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Everything filed under Design, newest first.
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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
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
What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators
Ben Overmyer compares Western heraldry and Japanese mon as generative systems—and what those rule-bound visual languages teach about building software that invents coherent coats of arms and marks.
13 min · 3,070 words
Pranav Desai catalogs ten visual and copy tells of AI-generated “slop UI”—from rainbow gradients and pulsing badges to glassmorphism and generic hype—and why vibe-coded interfaces often look cheap without a design vision.
4 min · 908 words
6 new Google Flow Tools built by industry creatives
Google Labs ships six Flow Tools co-built with creatives in architecture, sound, and digital content—custom workflows like Mondo Sónico and CaptionCast that you describe and compose inside Google Flow.
2 min · 455 words
A font that reads what you wrote
Rohan Adwankar introduces semfont: a small library that automatically highlights, colors, bolds, and italicizes text so typography tracks meaning as you write.
6 min · 1,295 words
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
Marcin Wichary traces Mac keyboard symbols that vanished from modern UIs—command, option, and other glyphs—and what their disappearance says about interface history.
3 min · 766 words
CleanShot’s bulldozed settings
Marcin Wichary documents how CleanShot’s settings UI was “bulldozed”: dense preferences flattened into a shallower, less legible layout, and what that says about modern app design trade-offs.
5 min · 1,074 words
This is a modern motherfucking website.
Robin Reel's tongue-in-cheek manifesto for building fast, readable, accessible sites without framework bloat—modern CSS and HTML done plainly.
7 min · 1,533 words
Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?Original essay: November 2021 · AI-written directory summary
An argument that judgments of artistic quality are not entirely arbitrary. Paul Graham examines what it would mean to deny differences in taste and considers the consequences for evaluating creative work.
1 min · 87 wordsagent-written
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
I’ve been thinking a lot about planning lately. With agents. And maybe “planning” isn’t the right word for it, as much as thinking-in-a-loop-with-agents or decision making with agents. Everyone is rushing towards hyper automation: loops, agentic workflows, software factories, and sending swarms of agents to solve problems on their own. We are trying really hard to make agents productive while we’re not around; while we’re off sleeping or jogging or reading the stomach-churning details of the Hugging Face attackhttps://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-in
18 min · 4,179 words
The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
Amanda Shendruk's newsletter covers the United Nations' near-unanimous endorsement of a resolution promoting area-accurate map projections, backed by the African Union, which formally challenges the 500-year dominance of the Mercator projection in official cartographic contexts.
1 min · 224 wordsagent-written
Optimizing anamorphic sculptures
Thiago Cardoso walks through creating and optimizing anamorphic sculptures—images that resolve only from a specific vantage—using computational geometry techniques.
6 min · 1,436 words
Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
Chad Maltby argues that macOS Finder is fundamentally broken because it requires users to already know where a file is or what it is named before they can find it — a poor fit for knowledge workers who create dozens of files a day and cannot maintain that mental index.
1 min · 228 wordsagent-written
Architectural visualization with Astra
I started with a simple brief for a house: minimalist but detailed furniture, a garden, and a cinematic atmosphere. I asked Astra in Codex to turn that brief into an editable 3D scene in Blender.
13 min · 3,103 words