The five best design links, every weekday

Friday09/12

1

buttondown.com

How to fold socks

How do you think about your creative practice? What are the most important parts of it?

2

slack.design

Design ops at Slack

How to make a big impact with a small team.

3

gamesbymason.com

Stop shipping PNGs in your games

Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? Here's a better approach.

4

zettelkasten.de

The scam called “you don’t have to remember anything”

Debunking the myth that search engines and AI eliminate the need for memory.

5

longform.asmartbear.com

Your target market isn’t demographic

How to define your actual target market, which probably isn’t traditional demographics and firmographics.

The Sidebar Newsletter

5 Design Links in Your Inbox Every Weekday

Thursday09/11

1

geoffreylitt.com

AI as teleportation

Here’s a thought experiment for pondering the effects AI might have on society: What if we invented teleportation?

2

the-brandidentity.com

Brutal types

Unearthing Europe’s forgotten interwar letterforms.

3

newsminimalist.com

News minimalist

A news aggregator that ranks news by significance. It uses ChatGPT to analyze ~30,000 news articles every day, ranking significance from 0 to 10.

4

figma.com

Figma: eye-following card

A nice little experiment that might inspire other ideas.

5

kk.org

The trust quotient (TQ)

Trust is a broad word that will be unbundled as it seeps into the AI ecosystem.

Wednesday09/10

1

emilkowal.ski

You don’t need animations

Why you are animating more often than you should.

2

thenanyu.com

Skip to the end

Computers gave us the means, but AI gives us the ends. What was virtually impossible became trivial in a hurry.

3

interconnected.org

The destination for AI interfaces is "do what I mean"

A smart + straightforward way to frame how AI will change the user interface.

4

panamaplaylists.com

Panama playlists

The real Spotify accounts of celebrities, politicians, and journalists.

5

xipu.li

The last programmers

We’re witnessing the final generation of people who translate ideas into code by hand.

Tuesday09/09

1

spyglass.org

A cynical read on Anthropic’s book settlement

$1.5B. Damn. Who can afford to pay that? A very cynical read.

2

oklch.fyi

OKLCH color picker, generator and converter

Build unique and uniform color palettes. Preview on UI components, export CSS or Tailwind variables, and learn why OKLCH outperforms RGB and HSL.

3

blog.frost.kiwi

Video game blurs

How to build realtime blurs on the GPU and how the best blur algorithm works.

4

figma.com

Why is corpcore suddenly such a thing?

Software swag has upped its swag factor. Here’s why wearing your app on your sleeve has gone from cringeworthy to cool.

5

addyosmani.com

A history of our browser

Chrome turns 17 this week, and it feels like a good time to reflect on how far we have come in terms of Chromes guiding principles.

Monday09/08

1

bit.ly

The Playbook: behind the screensSponsored

Raw design and startup lessons. From craft to chaos, learn how great apps are built, and the truths nobody shares. For ambitious builders.

2

danielmiessler.com

No, AI is not a bubble

Why the AI bubble argument misunderstands both bubbles and AI.

3

oddbird.net

Visualizing responsive typography

What do all the numbers in our clamp() do?

4

theverge.com

Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring

The site’s volunteers face threats from Trump, billionaires, and AI.

5

tpgi.com

On dashes, AI, and screen readers

Em dash, en dash, hyphen, minus symbol - what do they have to do with AI and how do screen readers treat them?

Friday09/05

1

otherbranch.com

No, you don’t want to hire “the best engineers"

Just say those words to any room full of recruiters, and everyone will give a wry chuckle and roll their eyes. We've all heard it a million times.

2

theguardian.com

American ads of the 1930s—in pictures

The end of prohibition but also the start of the Great Depression and the looming threat of war. What a mix.

3

smashingmagazine.com

Beyond the hype: what AI can really do for UX

From analytics and ideation to prototyping and visual design—where AI fits and where it doesn’t, illustrated with real-world examples.

4

knowaboutaccessibility.org

5 fixes to make digital spaces calmer for all users

Digital spaces must also support people whose minds process information differently.

5

blog.robbowley.net

Maybe it wasn’t the tech after all

What if most of the benefit from successful technology change doesn’t come from the technology at all?

Thursday09/04

1

seangoedecke.com

Seeing like a software company

Thinking in terms of legibility and illegibility explains so many of the things that are confusing about large software companies.

2

viewport-ui.design

Viewport UI

Curated experiences for you inspiration.

3

walzr.com

Bop spotter

This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes.

4

thomasmoes.com

Posters reveal the design spirit of each era

Every generation of poster artists unconsciously documented their era’s visual language.

5

itsnicethat.com

The good, the bad, and the iffy

A candid talk about the murky waters of client selection, the logistics and risks of rejecting work on moral grounds.

Browse Archives