IKEA PS 2026 marks the tenth edition of IKEA's experimental collection, featuring 12 designers who created "talking" objects that combine playful functionality with joy. The collection focuses on compact living solutions where every piece must be both entertaining and practical, challenging the notion that simplicity equals boredom. Led by Maria O'Brian, the designers developed furniture with descriptive names that reflect interactive features like folding, clicking, and transforming to maximize small spaces.
Origin Lab raised $8 million in seed funding to create a marketplace connecting video game companies with AI labs building world models. The startup helps AI companies acquire licensed gaming data for training physical-world understanding models, while allowing game companies to monetize their existing digital assets. This addresses the data shortage faced by labs developing AI systems that need to understand how the physical world works, unlike text-based language models.
iOS 27 will introduce broader refinements to Apple's Liquid Glass design, including redesigned tab bars, new animations, and updates to apps like Safari and Siri, with one potentially major usability improvement: Apple may stop collapsing tab bars while scrolling. iOS 26's minimized tab bars in apps like Music, Photos, and Podcasts make navigation slower by requiring extra taps. Reintegrating search back into the main tab bar—already seen in the App Store and Games apps—strongly suggests Apple is responding to criticism and restoring permanently visible navigation across iOS 27.
Figma's Codex integration enables teams to import live user interfaces into Figma for collaborative design exploration and refinement. Teams can then export these designs back to Codex while preserving all design context and specifications. This creates a seamless design-to-code workflow that bridges the gap between designers and developers.
Being a UX designer in 2026 requires juggling multiple skills, including product design, AI tools, strategy, presentations, networking, portfolio building, and content creation. Key productivity hacks include building a personal component library before you need it, using proper file naming conventions, time-boxing exploration to 90 minutes, making critiques asynchronous by default, and using AI note-taking apps to handle meeting documentation. These strategies help designers avoid repetitive work, improve organization, and focus on actual design decisions rather than administrative tasks.
AI tools like Anthropic's Claude can function more like rapid iteration partners than answer machines, helping people explore and refine ideas far faster than they could alone. Creativity has likely always been shaped by outside influences — conversations, books, criticism, memories, and culture — but AI makes that process unusually visible through prompts and chat histories. What ultimately makes an idea feel “yours” may not be pure originality, but the judgment behind it: the consistent pattern of choices, refinements, rejections, and instincts that shape the final outcome.
AI is lowering the barrier to building products, but also making it easier for people to create systems they don't fully understand, leading to polished but fragile apps, workflows, and experiences. Rather than replacing product and UX design, this shift may make those disciplines more important, since the real challenge is no longer shipping quickly but building products that are coherent, trustworthy, and genuinely useful. AI works best as a tool that amplifies existing expertise — helping with repetitive tasks, research synthesis, documentation, and workflows. Speed alone has never guaranteed success. Blindly using AI without understanding simply allows teams and individuals to fail faster.
ImageToVideoAI is an online platform that transforms static images into professional-quality videos using advanced AI models like Seedance 2 and Grok Imagine.
Design leadership in the AI era demands a shift from pixel production to strategic thinking. As AI compresses the production layer of design, human skills like ethical judgment, contextual understanding, and systems thinking become the true differentiators. To address this gap, Tey Bannerman, former McKinsey partner and software engineer, is leading "AI Strategy for Design Leaders," a new course launching June 18 structured as three 90-minute live online modules culminating in a personalized 30-day action plan.
Ten common Figma component architecture mistakes — from over-using costly variant properties to misusing shapes instead of frames — can quietly erode design system quality and user trust. Fixes include adopting slots, variables and modes, auto layout, and properly scoped state properties. Understanding each feature's constraints and tradeoffs leads to sharper decisions and components built to last.
Many modern AI products rely on a blank prompt box as their main onboarding experience, replacing decades of UX practices that traditionally helped users understand what a product could do and how to start using it effectively. This approach often increases first-session drop-off because users are asked to invent prompts and workflows before they have any context, forcing them to think harder instead of guiding them toward quick success. A better AI onboarding experience would use worked examples, clear starting actions, visible limitations, and interactive guidance that helps users achieve something useful before needing to master prompting.
