A lot of design thinking happens before the art board. The flow on paper. The wireframe that isn't a wireframe yet. The idea with no edges. Then it's gone.Goodnotes is a note-taking app for people who think on a tablet.Draw with your stylus on a canvas that keeps going.Search your notes every canvas you've made - whether they're typed, handwritten, or diagrammed.Try Goodnotes for free. Start a 30-day free trial, and see how it feels day-to-day. No card payment required.Download Goodnotes to your Apple device đ„
OpenAI is preparing to merge ChatGPT's Chat and Work tabs into one experience, letting users move from discussing ideas to completing tasks with files, plugins, and web tools without switching tabs. The change will first reach select users for feedback, while Codex remains a separate section of the desktop app. ChatGPT and Codex share a token allowance, which could mean more frequent waits for usage resets for some users.
Brush, Canva's in-house vision-language model, edits designs up to 69% faster than the previous design agent at 46% lower cost per task. It reads both content and layout across full designs like multi-page decks, writes and runs small pieces of code, and inspects results before each next step. Brush is in beta for Canva Pro subscribers, with Brand Kit support and better image-heavy layout handling planned.
Amstel has redesigned its packaging and logo around its 1870 Amsterdam origins, adding bespoke typography inspired by historic canal bridge signage and a refined golden circle. The red, white, black, and gold system also features a wave pattern, a horizontal split evoking the Amstel River, and three coins representing the founders, city, and waterway. Already a Red Dot winner, the identity is rolling out across 11 markets, with all remaining territories due to transition by the end of 2027.
Design is the deliberate process of deciding how something should work, respond, and be experienced, not simply the act of producing something that looks convincing. Conditions such as accessibility needs, localization, unpredictable content, failures, and different input methods should shape software from the beginning rather than being treated as edge cases to fix afterward. AI makes polished software dramatically faster to create, but that speed increases the importance of understanding which decisions were made, which assumptions they rely on, and whether they survive contact with reality.
Specialized post-training lets Figma's first-party editing model compete with frontier models on precise, iterative edits to existing designs. A Llama 3.3 70B model trained on 250,000+ examples first became competitive with top models, but imitation learning limited generalization, so Figma now invests in reinforcement learning. Since beta, typical tasks run about 20% faster, users rate results 33% higher, and they undo the agent's work 60% less often.
AI agents complicate the traditional definition of UX because people may increasingly accomplish goals without directly interacting with the companies, applications, and interfaces involved. Experience design provides a broader framing that includes traditional UX while also considering digital systems used by agents acting on humans' behalf and journeys involving multiple human and nonhuman actors. People's goals remain central, but designers must now consider experiences in which the immediate user of a product may be an AI rather than a person.
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AI makes generating images and concepts easy, so the harder work is deciding what is worth making, whose perspective is missing, and whether it communicates. At DesignThinkers, RGD's annual conference in Toronto, speakers covered information design, blending strategy with creativity, and designing a city. AI-accelerated trends risk polished sameness, so "raw, messy curiosity is the most valuable thing we can bring to the table."
Better graphic design copy starts with the project's purpose: a plain-language explanation, the audience, the most relevant benefit, objections, and the desired next step. Specific details persuade where vague praise does not, and a consistent brand voice should sound like the owner speaking face to face. Copy must fit its space, CTAs must match the reader's decision stage, and a final proofread should test every link and QR code.
Studio Kiln's identity for Reset reflects the weight-loss app's personalized approach to eating, building flexibility and responsiveness directly into its visual system. A dynamic identity uses typography, color, imagery, and graphic elements that can shift across different contexts while maintaining a recognizable core. The result gives Reset a distinctive presence without locking a product built around personalized meal guidance into a rigid visual language.
François Bourdin, a French freelance concept artist, character designer, and illustrator in Nantes, creates dynamic characters from razor-sharp angular linework and vivid, saturated neon palettes.
WhatsApp is adding four features designed to make busy group conversations easier to manage, including permanent message pins and Group Status updates visible only to members of a particular group. A new filter collects unread conversations containing mentions, direct replies, or @all messages so users can quickly find messages that need their attention. Recent message history can also now be shared with someone after they have joined a group, helping new members catch up without exposing older conversations automatically.
Meta's Style Sketch is an AI app that builds a virtual closet from a user's Instagram photos and suggests outfits from clothes they already own. Virtual try-ons use a model reflecting the user's body shape and skin tone, and trip plans pack outfits around destination, activities, and weather. The app launched on iOS and Android in Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, with no word on a wider rollout.
Affinity's all-in-one creative app is finally coming to iPad, nearly a year after its desktop debut, answering long-standing demands since new-format files can't open in the older V2 iPad apps. It combines photo editing, vector design, page layout, and sketching, with Apple Pencil support for pressure, tilt, and barrel roll, plus RAW editing and formats like PSD, AI, INDD, and SVG. The app is free for individuals despite its âpre-orderâ label, though Canva AI Studio features require a premium plan.
