy and sell pre-loved clothes. But does the app’s experience truly match the hype, or is it more like rummaging through an overcrowded digital thrift store? Let’s dive in through our trusty design lens.

Visceral level: 2/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

Launching the Vinted app is like stepping into a slightly chaotic thrift store — not in a charming, vintage-chic way, but in a crowded, cluttered way. The muted, uninspired color palette, combined with dense information, creates a somewhat gloomy and dull visual experience.

At first glance, there’s a noticeable lack of clear visual hierarchy, as items compete for attention in an overcrowded layout. Rather than feeling carefully curated, browsing often feels like digging through piles of clothes, hoping to find something appealing.

The user interface evokes a physical secondhand shop so well that I could almost swear I can smell the faint mustiness. This is an oddly impressive, albeit unintended, achievement for a digital space.

In short, Vinted's visual design lacks freshness and clarity, creating an overwhelming first impression.

Behavioral level: 4/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

On the behavioral front, Vinted nails the basics remarkably well. Listing items for sale is straightforward, with guided prompts that make the process intuitive even for first-timers. You can search and filter through thousands of products: by size, brand, price, and more, is particularly effective, solving one of the biggest pain points of second-hand shopping.

However, it stumbles slightly in terms of product discovery and notifications. Users are frequently bombarded by notifications for slight price drops or vague seller updates, creating a sense of digital clutter. Additionally, the navigation between product categories, seller pages, and buyer communication could be more streamlined. It sometimes requires unnecessary taps or repeated steps, hindering a seamless user experience. Here’s an example: It's about entering the price of an item. Does this require three additional taps? The answer is no.

Moreover, despite having many categories and filters, the app often suffers from inconsistent product descriptions provided by sellers, which can negatively impact search accuracy and buyer confidence.

Even more so. The app also suffers from an inconsistent visual language. Throughout the app, there are absolutely different styles of graphics. It's as if this simple design was created by an army of designers who lost their walkie-talkies.

Reflective level: 5/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

But it's a good example of how a product that is not well-designed can still be successful. On a reflective level, Vinted excels by deeply resonating with users’ identities and values around sustainability, conscious consumption, and personal expression through fashion. It captures the growing global shift towards ethical purchasing and eco-friendly lifestyles perfectly, creating a meaningful connection with its community of sellers and buyers.

Users aren’t merely shopping; they’re contributing to sustainability efforts, extending the life of clothing, and actively participating in a greener fashion economy. This generates a significant emotional payoff and cultivates lasting loyalty.

The community-driven aspect of Vinted is particularly powerful: user reviews and mutual feedback foster trust and encourage positive interactions. Buyers and sellers frequently form genuine connections, turning Vinted into not just a transactional platform, but a community-oriented marketplace.

Overall: 3.8/5

Vinted stands out as more than just another second-hand app. While it has room for improvement on the behavioral, and especially visceral levels, its strong emotional connection with users’ personal and ethical values make it genuinely impactful.

It demonstrates beautifully how a digital product can support both business goals and meaningful societal values, paving the way toward a sustainable future in fashion. If they improve the quality of the UI, they might be able to stay on top for a long time and become a Goliath in this topic.

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III. How to Redesign Wikipedia so it can make money?

A Dose of Inspiration

As designers, we almost always look at a product and think: “This design could be more interesting,” or “This looks bad and can't be monetized.” We're always looking for ways to improve a product. It's in our designer DNA.

There are plenty of design concepts in various portfolios that suggest redesigns or improvements to well-known products. Ninety percent of these concepts suffer from the same problem: disconnection from reality. They remain beautiful pictures because their realization is highly questionable.

But there are exceptions. For example, this proposal to redesign Wikipedia.

The author focuses on one specific business problem: how to generate revenue for Wikipedia. Everything else revolves around this important goal and is an added bonus. She presents her case study, complete with thoughts, analysis, and mockups, in an entertaining video (in my opinion, there are too many cats in it, but that's a minor detail). She also gives you access to an excellent Figma file that you can explore and experiment with! Enjoy this drop of inspiration!

