The five best design links, every weekday

Tuesday08/18

1

brentfitzgerald.com

The human is the loop

After a few weeks away from AI, I see my usage wasn’t always productive or healthy.

2

morphicons.com

Morphicons

Morph any SVG icon into any other with spring physics. Animate in React, Vue, Svelte, React Native, Astro or vanilla JS. Zero dependencies.

3

medium.com

How to make your design system agent-ready

If you don’t want your AI agent to choke on your design.md, stop putting your entire design system into one file.

4

azgaar.github.io

Azgaar’s fantasy map generator

A web app that helps fantasy writers, game masters, and cartographers create and edit fantasy maps.

5

patronview.com

99% of my website traffic is bots

A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website. What I tried, how I failed, and what’s working now.

The Sidebar Newsletter

5 Design Links in Your Inbox Every Weekday

Monday08/17

1

bit.ly

Take your meeting context to new placesSponsored

Granola's new Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration connects your meeting notes to your AI app of choice.

2

superposition.jem.computer

Design is how it tastes

If our design specs only tell models what the interface is made of, they have already forgotten what the interface is for

3

eigendrum.com

Eigendrum

Draw any shape and hear it as a drum. Every frequency is solved from your outline with finite elements, never sampled.

4

buttondown.com

Accessibility getting dropped in the process

When accessible designs become inaccessible products.

5

minoradventures.co

The making of Cursor’s icons

A year of drawing, testing, and shipping a complete icon system for the world’s favourite coding agent.

Friday08/14

1

blog.florianherrengt.com

AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

The economic shift that values human architectural judgment over execution speed.

2

gooey.jakubantalik.com

Liquid Gooey

Liquid UI effects for React.

3

mattrothenberg.com

You don't have a design system

A classification that forces teams to document implementation logic for sustained product consistency.

4

stolen-thoughts.com

Stolen thoughts

Encrypted chain-of-thought blocks returned by Anthropic, OpenAI and Google APIs—we exploit this to decode hidden reasoning at scale.

5

yaronschoen.com

Claude Code 101, for designers

What Claude Code actually is, plus a plain-language decoder for the jargon around it. Models, tokens, agents, MCP, and friends.

Thursday08/13

1

noemamag.com

Why is everyone in tech so sad?

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless.

2

kuber.studio

I didn’t set a cookie

Everything this page knows about you, it learned in under two seconds. Without a cookie, a permission prompt, or a click.

3

lethain.com

Middle management roles are also a trap

Most middle management roles make practicing executive skills difficult, and sometimes negatively select against developing them.

4

backyarddesigners.club

Backyard designers

Draft seven real designers as chunky cartoon kids, stay under the follower-count salary cap, then post your lineup.

5

imkylelambert.com

Everyone is designing with AI, not for it

We focus on how people are designing and building with AI. I rarely read about how AI is changing “what” people are designing and building.

Wednesday08/12

1

blog.mozilla.org

Let your designs fail for the right reasons

How AI-assisted native prototypes changed what usability testing could show.

2

state-of-ai-in-design-systems.netlify.app

State of AI in Design Systems

A field study of how 20 open-source design systems and 6 platforms make themselves readable to AI agents.

3

beautifului.dev

Beautiful UI

A small library of extremely crafted, copy-paste components for chat agents, thinking states, human-in-the-loop approvals, and everything agents need.

4

taylor.town

I’m leaving OpenAI to build Jurassic Park

Gonna send you back to the stone age.

5

2026.stateofcss.com

State of CSS 2026

The results are in. Developer adoption across modern CSS features—empirical data on layout practices and usage.

Tuesday08/11

1

uxdesign.cc

Bottle your judgment and make it outlive you

The most valuable thing you own dies with you, unless you get it out of your head. Let a machine and the person next to you finally use it.

2

thehtml.review

The HTML review 05

An annual journal of literature made to exist on the web.

3

blog.senko.net

“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. And there's a gross insult to all programmers everywhere.

4

aipotluck.org

AI Potluck

Mapping the open source AI stack to understand what’s missing. Now, together, we can close them.

5

martin.janiczek.cz

Systems and delays

Where delays are shown to be counterintuitive.

Monday08/10

1

bit.ly

The AI Notepad for back-to-back meetingsSponsored

The AI notepad for back-to-back meetings. Notes, actions and memory. Without a meeting bot.

2

notashelf.dev

Taste is all that's left

How automated output turns taste into the primary filter for software and product design.

3

agent-plugins.org

Agent plugins

A portable package format for reusable components that extend AI agents.

4

jarango.com

What’s the purpose of information architecture?

Fifty years after its formal introduction, the discipline of IA is still widely misunderstood. Here‘s a corrective.

5

joost.blog

The future of the website

Websites aren’t dying, but their job is changing: agent-readable surfaces, MCP servers, and verifiable authenticity.

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