A resurfaced photo of Daniel Craig giving feedback on the Casino Royale poster has sparked debate about whether non-designers should influence graphic design decisions.
Designers who want to transition from being seen as reliable executors to trusted creative leads should proactively expand smaller briefs into bigger strategic ideas, using overdelivery to demonstrate capabilities clients may not yet associate with them.
Nintendo fans have criticized the new Star Fox 64 remake for Switch 2, arguing that the more realistic character designs have lost their original charm despite improved graphics.
WhatsApp is rolling out a redesigned iPhone app inspired by Apple's iOS 26 “Liquid Glass” aesthetic, bringing more transparency, depth, blur effects, and fluid animations throughout the interface. The update refreshes elements like the bottom navigation bar, keyboard, buttons, and context menus with semi-transparent, layered visuals that better match the latest iOS design language, though the rollout is gradual and some parts — like the chat bar — still retain the older flat style.
iOS 26 adds a new “Spatial Scenes” feature that brings a 3D effect to iPhone wallpapers, making photos appear more immersive and dynamic as you move the device. The effect, which is also integrated into the Photos app and Home Screen widgets, works especially well as a wallpaper by adding depth and subtle motion to personal images. Users can choose from Apple's suggested spatial wallpapers or manually enable the effect on nearly any photo in their library through the Wallpaper settings, where iOS automatically generates the 3D scene before saving it.
New York Design Week runs May 14-20, transforming the city into one of the world's most design-saturated destinations through the NYCxDESIGN Festival. The week features dozens of events across Manhattan and Brooklyn, including the SHINE light exhibition at The Seaport and an AI design conference. The International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center (May 17-19) serves as the week's anchor event, functioning as North America's leading contemporary design fair.
Technical education should teach humility about how extraordinary it is for machines to work at all, since complexity spreads like a virus when not properly managed. Well-constructed systems require leadership or principles that know what to say "No" to, while revolutionary software faces resistance because people aren't ready for change. When drowning in complexity, take solace that revolutionary ideas can emerge to create better abstractions and simpler systems.
The conversation around AI in creative industries has shifted from pure anxiety to a more complicated debate about how to live and work with a technology that is now impossible to ignore. Many creatives still oppose generative AI because of concerns over copyright theft, environmental costs, and job losses, while others who tested the tools professionally found them unreliable and not yet ready for high-end creative work. At the same time, some designers and artists see value in AI for repetitive or administrative tasks, while arguing that human creativity, taste, and originality remain essential and difficult to replace.
shadcn/ui has quietly become the default foundation behind many AI-generated user interfaces, powering the patterns and components produced by tools like Figma Make, Cursor, and Claude. Its popularity comes from offering clean, accessible, copy-and-paste React components that developers fully own and customize, making it an ideal fit for AI coding workflows. The broader shift highlights how modern design systems are increasingly shaped by developer ecosystems, AI tooling, and code-first infrastructure rather than traditional design platforms, with many designers only later realizing how deeply these defaults had already spread across the industry.
Fastlane is a platform that helps users create viral short-form content for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts in seconds. Users can enter their website URL, browse thousands of auto-generated content options, and schedule posts across multiple social platforms with performance tracking included.
A native moodboard app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that auto-tags everything you save by color, style, scene, and even the words inside images, so your inspiration library stays searchable without manual sorting.
User journey maps visualize every action, emotion, and pain point a user encounters while achieving a goal, explaining why users drop off rather than just where. Building one involves five steps: defining a research-backed persona, setting a specific scenario, mapping all touchpoints, capturing an emotion curve, and converting pain points into prioritized opportunities. Organizations that act on these maps see compounding business gains, including stronger marketing returns and faster sales cycles — but only when maps are grounded in real user research, not internal assumptions.
A 30-year design veteran shares 10 hard-earned lessons from a year of solo-building a data-intensive product. The core insight is treating data as the interface itself — letting its structure drive page layout, navigation, and interaction rather than decorating a pre-designed shell. Practical tips include learning Python, working with realistic data, bridging user mental models with system data models, and designing thoughtfully for empty states.