And this is it for today,

Thank you for your support and thoughtful comments lately! The last sentence that I always use at the end of each issue feels more relevant than ever.

Remember, great design isn’t just about solving problems; it’s about creating products and experiences worth cherishing.

Until next time, stay curious, keep designing with love, and if you enjoyed this issue — please spread the word. Design, after all, is better shared.

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks.

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Sincerely,
Vadym Grin

I typically aim to send out our newsletter during the first half of each month, but May was a whirlwind month in the digital design world. Between major events like Figma’s Config conference (if you missed it, you can read my reflections here) and a series of significant industry shifts, there’s been a lot to unpack and reflect upon.

With all these rapid developments, I find myself (and many designers around me) confronting the same persistent anxiety:

Am I focusing on what’s truly important?

I can't promise that this issue will help you overcome that anxiety. But I can guarantee that it will quickly update you on the latest design news, and with another app review, a dose of inspiration it will keep your creativity sharp and your spirits lifted!

In this issue:

• UI Design Trends: Apple and Google redefine their visual styles, embracing glassmorphism and neo-brutalism, while Airbnb revives skeuomorphic aesthetics.

• Spark App Review: An in-depth exploration of why Spark may be the ideal email client.

• Design with Courage: How Kyiv-based Banda Agency creatively challenges international injustice through powerful design.

I. New Old UI Trends

Insight

It's amazing to see the latest design updates to big brands' interfaces and styles. While they all used to adhere to similar rules and patterns, they now seem to be diverging stylistically.

In the previous issue, I wrote about upcoming Apple “glass” interfaces, and shortly after, Google announced significant updates to their Android style guide. The company unveiled Material 3 Expressive, a new design for Android 16 and Wear OS.

👉 Here’s more information and a short video demo.

Material 3 Expressive is all about:

• Many new micro-interactions, including animations and vibrations.

• Like Apple, there are blurred background effects, transparency, and some “glass” effects.

• Elements of trendy neo-brutalism can be seen in the graphics, fonts, and iconography, which could extend the trend's longevity.

This design has a very interesting, modern vibe!

And while Android is leaning into neo-brutalism, Airbnb is rolling out a new feature called Airbnb Services with graphical updates that hark back to the elements of old, forgotten skeuomorphism. Just look at their new icons!

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The most important aspect of these updates is that major companies are rediscovering their unique and captivating voices in the digital world. While minimalism, simplicity, ease, and straightforwardness were common practices, we can now see different development vectors and focus on specific audiences with particular preferences. Long live pluralism!

You can take a deeper dive into some of my reflections on Glassmorphism and read my “verdict” after touching the beta:

II. Spark Mobile App: A Fresh Breeze or a Flickering Flame?

Product Review

Reminder: Product evaluation is done according to Don Norman's 3 levels of design.

This month, we’re shining our design spotlight on Spark, an email client that has garnered attention by promising clarity, productivity, and a less stressful inbox experience. Is it just another pretty interface? Can this app actually help you achieve a zero-inbox state? Let's find out.

Visceral level: 5/5
The visceral level is responsible for first impressions.

From the moment it's launched, Spark feels like a breath of fresh air in an otherwise dreadful inbox. The app greets users with a sleek, minimalist design that is visually delightful. The color scheme of soft blues and ample white space feels calming, professional, and inviting — the perfect emotional antidote to inbox overwhelm.

The animations and transitions are fluid, subtle, and satisfying. Buttons and icons are crisp and intuitive, avoiding the overly complex design elements that typically clutter email apps.

Spark immediately creates a visceral sense of trust, ease, and clarity. Exactly what busy users want from their email app.

Behavioral level: 5/5
This level focuses on usability — how the product performs and whether it effectively solves user problems.

Spark truly stands out in its ability to simplify email management. Its standout feature is the Smart Inbox, which categorizes emails into three folders: “Personal,” “Notifications,” and “Newsletters.” It really works without any additional customization, filtering rules, or anything else. This feature instantly provides a clearer view of what’s important. It alone significantly reduces the cognitive load of processing emails and maintaining an organized inbox.

