Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities
Piotr Migdał asks Claude Opus 5.5 to turn Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities into interactive visualizations in a single long session, reflecting on what 'vibe designing' can and cannot do for explorable explanations.
3 min · 609 words
Agentic Systems Are the Future of Brands
A Little Plains research note arguing that growing teams and AI agents cause brand drift, and that studios should hand over agentic brand systems: living kits of positioning, voice, visual rules, assets, tokens and working components that people can browse and agents can read, so every new touchpoint strengthens the brand.
9 min · 2,158 words
Declan Chidlow revisits the interactive menus of the DVD era—how publishers used motion, sound and branching to make home video feel authored—and argues for treating those interfaces as a short-lived but distinctive design craft.
8 min · 1,902 words
I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard
Anton Frolov describes commissioning hand-drawn day and night illustrations of each floor of his house, with every device on its own layer and a shared canvas, then wiring them into a Home Assistant picture-elements dashboard in YAML so lights, fireplace and air conditioners animate on a wall TV the whole family actually uses.
10 min · 2,239 words
Bring Back the Cool Save File Screens
A nostalgic look back at the memory card and save file screens of sixth-generation consoles, the Dreamcast VMU, GameCube, PS2 and original Xbox, and why their game-specific icons and quirky menus were a small treasure that modern cover-art save menus have lost.
3 min · 614 words
'Wallace and Gromit,' 90% Alone
The Animation Obsessive newsletter recounts how Nick Park spent years making A Grand Day Out, his overambitious NFTS graduation film, mostly alone before finishing it at Aardman and premiering it in Bristol in 1989, plus Asians in Animation's Unboxed education project and animation news.
14 min · 3,247 words
Fatih Arslan gives a tour of the designer lamps he owns, including the Artemide Tolomeo, Tizio, several Noguchi Akari lights, Louis Poulsen PH pieces, the AJ wall lamp, and Jean Prouvé's Lampe de Bureau, with the history of each design and a look at a 3D-printed lamp he designed himself.
8 min · 1,797 words
Vibecoding Photoshop: Time and Pressure
André Klein argues the claim that vibecoding can't replace tools like Photoshop is now dead, because several agent-era Photoshop clones exist. He tests PSD import and features in Photon Studio, OmaPhoto, the open-source PhotoCraft and PhotoSuite against Photopea, and lists more projects like Patchy and Xuan.
5 min · 1,092 words
City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
A follow-up essay on why many city-building games feel hollow: missing social texture, opaque systems, and design choices that strip “soul” from simulated places—and what deeper urban sims might still chase.
3 min · 682 words
This is a collection of classless css themes to use as starting points in web development. Paste into your website's <head this snippet.
3 min · 792 words
Automating my 35mm film scanning pipelineA story about replacing a creative workflow and focusing on another.
Shan Hannadige describes automating the tedious parts of scanning 35mm film from a Canon AE-1P, building a pipeline and a site to present the results, and what it means to delegate one creative workflow to focus on another.
5 min · 1,257 words
Halfspace: An experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields
Matt Keeter’s experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields: interactive halfspace CSG, live rendering, and a toolkit for sculpting shapes as signed distance functions.
6 min · 1,448 words
Thunderbird for iOS: A First Look at the Native iPhone Email App in Development
The Thunderbird team gives a first look at its native iOS email app, built from scratch rather than ported, covering design research, the foundations being laid for a fast cross-device experience with Thunderbird Desktop and Android, and how the community is shaping what ships after the first release.
2 min · 551 words
Respecting your users' dread of the clankers
thoughtbot's Dave Iverson argues AI products should let skeptical users opt in rather than opt out, laying out design and strategy techniques such as progressive opt-in, just-in-time consent, pre-approval, clawback, and agents that reject PII and secrets.
6 min · 1,306 words
Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
Marcin Wichary photographs modular industrial control dashboards in German and Polish museums—air traffic, subway, railway, and power-plant panels as physical design systems that software later replaced.
1 min · 320 words
How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it
Railcode founder Yakko Majuri walks through a real agent-assisted design process—inspiration spectra, single-HTML forks, color playgrounds, and relentless iteration—showing how non-designers can steer coding agents toward tasteful product sites.
2 min · 397 wordsagent-assisted
Mass Fraction: a love letter to Deuteros, in sixteen colours
Arda Karaduman launches Mass Fraction, a hard-SF space-industry strategy game at 640×512 in sixteen colours—mapping Deuteros and Millennium 2.2 into a Godot sim of Lid debris, named crews with dose ledgers, and indifferent Harrow machines.
5 min · 1,252 wordsagent-assisted
A satirical product essay for “Windows 11½”: a tongue-in-cheek redesign pitch that skewers modern desktop bloat while laying out a coherent, opinionated vision for a lighter PC OS.
7 min · 1,677 words
Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display
A build write-up of an audio-reactive LED sculpture that maps Fibonacci phyllotaxis onto a physical light array—math, fabrication, and real-time reactive firmware.
7 min · 1,644 words
Design eng hiring guide — part 1: defining the role
A practical part-one guide to hiring design engineers: why the role exploded, three common archetypes across the design landscape, and how company stage shapes what “design engineer” actually means.
11 min · 2,538 words