Articles
Notes on design, side projects and life in between.
What a team loses when designers ship their own code
Designers can now take their own work live, and the speed is real. So is the loss: a second reader, an engineer's objections, and code that more than one person owns.
Where the design process goes when you work with AI
The design process did not die when agents arrived. It left the meetings and moved into the files an agent reads, and a team that cannot see it has not dropped it.
How to define what a good AI answer looks like
Every AI feature needs someone to write down what good output looks like. That is a design review made explicit and repeatable, and designers should be the ones writing it.
AI design tools keep the result and forget the reasons
AI design and coding tools give the output a whole interface and give the reasoning behind it none. So every generation keeps the screen and throws away why it looks that way.
What I tell an AI before it touches my design
An AI agent builds fast and forgets every design decision overnight. How I write down taste, rules and feedback so the next session builds inside the system.
How to judge what AI makes for you
An AI model will give you twelve competent options and an opinion about none of them. How I form my own opinion before I generate anything, and the three questions I ask before I accept what comes back.
When animation helps, and when it gets in the way
The test of an animation is not whether it impresses once. It is whether it still feels right the fortieth time, which is a different problem entirely.
Performance is a design decision
Speed is treated as an engineering concern, so designers hand over work that cannot be fast. Most of what makes a page feel slow was decided in the design file.
Form validation is a design problem
Validation is the moment a product tells someone they are wrong. Almost every rule about it comes down to when you say it, and whether you say what to do next.
Design tokens that survive a rebrand
Some products can change their brand colour in a day; others need months. The difference usually comes from how the design tokens, the named values a product's colours come from, were set up years earlier.
How an idea becomes a digital product, step by step
The steps between an idea and a working digital product, in the order they happen: what each one is for, what you should have in hand when it ends, and the common mistakes.
Why a design file is not a handoff
Design handoff, the moment a design passes from designer to developer, keeps getting better tools. What goes missing is the reasoning behind the design, and a more detailed file does not carry that.
Design sprints that actually ship
A design sprint is easy to run and hard to make count. Whether it changes what a company builds is decided before the week starts and after it ends, not during it.
Why most design systems quietly fail
Most design systems fail not for lack of components but because teams stop trusting them. It rarely gets said out loud: one team after another simply copies a button and changes it for themselves.