The five best design links, every weekday

Friday04/24

1

jonnyburch.com

I love AI, but it still can’t design for shit

Without a critical human eye, AI produces slop. The quality bar is yours to maintain.

2

grit.garden

Grit Garden

Each Wordle game becomes a bouquet of flowers and a story. The emotional arc of every game mapped onto prose.

3

sidjha.com

Why productivity needs to be redefined

We’ll need to redefine what productivity means in the context of humans. If we don’t, we’re all kind of screwed, and yes, AI will take our jobs away.

4

jobsdata.ai

Early signals of AI impact

462+ sources, one pattern: AI adoption is accelerating, productivity is climbing, and jobs are changing faster than they’re disappearing.

5

bradfrost.com

Mouth Coding

Talking websites into existence.

The Sidebar Newsletter

5 Design Links in Your Inbox Every Weekday

Thursday04/23

1

interconnected.org

Headless everything for personal AI

Headless services are quicker and more dependable for the personal AIs than having them click round a GUI with a bot-controlled mouse.

2

developers.openai.com

GPT image gen prompting guide

Prompting patterns, best practices, and example prompts drawn from real production use cases for gpt-image-2.

3

cssence.com

Six levels of dark mode

From HTML-only to JS-infused, and all the CSS in between.

4

tante.cc

AI as a fascist artifact

Our world is built around technological infrastructures that define what we see, who we can talk to and what information gets presented to us.

5

daverupert.com

I don’t want a screenshot of your Claude conversation

The number of screenshots of Claude conversations is going up in my life and it’s beginning to have an impact on my general mood.

Wednesday04/22

1

samhenri.gold

Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

The beast is hairy enough that entire design roles now specialize in wrangling the system itself.

2

wiretext.app

Wiretext

A spatial design tool where everything renders as Unicode box-drawing characters. Create wireframes, diagrams, and mockups.

3

lesswrong.com

There are only four skills: design, technical, management and physical

What determines whether someone is capable of relatively quickly acquiring expert-level performance in other domains?

4

uicolors.app

Tailwind CSS colors

Generate, edit, save and share Tailwind CSS color shades based on a given hexcode or HSL color.

5

antmurphy.me

The AI chasm

Why most companies are still early in the AI journey—and what product leaders should focus on instead.

Tuesday04/21

1

mattstromawn.com

Expansion artifacts

AI output gets inflated into blog posts and LinkedIn thoughtspam, software platforms, omnichannel advertising campaigns, and more.

2

asc11.com

ASCII art generator

Create ASCII art for websites and marketing from images, video, live cam, and templates.

3

andrewmurphy.io

If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem, you have a problem

AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it.

4

thoughtshrapnel.com

The AI adoption spiral

The journey that people go on with any new tool.

5

microsoft.design

Design isn’t dying. It’s shifting left.

When the model is the new medium, shaping how it behaves in humanistic ways is design.

Monday04/20

1

bit.ly

We built a banking app prototype with zero codeSponsored

Login, balance transfers, camera scanning—all built in ProtoPie. Explore the live demo, then see the 4-part breakdown.

2

medium.com

What Claude Design actually changes for designers

The handoff problem is finally getting solved—and it’s happening faster than most of us expected.

3

charcuterie.elastiq.ch

Charcuteria

A visual explorer for Unicode. Browse characters, discover related glyphs, and explore scripts, symbols, and shapes across the standard.

4

rajnandan.com

Good taste the only real moat left

The real edge comes from pairing judgment with context, stakes, and the willingness to build.

5

chrbutler.com

Red-lining AI

Blanket AI bans mistake the tool for the problem, Thoughtful integration of automation, ethics, and creative work offers a better path forward.

Friday04/17

1

uxdesign.cc

We become what we behold

A discussion of AI + Design and our shifting roles.

2

webaim.org

The WebAIM Million

The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages.

3

marginalia.nu

AI makes you boring

Prompting an AI model is not articulating an idea. You get the output, but in terms of ideation the output is discardable.

4

smashingmagazine.com

How to improve UX in legacy systems

Practical guidelines for driving UX impact in organizations with legacy systems and broken processes.

5

daverupert.com

When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break

Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. When speed is the priority, there’s no incentive to improve or invest in the shared system.

Thursday04/16

1

maggieappleton.com

One developer, two dozen agents, zero alignment

Why we need collaborative AI engineering.

2

font-stealer.vercel.app

Analyze any font

Extract and analyze fonts from any website instantly.

3

reuters.com

How California fights fires from the skies

High-stakes data visualization saves lives. This breakdown shows how clear mapping helps people navigate chaos.

4

davidmello.com

Playwright accessibility testing

Axe and Lighthouse miss 60–70% of WCAG violations. Learn the limitations of automated accessibility testing and how to write smarter Playwright tests.

5

lukew.com

The new designer/developer collaboration

A collaboration model that shined a light on how things could (no, should) be.

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