signal/ — curated news at the intersection of AI and design

The human is the loop

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

Morphicons

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

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.

Azgaar’s fantasy map generator

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

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.

For students who make websites

Meet WordPress.com Education, a new, free product for teachers and students. The post For students who make websites appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Dark mode toggles: two states are enough

Lea's pushing back on light/dark mode implementations that display three state options for visitors: light, dark, and system. Dark mode toggles: two states are enough originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.

Ask LukeW: A New Retrieval System

The Ask LukeW feature on my Web site has been answering people's product design questions using my writings, talks, images, and videos for over three years. During that time, I've seen people ask lots of different kinds of questions. So we rebuilt the system to answer more of them, better. Here's how. Not all questions are the same. Some are time bound: "What did you write about Web forms in…

Creativity at Enterprise-Scale, Without Compromise: The OFF+BRAND. Story

Telling stories on some of the biggest canvases on the web, from Awwwards Site of the Year to the front door of Microsoft.

Rethinking leadership, Judgment as bottleneck, Ethical UX for machines

UX Roundup: AI Spending Up | Adversarial AI Helps Designers | Design Hypotheses | Generative Accessibility | Skeleton Screens | Pain of Paying

AI spending growing 75% per year at the median firm | An AI agent that argued back against design ideas helped designers improve | A design is a hypothesis: try to defeat it | AI can generate superior accessibility when it prioritizes communication density over narrative completeness | Skeleton screens buy patience, not speed | Checkout design dials the pain of paying up or down

The feature was fine. So why did users keep hiding it?

Take your meeting context to new places

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

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

Eigendrum

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

Accessibility getting dropped in the process

When accessible designs become inaccessible products.

The making of Cursor’s icons

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

AI adoption and the slow erosion of design idealism

Pixels of the Week – August 16, 2026

This week we explore creative provenance and trust in the age of AI generated content. Also don't miss 3 amazing illustrators you must follow, the design of the new European banknotes and an ongoing reference library for Black hairstyles.

You already know how to make it accessible

Inside HAOQI.DESIGN: Letting DOM and WebGL Share a Retro-Futurist Stage

A technical look at the making of HAOQI.DESIGN, exploring scroll sync, glass shaders, and the interplay of DOM, CSS, and WebGL in a retro-futurist portfolio.

How to become an AI Designer

Who gets the meter?

We’ve spent 180 years trying not to feel the cost of the machine. AI just turned the meter back on. Continue reading on UX Collective »

Getting started is not getting it right

Psychological Ownership: Own the Right Things

Psychological ownership can make you more effective, but you’ll struggle if it attaches to things you can’t control. Spot misplaced ownership and redirect it.

One AI Output Is an Example, Not an Evaluation

One output cannot establish how well an AI system performs. Evaluate with multiple representative inputs, repeated runs, and confidence intervals.

What’s !important #17: Custom Highlight API, CSS Navigation Matching, Fixing text-stroke, and More

Plus, how to style skeleton UIs, how to enable diagonal scrolling, how images can overflow themselves, and yet, still more. Basically, how to do a lot of really cool (CSS) stuff. What’s !important #17: Custom Highlight API, CSS Navigation Matching, Fixing text-stroke, and More originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.

UX Roundup: Hedonic Adaptation | Knowledge Worker AI | AI Sensemaking | Delegating Agent Actions | Branching UI vs. Linear Chat | Base-Rate Neglect | Rating Controls | Animated Prompt Understanding

New music video about hedonic adaptation | AI better at some forms of knowledge work than at others | AI increasingly used for sensemaking among corporate users | Users want to approve certain autonomous actions | For exploratory creation, a branching UI beat the traditional linear chat interface to the AI backend model | Base-rate neglect: one vivid anecdote outweighs a thousand statistics | The…

AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

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

Liquid Gooey

Liquid UI effects for React.