Thank you for the kind words!

Expansion artifacts Matt Ström-Awn · Designer, leader, and coach focused on building exceptional products and teams.

New essay! In which I try to define the toolmarks that AI leaves behind in the process of turning your prompt into a generated output.

mattstromawn.com/writing/expa...

Kinda wild given our conversation on Monday. I think it’s extremely rare for an inventor to profit from their invention.

Wireframe Live weekdays @ 5pm ET Transparent Design Talk

Today @mattstromawn.bsky.social is my guest on Wireframe Live for the first show of the new year! Catch us at 5pm ET today. 👀

wireframe.ds.house

Happy to get input and suggestions for future additions! We’ll be continuing to add to the spec in lots of ways and want as much input and discussion as possible to guide the process. Just open a discussion on GH :)

Functions and the future of design systems A new paradigm powering the next generation of design systems

Just re-read @mattstromawn.bsky.social: buff.ly/xqE8kN9
- #DesignSystems are moving from static “dictionaries” to dynamic “functions”
- Dynamic logic enables adaptive, personalized, and accessible UIs
- Tools like CSS clamp() and Material’s dynamic color make this future possible

Talking Heads got so tired of being called The Talking Heads that they put out an album called “The Name of This Band is Talking Heads”

Decentralizing quality Why moving judgment to the edges wins in the long run

New essay! What the heck is "quality", anyway? And how can we intentionally and meaningfully create it in our work?

matthewstrom.com/writing/dece...

also a fabulous year for naming web things (suckerfish dropdowns!)

I will be the Glenn Gould of bad takes

taking a cue from jazz & blues, if you repeat yourself enough times it gets interesting again. To that end I will write a “should designers code” think piece every week from now until the heat death of the universe

The product design talent crisis Why we should invest in the next generation of product designers

Did some research of my own here, if it’s useful: matthewstrom.com/writing/prod...

A really monkey’s paw moment for designers who wanted a seat at the table

The product design talent crisis Why we should invest in the next generation of product designers

New essay! Bad news: the “check engine” light is on for the practice of product design as a whole.

matthewstrom.com/writing/prod...

the prevalence of em dashes in ai writing means my writing is almost certainly in the training data set

Putting it into the universe: any company out there want to hire me to help them build an "associate product designer" program, modeled after many tech co's "associate product manager" programs (apmlist.com)? There's a lot of potential in the market right now.

You know what's better than a 3-legged stool? A 4-legged stool.

(please send biblically-accurate stool memes)

Footnotes - bringing them up to side notes or popovers, but keeping the end-of-page ones for semantics and accessibility

The current desire for “Super IC” designers is possible because of a previous investment in coaches, mentors, and managers, that helped develop those folks.

As companies cull managers and hire “player-coaches”, the next generation of ICs will lose out on much-needed development opportunities.

Is there anyone out there doing AI for design using computer vision (segmentation, world model, etc) instead of using language (LLMs, transformers, etc)?

definitely, and also depends on the relative productivity of what you're switching between.

It's true that the coding takes longer, but there's some extra productivity due to what you can do while the agent is working.

Based on a few weeks of using a coding agent, i think the recent result that coding AI slows developers comes down to two factors:

1. Coding agents allow the developer to multi-task
2. Multi-tasking involves context switching, which has a penalty

troubleshouted

If you're working with design tokens, you might have noticed that the color format has been updated in the latest editor's draft at tr.designtokens.org/color/. But updating your tokens files is a snap! Here's a node script you can run that will get you up to speed: gist.github.com/ilikescience...

They’re calling him the Fizzler

I was an early adopter! Looks like I bought a license in 2013. I think it was the first time I used markdown.

Keep doing great stuff, and lemme know if you ever need design help :)

And if you don't need any of those things, but wanna work together anyway, you should still get in touch :)

After ~10 years of in-house design leadership, I'm going back to my roots as an independent designer. If you need:

- 0 → 1 design partnership
- Mentorship, coaching, or design org design
- Early stage design strategy, especially in AI and Fintech

Get in touch: hello@mu.design

Worst,