The five best design links, every weekday

Friday12/05

1

fastcompany.com

121 brands that matter in 2025

Companies that have demonstrated an ability to connect their business to their fans and culture more broadly.

2

emesstyle.com

10 usability heuristics & AI principles

Master usability heuristics and AI design principles through interactive examples.

3

tensorlabbet.com

It’s hard to feel the AGI

A reality check from leading researchers.

4

smashingmagazine.com

Designing for stress and emergency

Practical guidelines on designing time-critical products that prevent errors and improve accuracy.

5

adamsilver.io

Can you make toast messages accessible?

Toast notifications are fundamentally inaccessible and should be abandoned rather than improved. Here’s why.

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Thursday12/04

1

scopeofwork.net

On factory tours

How factory tours connect people to how things are made, despite rising barriers.

2

drive.google.com

Trends 2026 - Google Drive

A drive folder with 2026 Trends reports from multiple companies, consultancies, and research groups.

3

properprompts.ai

Proper prompts

Streamline your workflow and generate high quality AI assets that you can actually use in real world projects.

4

people-work.io

The junior hiring crisis

AI is removing the apprenticeship ladder. Here’s what that means for students, early-career professionals, and the tech industry’s future.

5

chrisyoong.com

Debunking the Alt text character limit

100, 150, or 200? The arbitrary limit can be built into input fields and automated tooling.

Wednesday12/03

1

order.design

A dozen years of Work & Co

Order designed a book with over a decade of digital craft and impact. The work we do and the company we keep.

2

staysaasy.com

Own a graph

One of the quickest ways to get better at your job is to own a graph.

3

bsky.app

The key to understanding the world today

A simple and brilliant analysis of today's conservative discourse.

4

creativeboom.com

AIGA NY unveils new identity

The largest chapter of AIGA has launched a new identity and strategy designed to strengthen its role as a civic space for design.

5

brookings.edu

We should all be Luddites

Rehabilitating the idea of Luddites as people concerned with the control and impact of technology.

Tuesday12/02

1

doc.cc

Critique

On elevating craft through critical thinking.

2

typingsvg.vercel.app

TypingSVG

Generate animated typing SVGs with multiline styling, cursor styles, and adjustable typing & delete speeds for full control.

3

hvpandya.com

Systems, stables and stars

Why mature organizations still rely on rockstars for critical work, and how systems raise the floor while stars raise the ceiling.

4

daverupert.com

Grid paper

Create and download 7 grids types using different kinds of background gradients.

5

travers.fyi

Durable consumables

How accelerating tech progress compresses the economic lives of objects, and what we lose when fewer things are built to last.

Monday12/01

1

bit.ly

Level up your design skills for 2026Sponsored

Get $200 off courses for experienced UX and product designers—AI for UX, Advanced Figma, AI Prototyping & more. Sale ends Dec 2.

2

werd.io

Disagree and let’s see

“Disagree and commit” is disingenuous. Here is a better idea.

3

feyder.co

Chromatic: a colorful daily puzzle game

Sort colors, create gradients, find your daily calm.

4

nerdy.dev

Using CSS to fix the irradiation illusion

How to adjust perceived font weight in dark mode without layout shift.

5

another.rodeo

Feedback doesn’t scale

Listening is always hard, and it only gets harder at scale.

Friday11/28

1

hidde.blog

Who wins when we filter the open web through an opaque system?

When people stop visiting websites directly, they're filtering content through an opaque system.

2

figma.com

Figma plugin: asciicore.exe

Transform any design into mesmerizing ASCII art masterpieces.

3

cosmic-ui.com

Cosmic UI

A curated set of futuristic UI components — reusable, customizable, and framework-friendly.

4

explorer.audubon.org

Bird migration explorer

A guide to the heroic annual journeys made by over 450 bird species, and the challenges they face along the way. Nice dataviz ref.

5

techblog.wikimedia.org

Unifying our mobile and desktop domains

How Wikimedia achieved 20% faster mobile response times, improved SEO, and reduced infrastructure load.

Thursday11/27

1

anxietyaidtools.com

Open source anxiety toolkit

Community-built tools for anxiety relief including breathing techniques, grounding, and muscle relaxation.

2

ilovetypography.com

Steven Heller’s font of the month: Archive Matrix

Dot matrices to build the structure and subtle contrast of its futuristic letterforms.

3

developers.openai.com

Building an AI-native engineering team

How coding agents speed up the software development lifecycle—a guide by OpenAI.

4

flagstories.co

Flag stories

Stats about flags and flag design—a data visualization project.

5

cloudfour.com

Responsive letter spacing

Minimizing the readability impact of a typographic brand requirement.

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