Spotify will give "Verified by Spotify" badges to artists who comply with policies, have consistent listeners, and maintain an identifiable presence on and off the platform. This initiative aims to combat AI-generated music, which has become problematic after incidents like the completely AI-generated rock band The Velvet Sundown that gained a million streams. The verification badges will roll out over the coming weeks, with Spotify aiming to verify over 99% of actively searched artists at launch.
Apple is reportedly planning a modest redesign for macOS 27 that refines the Liquid Glass interface introduced in Tahoe, improving transparency, shadows, readability, and overall polish after what Apple internally viewed as an unfinished first implementation. The update will also focus on performance and efficiency improvements, while bringing major AI upgrades such as a Gemini-powered Siri with chatbot features, unified Siri and Spotlight search, and other Apple Intelligence enhancements ahead of its unveiling at WWDC 2026 on June 8.
Autodesk has released Project Falcon, a free browser-based 3D modeling tool designed for beginners with no technical experience required. The platform uses a guided kitbashing workflow where users can assemble premade parts from a library of thousands of assets to create 3D models like vehicles and spaceships. Models can be exported to professional software like Maya, 3ds Max, or Blender for refinement, or used for 3D printing.
AI is transforming work from individual task execution to conducting multiple AI agents simultaneously, requiring a fundamental mindset shift from doer to director. People struggling with AI aren't lacking tools or knowledge, but rather the organized workflows and structured processes that AI needs to function effectively. This transition mirrors the challenge design leaders face when moving from hands-on work to managing teams, requiring the ability to oversee multiple parallel projects without diving into tactical execution.
Designing small in agile contexts is harder than it looks — not because of speed, but because it demands resisting the designer's natural instinct to solve the whole system at once. The key challenge is identifying the smallest slice of an experience that still delivers real user value, as opposed to dividing work by technical layers, which produces components that are useless in isolation. That constraint, though uncomfortable, is what enables fast learning loops and meaningful discovery about what users actually need.
Most companies are failing to see meaningful returns from AI because they are using it mainly to speed up existing workflows rather than rethink what products, services, or business models are worth building in the first place. While AI delivers clear productivity gains — especially for less experienced workers — the real long-term value comes from using it to ask better strategic questions, challenge assumptions, and reshape offerings, markets, and customer relationships instead of simply accelerating old processes.
A free set of 200+ pixel-style icons drawn on an 8 by 8 grid, exploring how minimal an icon can get and still be read at a glance. Available in Figma and SVG.
AI has caused a collapse in the mid-level freelance design market, with commodity work now dominated by $20/month AI subscriptions and mid-range freelancers losing clients to automated tools. Data shows freelance graphic design work shrank 17% within eight months of ChatGPT's launch, with entry-level projects dropping from 15% to below 9% on platforms like Upwork. Only high-level strategic design work requiring human judgment remains viable, while basic design tasks have been entirely replaced by AI tools like Canva and Midjourney.
Apple successfully challenged an EU trademark application from Chinese keyboard maker Yichun Qinningmeng Electronics Co. over a citrus-shaped logo that featured a missing “bite” and leaf motif, with the EUIPO ruling that consumers could mentally associate it with Apple's iconic branding despite only minor similarities. The case highlights Apple's aggressive protection of its logo and the strength of its brand recognition, following previous disputes over other fruit-inspired tech logos.
Eat Marketing reimagined the 124-year-old Stokes Coffee brand by modernizing its identity without losing its heritage, creating a warm and confident visual system centered around illustrated “Stokes People” characters inspired by real staff and family members. Rather than focusing only on aesthetics, the rebrand rebuilt the company's strategy, tone of voice, typography, and packaging to help Stokes compete in today's coffee market while preserving the trust and history that define the business.
This 11 icon pack list includes open-source options like Lucide and Iconoir, commercial libraries like Iconsax and Hugeicons, and specialized collections like Pixelarticons for retro designs.