Spark also offers intuitive swipe actions for quickly archiving, deleting, or pinning emails, which significantly speeds up inbox management. Integrations with productivity apps such as Todoist, Evernote, and Trello further enhance workflow efficiency, establishing Spark as a vital hub for task management beyond just an email client.

Okay, maybe it doesn't sound like a review anymore, but more like a fan's enthusiastic response. Perhaps it is! 😁 As it seems like this is the first app I've reviewed that will receive a rating higher than 4.5!

Spark, of course, has a business goal: to generate revenue for its developer's company. Currently, it appears that Spark primarily attempts to achieve this through AI integration and an email blocking feature. However, the latter isn't critical due to the excellent filtering capabilities. Since there are other tools available for analyzing long emails, providing short summaries, and writing replies, I don't see any reason to upgrade to a paid account. This isn't great for their business, but it's great for me as a user.

I tried really hard to find any bugs, inconsistencies, or other issues on this level. I didn't find anything, not even a minor issue! Okay, maybe just some lags when syncing between desktop and mobile devices. But nothing is really worth noting.

Reflective level: 5/5
The reflective level considers the long-term impression and deeper meaning of the design — how it aligns with the user’s identity and values.

Spark is more than just a productivity tool; it's an ally against inbox anxiety. Spark embodies the modern ideals of digital minimalism and stress-free productivity. For many users, Spark reflects their aspiration to manage digital communication effectively and avoid feeling overwhelmed.

However, its appeal to power users who seek a highly personalized experience may be reduced by the somewhat limited customization options, such as personalized themes or advanced inbox rules, compared to competitors. For those who don't need extensive customization, Spark is a purely amazing, ready-to-use solution.

Spark’s user-centric philosophy, intuitive interaction patterns, and commitment to reducing inbox stress align beautifully with the values of modern professionals: simplicity, efficiency, and mindfulness.

Overall: 5/5

Spark is undoubtedly a top-tier email client. It excels in aesthetics and usability, and effectively addresses the emotional pain points associated with email management. Its thoughtful, holistic approach sets a high standard for app design and proves that great digital products are about more than just beautiful visuals. Spark empowers users to feel in control, efficient, and calm, showcasing the transformative power of exceptional digital design.

Have you tried Spark yet? I’d love to hear about your experience with it! If not, I encourage you to give it a try! And no, they didn’t pay me to advertise.

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III. How Creative Courage Can Drive Change

A Dose of Inspiration

Great design has the power to move us aesthetically and inspire profound societal change. This month, a dose of inspiration comes from the Kyiv-based Banda Agency, which is known for its creativity.

Recently, Banda unveiled a new project: the “Moscow Conventions”, an alternative version of the Geneva Conventions that directly confronts Russia's violations of international law. Through powerful visuals and thoughtful design, Banda has transformed complex political issues into compelling visual statements that drive the world’s attention toward critical, ongoing conflict and injustice.

The Moscow Convention's physical copies are going to be handed over to political leaders and ambassadors from different countries. Banda hopes that using the language of international law, along with strong visual design, will help reach UN representatives and human rights commissioners.

It's tough, but it's taught us Ukrainians that donations can be super effective, and that putting pressure on the public and media can get Leopards tanks, F-16s, and so on. So why shouldn't this project influence the opinions of certain people? It might.

What’s so remarkable about Banda’s approach isn’t just their world-class design skill, but also their unwavering courage. Their work reminds us that our responsibility as designers goes far beyond pixels, screens, and aesthetics. It touches the heart, provokes the mind, and carries the potential to inspire action on a global scale.

So let this be our gentle reminder today: Design with courage. Design with intention. Because our creativity can (and should!) spark conversations that change the world.

And this is it for today,

Remember, amidst rapid changes, our most crucial task as designers is to stay true to meaningful, impactful work.

Wishing you a creative and fulfilling month ahead! See you in the next issue, and as always — happy designing!

As always, this newsletter is free, but if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. Spreading the love is what it's all about, folks.

Share

Sincerely,
Vadym Grin