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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 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…
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…
1950s Designers Using Type as Art: The Creativity Behind the Jazz Covers of Prestige Records
How Freelance Designers Off the Street Made Some of the Best Album Covers of All Time
Why You Never Find Out What a New Technology Could Have Done
Why 'Let AI Do the Work' Is the Trap Every Designer Falls Into
The Design Decisions That Stop a Child Outgrowing It
Designing for Children When Screens Are Everywhere
Making Your Portfolio Relevant Is Costing You the Job
Your Design Work Keeps Coming Out Predictable
Your Designers Will Never Try AI on a Deadline
Rivian's Design Chief on Why the Best Designers Work Within Constraints
Your AI Work Isn't Fooling Anyone
AI Makes You Look Like an Expert. That's the Trap. With Paul Ford
Inside Samsung's AI Design Process
Samsung's Federico Casalegno on What AI Still Can't Do in Design
The Sense You Lost When the World Went Digital, with Ian Bogost
How "User-Centered" Design Quietly Stopped Serving Users, with Ian Bogost
Why the Best Talent Won't Work Under Surveillance with Airbnb's Clay Parker Jones
DSB E282 Final YouTube
Why People Still Crave Real, Physical Things, With Vestaboard's Dorrian Porter
How Vestaboard Built a Physical Object People Obsess Over
Why Your Best Work Keeps Losing to ROI, with Lean Startup's Eric Ries
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Shorts
90 seconds or less96
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Every Icon Drawn by Hand
A 16 by 16 grid is the one thing AI still cannot draw. Yoto tried every model. They all make beautiful full resolution images, and none can make good pixel art. Constrain the…
How Lack of Experience Helped This Design
Expertise would have talked them into something more complicated. Yoto had never built hardware, so they built the obvious thing instead: children love putting things into things…
Don't Call It a Toy
Slapping an animal face on an adult device is the lazy version. Build for children from the ground up, then ask one question: at a dinner party, would the adults hide this, or…
What a Design VP Looks For That AI Work Never Has
It looks fine until you try to use it. Generic work passes the first glance, then fights you: a room where the floor sits halfway up the wall. Intentionality, decisions that fit…
The Redesign That Reduced Revenue by 30%
Nobody suspects the white space. Your pricing page used colors the product never uses, and trust broke. Your white space ran slightly wide, so eyes landed on the gaps instead of…
Focus on Value Before the Details
You're crafting exact wording for a flow nobody has proven yet. Go lower fidelity when the work gets complex. Figure out if anyone wants the thing before you argue about glitter…
How Rivian Addresses "Just Give Me a Button"
Customers keep asking for physical buttons. Instead of adding them, Rivian asks why. A labeled button keeps that job for the life of the car.
AI Ends the Drawing Contest
For years the best illustration won, not the best design. AI levels the playing field, so the best idea wins instead of the best drawing.
Designer or Stylist?
Anyone can make something look good with no limits. Working inside aerodynamics, safety, and cost is what separates a designer from a stylist.
AI Has the Skills. So Hire for Temperament.
Your next interview won't be about your skills. The machine has those. Companies want people who can articulate quality clearly enough to pull the work back when AI drifts…
AI Is the Most "I Could Do That" Technology Ever Made
You put rectangles on a screen. How hard could that be? Everyone devalues the next person's craft, and AI just handed the whole world permission. It will tell a stranger exactly…
The AI "Magic Trick" That Closes Deals
Your client thinks you did the work. You didn't. AI gives you months of understanding at the snap of a finger. Disclose what the machine made before someone asks for the idea you…
We've Gotten Too Soft on Critique
Direct feedback with fewer filters is how your work gets better. Keep it about the project, never the person. Reward the hours and the passion, then say what isn't working: on…
A Digital Twin of Your Ears
Your ears are too complex to design for by guesswork. A simulated version of your ear runs thousands of fit variations before a real one ever wears the product. The data narrows…
AI = EI + HI
The formula that keeps you driving the tools instead of being driven by them. Artificial intelligence equals emotional intelligence plus human imagination. Set the objectives…
Showing 24 of 96
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