The five best design links, every weekday

Thursday01/29

1

randsinrepose.com

Sometimes your job is to stay the hell out of the way

A take on the mythical 10x engineer, except that they aren’t a myth.

2

daily.jstor.org

The hidden history of women game designers

Nineteenth-century women turned music lessons into interactive entertainment, complete with spinning wheels and ivory counters.

3

ragecheck.com

Rage Check

Analyze articles and social posts for manipulative language patterns, fear-mongering, and engagement bait.

4

ericwbailey.website

How an accessibility designer adds keyboard shortcuts to a web app

Keyboard shortcuts occupy a strange area for web design.

5

css-tricks.com

There is no need to trap focus on a dialog element

Accessibility advice around modals have commonly taught us to trap focus within the modal.

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Wednesday01/28

1

blog.vbuckenham.com

Some thoughts about tool design and AI

Asking questions and waiting for a response is not the most productive way of doing things.

2

infiniteballdrop.com

Infinite Ball Drop

Where would the Times Square Ball be if it started dropping now?

3

maggieappleton.com

Gas Town’s agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code.

4

tangiblemediacollection.com

Tangible Media

A historical collection of information storage technology—information you could hold in your hand.

5

agentation.dev

Agentation

A visual feedback tool for agents. The website homepage being the demo is such a nice detail.

Tuesday01/27

1

blog.jim-nielsen.com

CTA hierarchy in the wild

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

2

bugsappleloves.com

Bugs Apple loves

Bugs Apple won’t fix. Why else would they keep them around for so long? We did the math.

3

stroke.abhii.space

Stroke: animate SVGs

Create hand-drawn SVG animations for logos, signatures, and illustrations.

4

last-child.com

Building the brain of your accessibility AI

How accessibility leaders can build trusted, scalable AI assistants by curating the right standards, documentation, and institutional knowledge.

5

dbushell.com

Death to scroll fade

Fade what? Everything! Make everything fade into view! It’s too static, you know? Make it pop!

Monday01/26

1

bit.ly

From prompt to several wireframe variations <10 secondsSponsored

UX Pilot AI speeds your design process by turning text or sketches into UX/UI. Sync with Figma, upload guidelines, and start 100% for free.

2

blog.avas.space

Privacy is a value we can lose

We’re taking data protection and privacy rights for granted.

3

youtube.com

The persistence of decay

A funeral for a lighthouse, a sermon in fungus, our vanishing digital media, and the arrow of time.

4

visualrambling.space

Visualrambling.space

Just a place to ramble visually.

5

codegood.co

The context collapse problem

AI coding tools amplify whatever they can access. In codebases where institutional knowledge lives in engineers’ heads only, AI amplifies nothing.

Friday01/23

1

overreacted.io

A social filesystem

Formats over apps.

2

mood.harrycresswell.com

Mood

A moodboard of graphic inspiration, curated by Harry Cresswell.

3

websafe2k16.com

Web safe 2k16

A literary/graphic project exploring our memories of the pre-broadband Internet and related technologies.

4

emilkowal.ski

Building a toast component

How I built Sonner, an opinionated toast library for React used by milions.

5

thoughtfuleng.substack.com

Junior developers in the Age of AI

Companies are ditching junior engineers en masse. They’ll tell you it’s because AI writes better code. They’re right...but also missing the point.

Thursday01/22

1

dri.es

Software as clay on the wheel

You're shaping the code or text the way a potter shapes clay: push a little, spin the wheel, look, push again.

2

design.google

Gemini AI Visual Design

How Google designers use gradients, motion, and foundational shapes to build trust and intuition within Gemini.

3

aethercss.lovable.app

Liquid Glass CSS Generator

Create liquid glass, glassmorphism and neumorphism CSS effects with this free online generator.

4

oreilly.com

AI and the Next Economy

The narrative from the AI labs is dazzling: build AGI, unlock astonishing productivity, and watch GDP surge.

5

anthropic.com

Claude’s Constitution

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Wednesday01/21

1

veen.com

On coding agents and the future of design

How Claude Code is showing us what apps may become.

2

howbrowserswork.com

How browsers work

A guide for engineers and curious people who use the web every day, but never built a mental model of how browsers work.

3

aresluna.org

The hardest working font in Manhattan

A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.

4

matthewbutterick.com

The copyrightability of fonts revisited

How many existing regis­tra­tions of font copy­rights might be vulner­able to attacks during liti­ga­tion?

5

carlbarenbrug.com

Friction by design

What gets lost when everything is effortless?

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