Hawaii's 2018 false missile alert demonstrates how poor information architecture, ambiguous labels, and insufficient friction can turn an interface mistake into a real-world emergency affecting 1.4 million people. The alert system reportedly placed confusingly named test and real commands together without clear hierarchy or confirmation proportional to the consequences, making a catastrophic selection surprisingly easy. The same principles apply to everyday software on a smaller scale: visually similar choices, weak labeling, and poorly structured menus create countless small errors that gradually erode usability and trust.
AI intensifies designers' fears about competing with people who can work faster, cheaper, or better, but those pressures have existed throughout the history of professional design and every major shift in production tools. Faster tools become threatening when designers price their time rather than outcomes, while âbetterâ extends beyond the quality of an artifact to the experience, perspective, judgment, and relationships a designer brings to a client. As AI makes production faster, deliberately taking time to gain experience, make mistakes, and develop a singular way of working may become more valuable than racing to master whichever tool is currently dominant.
Slow design system components make every app built on them slow, so performance belongs next to accessibility on the team's priority list. Timing ten popular systems on a 249-country dropdown and 100 checkboxes found Fluent and Carbon quickest to open the dropdown and Ionic by far the slowest. Playwright tests with explicit budgets, virtualized long lists, and published performance numbers keep components fast by default.
An AI video agent that turns your ideas, documents, links, and media assets into share-ready videos. Describe the video you want to make, upload your assets, and Cutbay helps you shape the idea.
An interlinked library that takes interfaces apart for the people who make them. Every entry names the mechanism, traces it back to the people who built it, and connects it to the ideas it grew from.
Check the accessibility of your PDF against WCAG and PDF/UA. Get actionable recommendations to fix the issues and move toward ADA, Section 508, and EAA compliance.
Striking photography wins attention but fails when visitors cannot tell what working with a studio involves. Dutch lighting consultancy Eclectic Lighting bridges that gap with sector-based project filters, a four-step process, specific client reviews, and a floor plan upload. Asking for a floor plan visitors already have turns the contact form into a concrete next step.
Kontrapunkt extended Copenhagen's JUNO the bakery into a restrained identity and packaging system built around white paper, subtle blue accents, simple duotone illustrations, and the bakery's blue peacock mascot. Its Danish Butter Cookies use the same quiet visual language. COPUS and Tommy Campbell carried the identity into JUNO's first online shop, using blue sparingly for highlights, product tiles, and the add-to-cart button to make the digital experience feel like a window into the physical bakery.
Missing the personality of the old internet, Paul Bakaus rebuilt his personal website over ten days with Claude Code as a retro Amiga-style world, using a 4,096-color palette, live-synthesized music, and a boss fight against a monster called Jirasaurus. Each page became a themed scene, from a rooftop panel and a speaking auditorium to a floppy-disk office platformer, and three pages hide playable games. Claude wrote the code, built the art pipeline, and composed the music, but animation needed a leg rig and constant feedback, and the site stays a fast, optional-to-play Ghost theme where reading still comes first.
Equine Eyes, an oversized horse-head headset, uses side-mounted cameras and a VR display to simulate a horse's nearly 350-degree field of view and blue-yellow color perception.
Japanese-American illustrator Mike Yoshimura channels 80s and 90s anime, retro cyberpunk, and vintage cel animation into solitary figures in neon-lit rain and twilight cityscapes.
John Kenn Mortensen translated his hand-drawn creatures and childhood fascination with darkness into the fantasy roguelike FLASK, combining grotesque medieval imagery, black humor, Labyrinth-like fantasy, and the energy of Slayer while working with a game art team to preserve his distinctive style in a colorful digital world.
Fitbit Edge pairs the brand's largest, brightest Hybrid OLED tracker display with a tactile side button for quick control mid-workout, even with sweaty fingers. A subtly curved chassis of 100% recycled aluminum keeps sensors against the wrist for 24/7 heart-rate and sleep tracking. Four finishes, four redesigned band styles, and up to seven days of battery life round out the design.
Microsoft is redesigning Windows Security to finally align its interface with the rest of Windows 11, replacing layouts and visual elements that still feel inherited from an older generation of Windows. Navigation, typography, spacing, colors, controls, dialogs, and status indicators are being modernized, with layouts also adapting more consistently across different window sizes. The update additionally improves how security status and available actions are communicated, while device information on supported managed PCs will progressively load so useful details appear sooner.
