A digital painting of a room from the video game, Chicory, painted in pink and green with various textures
It also offered a wonderful bonding experience for me and my 5-year-old daughter. Letting her take control and play around with colors and brush styles was inspiring and reminded me that I need to let go sometimes and see what happens.
This is one of those times she took the mouse and went to town.
A digital painting of an orange fluffy dog (who was the best boy)
I recently finished up playing #chicory and it was well worth it; the right mix of cozy, adventure, and positive storytelling.
It was a cathartic experience being able to paint my best friend who I said goodbye to two years ago.
Thank you.
One of the best things I’ve read in a while:
Vanilla JS for scroll-depth trigger and animated using CSS keyframes with a custom bezier curve, transform properties, and a quick blur filter
Hand-drawn button, jigglified in Affinity using Liquify, and then put together into a WebP animation that triggers on hover.
Inspired by the boiling line animation style of Ed, Edd n Eddy and Yoshi's Story on N64
Sometimes you want to bring your website to life without a ton of JS overhead.
Hand-drawn sketch, chopped up in Affinity, animated in @rive.app
Brings me back to my Flash days
Absolutely. It's death by a thousand cuts that's making me rethink my commitment to them. It's especially apparent with their incessant promoting to use AI in Messages, Nano banana in Photos, and Gemini in Home and GSuite. It really gets in the way and feels very invasive.
I feel this on so many levels
(pun absolutely intended)
This site is incredible and the world needs more like this
The ROI of UX is the value of your entire company, because user research is the work that determines what problem is most valuable to solve in the first place.
Trouble is, people won't believe you if you tell them this.
So the second job on top of that job is to convince people to trust us.
"Good UX made all this new technology usable... UX standards brought consistency, best practices, and templates built on proven success. But in the search for consistency and usability, we lost something. We stopped asking “What if?” and started asking “What’s the benchmark?”."
Product Designers, especially beginners, need to remember there are tools other than Figma.
Differentiate and expand your skillset to stand out in a crowded market
We need more of this. Using our design skills to help progressive movements claw the internet (and our attentions) back from the tech oligarchs.
Fantastic work @bell.bz, taking the lead and pushing us towards a better internet!
As soon as investors get involved, you can bet some amount of creativity and "soul" will be lost. Their demand for unsustainable growth over all else incentivises the use of deceptive design, increasing profit margins, and featuritius.
Designers, don't give up control. Take your time.
#designsky
At the same time, design leaders specifically will need to prioritize connecting design to business and customer outcomes, as well as systems thinking, thinking through edge cases, and living in a nonlinear design process (which agency designers are often already great at).
Roles are compressing, requiring generalist skill sets
Designers will need to stretch their wings beyond strong visual craft to stay relevant, especially by investing in product thinking and technical fluency. We are becoming editors rather than producers, requiring a critical eye and vision.
However, this doesn’t mean adopting an “AI-first” mentality on everything. Teams need use cases to find where AI can deliver real value, spaces to share demos of what they’re learning and trying, and a list of vetted tools that match needs.
Less red tape increases AI adoption
Due to the nature of startups being nimble and curious, they excel at AI adoption compared to large organizations. This makes sense because larger orgs have more complex systems and must consider security and privacy before giving approval to experiment with AI.
AI is for the individual, not yet for the team
AI in its current state is very siloed and focused on individual workflows. Designers are finding it difficult to create a shared understanding of tools, coordinate work across fragmented tools, and sync efforts.
AI tools are struggling to show lasting value
We're still struggling to determine which tools to invest in because none are showing clear, lasting value yet. This requires experimentation and self-directed learning, which can lead to AI adoption faster if companies support these grassroots efforts.
Great designers will deliver differentiation in an era of democratized design
When AI can raise the bar for everyone, anyone can make things that are “good enough.” It's critical to invest in human-led design--in people who can differentiate products through novel design that feels authentic.
AI excels at the start, fails at the end
In various areas (design, research, and development), AI is a great starter tool, but it still stumbles on the final execution or when things get complex. The report sees it as the 80/20 or even a 60/40 split, with AI helping designers get off the ground.
Foundation Capital & Designer Fund released their State of AI in Design 2025 report!
🧵of my insights from the report
"Agency designers have had their souls crushed, but they rarely miss a deadline."
🤣😂😭
Design mode in Cursor, huh? If it's as good as it looks, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be using Figma
www.linkedin.com/posts/tomkrc...
#designsky
This is why companies need to build for MUP, not MVP.
Minimum Usable Products are still the minimum, but they have their foundational bases covered. Like, you know, following a11y and sematic standards.
Figma Sites is nothing more than investors demanding infinite growth at any cost.
As excited as I am for @figma.com Make, I'm curious if it will suffer the same issues as similar tools that use one-shot prompting:
- Context/memory loss
- Limited to small-scale prototypes
If I can export Make's code into an AI IDE like Cursor, that'll really change the game!
I wish Lovable, Bolt, and v0 the best. Figma Make is going to make their user count nosedive
Got to see @markhoppus.bsky.social talk about music, cancer, and hand stuff.
Every punk rock kid's dream.
