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Why the Tool You Know Best Is Choosing Your Ideas
If your work keeps coming out looking like the last thing you made, the tool you know best is choosing your ideas for you. Trenton Doyle Hancock was in the Whitney Biennial at 26…
The Design Teams Weren't the Difference
Great cultures aren't great because they contain the thing. They're great because they value it. Walk into a company where design works and you can feel it in the people who…
How Milton Glaser set design quality standards
Lessons from a conversation with Randy Hunt, former head of design at Notion and Etsy.
You Can't Convince Them
Nobody was required to join. That's exactly why teams lined up. Make your change something people choose, then cap how many can. Seven teams got in the first year, sixty or…
Randy Hunt: Notion and Etsy design leader on why the best design teams stay small
Episode 194 of the Design Better Podcast
Thou Shalt Change
Nobody owes your change a yes. Mandates make people dig in, so treat the change like a product nobody has to buy. Deliver it so well the team wants it. If they refuse, that's on…
The Formula for a Design Team That Runs Without You
The way you work is probably locked in your own head, which means it stops when you do. Asked for his formula, Phil Gilbert had to turn instinct into something other people could…
Matt Owens: Athletics co-founder on keeping your creative fire lit
Episode 193 of the Design Better Podcast
How to Get a Yes From People Who Keep Killing Your Designs
When it comes to a design, you can build the case, bring the research, and still watch a good idea stall. Nobody at work owes your idea a yes. Phil Gilbert, former General Manager…
The Roundup: How to defeat jargon, win over a pushy PM, and fix the collaboration gap
What we learned from Blain Billingsley, staff designer at OpenAI
1950s Designers Using Type as Art: The Creativity Behind the Jazz Covers of Prestige Records
When Designers Collaborate
A designer chalked the album's lineup on the side of a railroad boxcar. He wasn't a photographer yet, so another designer took the shot. Your best work might need a skill you…
The Limits Are What Make the Project
So much is at your fingertips now. That's the problem. The constraint you're fighting often sets your work apart. Every Prestige Records designer asked the same question: what can…
Blaine Billingsley: OpenAI designer on the collaboration problem AI hasn't solved yet
Episode 192 of the Design Better Podcast
The Type Was the Art
Your type probably goes on last. One self-taught designer stayed up until two or three in the morning with type foundry catalogs, figuring out how it was done. Choose, color, and…
The Brief: 7 Principles for better AI collaboration
Principles and a downloadable kit for anyone who wants to work more efficiently with AI collaborators.
How Freelance Designers Off the Street Made Some of the Best Album Covers of All Time
Mack Paul: Co-author of Miracle Road on designing places where innovation happens
Episode 191 of the Design Better Podcast
The Roundup: Why some of Google's best designers spent time as PMs
Google let designer Niyati Gupta try being a PM and she became a better designer for it.
Technology Is Rude
Every polite thing you do for a stranger, you do without a word. Your product reads none of those cues, so it interrupts at the worst moment. The fix is not a smarter device…
Why Humane and Rabbit Didn't Work
Putting an LLM in a box does not put AI in the physical world. Alexa failed the same way. A device that cannot see what you are looking at or which room you are in will never read…
Why You Never Find Out What a New Technology Could Have Done
Federico Casalegno: Samsung EVP on how 20,000 years of creativity shapes design today
Episode 190 of the Design Better Podcast
AI Isn't a Thinking Machine, It's a Thinking-With Machine
Delegation is not a fact about AI. It is a metaphor you inherited. Swap it for augmentation and the work changes shape. AI you think with sharpens your decisions and shows you…
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