“A designer is not an artist. A designer is a commercial problem-solver, hired to take a client’s half-formed intent — a vibe, a feeling, a vague sense of “make it look professional” — and give it form. That is the job whether the tool is a pencil, Photoshop, or a prompt box. AI has not changed what a designer does. It has changed who can now attempt to do it themselves.
Who-can-now-attempt-it is not one group, though. It’s three, and the current debate around AI usage is weaker for not differentiating between the different needs of these groups.
Together, I’ll call them ‘the designless’: not a single condition, but an absence of design in three different ways — lacking the access to hire it, the awareness to know what to ask for, or the motivation to bother when the means are already there.”
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Editor picks
The hidden culture layer in AI →
How AI is becoming the most culturally saturated technology ever built.The death of the deliverable →
The wireframe was never really the point.You’re not behind →
The feed is built to make you feel that way.
The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.
Optical vs. Mathematical Alignment →
Make me think
If coding is solved, what now? Measuring the sloppiness of code →
“LLMs are able to write almost perfectly correct code. This is because of the scalability and the verifiability of code. It is pretty straightforward to let LLMs generate code and then let that code be checked by hidden tests, which results in a clear reward signal. In stark contrast to that, checking the ‘sloppiness’ of this code often requires human intuition and taste, and is an extremely difficult task in general.”The most important product decision is what you don’t build →
“Except every stakeholder involved wants to do a Columbo and add just one more thing. By the end you’ve essentially rebuilt Google Drive, with tagging, archiving, printing and sharing across several channels, each with its own quirks. Not to mention clearing the security and authentication hurdles so the right person sees only the right documents. And so on, and so on.”We are all Product Engineers now →
“In March this year I found companies substituting compute for labor at record rates. In July I looked into labor statistics and found that the market for junior programmers had been savaged while the market for senior ones was fine, in fact growing.”
Little gems this week
Don’t let AI build a Winchester Mystery House →
The real reason everyone hates the viral AI food slop →
A short history of logos made of data →
Tools and resources
Please don’t stretch your app for foldables →
What happens when the screen isn’t a fixed constraint?iPhone Duo’s UX →
Making foldables useful, but also missing the mark.How to say no when a friend asks for a discount →
Thinking about price can connect to much bigger things.
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