ChatGPT Dot can now communicate through iMessage and RCS, letting users assign tasks, send photos or voice notes, and receive proactive updates without opening ChatGPT. Dot can use context from ChatGPT conversations and connected channels to decide where updates belong, while users can specify that only urgent information should arrive by text and approvals still happen inside ChatGPT. The beta is currently limited to ChatGPT Pro users in the US, with one-to-one messaging supported but no group chats, regular phone calls, or FaceTime.
Working with AI agents means the author no longer memorizes every detail of the design system they build, a shift that requires making systems legible to LLMs. That knowledge has to move into the system itself, through explicit naming, current documentation, and composition rules, since agents can't rely on informal context or unwritten history. Understanding why the system works still matters, but less inventory in the designer's head is a trade worth taking if the system knows more about itself.
Figma captures only part of the behavior encoded in production components, leaving AI to invent missing details such as focus order, error states, accessibility behavior, and failure handling when translating designs directly into code. Reversing the workflow makes code the source of truth and Figma its visual mirror, with AI and MCP transferring real tokens, styles, properties, variants, and states from a repository into a usable design library. Storybook provides designers with a visual view of the production system, while explicit documentation of anything that cannot be represented in Figma helps maintain parity instead of allowing invisible differences to accumulate.
Products, from note apps to banks, ship the same AI chat panel behind a sparkle icon, often switched on by default and hard to turn off. Big cloud firms are projected to spend more than their cloud revenue on capex, while a cited study found that 95 percent of companies saw no measurable return from generative AI pilots. The fix is to build features with AI, not AI features, and to ask who asked, what it's named after, and whether it survives off by default.
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Agent skills can be treated like apps whose interfaces happen to be written largely through instructions, with both the human invoking the skill and the AI interpreting it acting as users. Building a polished skill requires many familiar design practices, including finding the right form, refining copy, creating a visual system, anticipating repeated use, offering meaningful customization, and testing across different contexts. Precise instructions matter because agents fall back on familiar patterns when given vague directions, making skills a useful place to encode the context, trade-offs, intuition, and taste that individual prompts cannot reliably communicate.
Art is less about conveying emotion to an audience than about capturing it, since a painter alone in a studio still makes art. Comparing skills with others can help, but becoming a better artist is personal, because nobody can express someone's feelings like they can.
Vancouver-based 3D artist Calder Moore builds bioluminescent forests, glowing flora, towering monoliths, and surreal planetary systems under twilight or starry skies.
Apple's first touchscreen MacBook Pro comes in 14- and 16-inch sizes, pairing a PROLED XDR display with a Dynamic Island-style cutout and a lighter body. A redesigned hinge keeps the screen steady during touch input, while M5 Pro and M5 Max chips power both models. Prices start at $2,899 for the 14-inch model and $3,399 for the 16-inch model, with preorders opening October 30 and availability beginning November 6.
Google Photos on Android is getting a customizable Collections tab that lets users pin frequently opened collections, hide sections they rarely use, and rearrange the layout. Favorites, Screenshots, and Trash are pinned by default, while albums, people and pets, places, and other categories get carousels that can be hidden or reordered. The update arrives with Google Photos version 7.97 through a server-side switch, with no broader release date announced.
Google's Genie 4, a new world model for real-time interactive simulation, brings more realistic visuals and native audio to generated worlds. Natural-language prompts steer scenes live, from moving the camera to changing the weather or adding characters. Rollout starts with a limited group of trusted testers, with Google AI Ultra subscribers in Project Genie and early-access Gemini API partners coming soon.
ADHD affects about 5% of people and stems from differences in how the brain develops focus, planning, and self-regulation. It is not a matter of willpower. Helpful patterns include reminders for unfinished drafts, chunked long forms, gradual disclosure of options, and visible progress, while autoplay and infinite scroll are best avoided. ADHD often overlaps with autism, dyslexia, and anxiety, so designing for it tends to help several groups at once.
Ideas such as clarity, simplicity, restraint, and functionality are often treated as universal measures of good design even though they emerged from particular Western histories and cultural contexts. Design traditions excluded from the dominant canon can use decoration, complexity, symbolism, and craft in ways that are deeply functional within their cultures, challenging assumptions that minimalism is inherently more sophisticated or understandable. Evaluating design more broadly requires asking who established prevailing standards of taste, whose histories were documented and taught, and whether a design successfully serves its specific cultural purpose rather than conforming to a supposedly universal aesthetic.
Customizable HTML selects can now include previews, secondary information, warnings, and other context that helps people recognize the right option instead of deciphering text labels. Practical examples include showing fonts in their actual typefaces, displaying current local times instead of UTC offsets, aligning delivery prices for comparison, and distinguishing people with identical names by job title and department. The technique progressively enhances the native `select`, so unsupported browsers can retain familiar controls while richer desktop experiences provide more useful information without replacing built-in semantics and keyboard behavior.