And the real crazy part is that my bad decades-old code still renders fine in today’s latest web browsers! I would be sad if it didn’t, but I also wouldn’t be surprised. How is this stuff still backwards compatible!?

How much of your software from 20 years ago runs on your devices today? I realize CSS is actually “software”, but it is a kind of user interface for making stuff. Most things in tech get worse as time goes on, filled with upsells and ads, or sparkle icons to try out some rad new agent surreptitiously shoved into an app. CSS gets better with age and as more features are added. That’s bananas!

Not in the Figma file. Not in the pull request. In the friction between two people who care about different things and are forced to find a shared answer.

Design systems fail when people don’t use them, don’t trust them, or can’t find what they need. AI adds another version of that problem. If an agent can’t discover the right component or doesn’t have enough context to use it correctly, it may generate something new.

Well-designed diagrams will have a sense of aesthetic balance between lines and typography. Their overriding imperative is to inform the passenger of the connections between destinations at a glance, rather than a slavish requirement to follow the topography.

Olivetti’s unique corporate identity did not come about through following norms but through an expansive understanding of design.

Despite there being a number of breakthrough examples, most early corporate identities in the first half of the 20th century were based on the creative signature of an individual designer who produced, for example, posters, brochures and packaging in the same style. An important impetus in design history thus emerged with the approach of the Italian typewriter manufacturer Olivetti. In the early 1930s, Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960), the son of the company founder, established the principle of working with not just the best engineers but also the most innovative architects and product and graphic designers in Europe.

Documents and code are being generated faster than team members can review. You get the feeling that most people have stopped reading altogether.

We need to stop pretending that “the cloud” is a place. It’s not a place. It’s a promise—and promises are only as good as the entity making them. The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage. But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with its own exit strategy and its own definition of “forever.”

I have a colleague who has completely embraced A.I. My understanding is that his course is much harder than it used to be, but students are allowed to use A.I. during exams. I see the motivation—A.I. is supposed to enhance our skills/productivity, so students should be expected to produce more—but I don’t want to create a situation where students are helplessly dependent on A.I. because they don’t have a solid grasp of the fundamentals.

I’ll say that the computing speed of today’s devices is fast enough to trick some people into thinking that such devices are doing more than just performing calculations. But this ‘understanding’ and ‘learning’ and ‘communicating’ are just a faster and sometimes more efficient autocorrect. Yes, the autocorrect you have on your phones and tablets and personal computers.

When you’re typing a message and you see your phone’s OS correctly suggesting the next word after the one you’re typing, that’s not intelligence. The phone doesn’t ‘get’ you. The phone doesn’t ‘know’ you. The system is making a prediction by calculating probabilities. The data sample it’s using for this prediction is everything you’ve typed on the phone since you bought it.

È una questione di calcolo, di computazione:

By the way, Large Language Models don’t even see those as words, but numbers, tokens.

It wasn’t artificial intelligence, it was computers that computed. It’s always been computers computing. We have more refined tools today, but that’s it.

Design tools followed the same arc. Figma lowered the floor of UI design — suddenly, anyone could open a canvas and move elements around. Design systems lowered it again. Templates lowered it further. Each step made the starting point more accessible. And each step produced a new professional layer above it — people who understood not just where the buttons were, but what they were actually for.

The boom and recognition of information design, though, has not improved significantly the public understanding of design and data, of their specific qualities. Particularly, the implications of their constructed and interpretive – and potentially misleading – nature have received little attention. The assumption that “what you see is what is there” has remained dominant. Practitioners, for their part, have done little to shake it, generally aligning – implicitly or explicitly – with the idea that data and design are objective and transparent, and mostly focusing, in their discussion of information design, on usability or formal issues (Hall, 2011).

Collaborative steering doesn't mean dumping every possible bit of design or development context into agent instructions. It's being precise about what matters because with AI agents today, the more you pile in, the less useful it gets.

And that's where expertise kicks in. Knowing the three to five things that actually matter, in what order, and how they need to be done, is the value add. It's the part you can't fake by playing a role you never trained for. And it's the part worth encoding for everyone else.

No one secretly wants a new logo. They all want someone else's logo, or they want their old logo back.

(L’estratto viene da Daily Designer, un progetto di Arun Venkatesan, dove si raccolgono cose dette da noti e famosi designer.)

“Why don’t we just do what I did here?” is demoralizing. I get why you’re frustrated. Nothing seems to get done, regardless of all these wondrous advancements in AI. It trivializes all the actual work that needs to get done to produce something real and reliable. It dismisses people’s expertise and skills. You also don’t look good—you even look just a little worse.

Your browser kept your battery level back. Firefox removed this API entirely in 2016, after researchers proved it could be used to track a visitor across websites without cookies, without consent. The API still exists in the specification. It was simply hidden — from you, and from any page that might ask after it.

The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades.

Il design delle piattaforme può indirizzare il nostro uso di esse, ma se siamo frustrati ci passiamo più tempo. Se abbiamo impegni e passioni facciamo altro. Ma per avere impegni e passioni dobbiamo avere il tempo e le risorse culturali, economiche e sociali per coltivarle.

Viviamo in una condizione di stress persistente — lavorativo, economico, esistenziale — che il capitalismo contemporaneo produce quotidianamente e per la quale cerchiamo sollievo momentaneo nello scrolling, esattamente come le generazioni precedenti cercavano sollievo nella televisione spazzatura. Il design della piattaforma conta, certo, ma conta meno delle condizioni materiali di vita.

Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.

The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.

No knowledge I possess about design—the incorporeal understanding that makes what I create better than an off-the-shelf template or something done by someone without my experience—is made irrelevant by AI. Nor is it contradicted by my use of AI tools.

Structure still communicates before content. Visual hierarchy still guides attention. Negative space still creates rhythm. These principles don’t vanish because I’m working through AI rather than directly manipulating pixels.

The craft migrates to a different level of abstraction. But it remains craft.

The promise of simplification is to maintain, or even increase, semantic depth through synthesis. When synthesis is missing, what you get is blandness.