Leaping from 18th to 1st on one of the more visual benchmarks, Frontend Code Arena.

Here was not only a strong model, but a launch and product executed with care and craft, from slick marketing materials to the interface itself.

It encapsulates a reshaping in China’s brand and perception.

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State of the Craft: Baidu (China’s Google) searches for homegrown brands went from 38% to 70% of all brand searches between 2009 and 2019.

Brand In China

Some of the launch materials for Kimi k3 are beautiful, including this video piece, shot with a variety of different science-y objects over a Lightbox. There’s a compass, mathematical sketches and iron filings like you might have played around with magnets in science class. It’s well-paced, has interesting music and tells a compelling story visually about model inputs.

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In the 1950s a flood of Japanese products hit global markets — “Made in Japan” became synonymous with cheap, imitative and low quality, sound familiar? History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. Cheap, imitative and low quality can no longer box in the dynamism and innovation coming out of Chinese markets.

One example is BYD cars. They’re explicitly designed with a Chinese visual language. They’re sleek, simple, charge faster than western models and some makes have small motors in each wheel, allowing a 360 trick known as “Tank turns”. While sales have cooled, there’s still roughly 100,000 being sold a month. Looking more broadly there’s futuristic cities, reusable rockets and the fastest bullet train in the world. In 2024, China deployed 54% of all industrial robots installed worldwide, more than the rest of the world combined.

Japan and Korea have had rounds of heavily influencing western culture, it feels like it’s China’s turn. You may have seen “I’m in a very Chinese time of my life” memes “Chinamaxxing” and a flood of influencers documenting visits to the country. There’s Luckin Coffee, Mixue chains and lines stretching for blocks at HeyTea in New York.

Inside China, there’s a Gen Z movement called “Guochao” (national tide) that rejects imported brands in favor of homegrown ones. The assumption that imported brands are better seems alien to a generation that doesn’t see its nation as behind, but rather as an equal to the west.

Making things people buy is a manufacturing problem, which China has excelled at for 30 years. Making things people want is a design one, and that shift is happening now.

↳ See Here

Origin launches in early beta

Sorry to hype up Origin 2 months in a row, but we’re super excited that this is now available in open beta. Funnily enough, we launched on Monday, the same time GitHub had a major outage, I swear this was not planned!

Cursor can now host your code! Origin, our code hosting platform, is being rolled out in early beta to all paid Pro and Teams plans. Enterprise orgs also got access this week , except orgs where the admin has opted out.

We’re starting with the essentials, designed for agent scale: create a repo, push and pull with git, open, review, and merge PRs, and sync your GitHub repos. Vercel, Depot, and Buildkite are integrated from day one. Agent-native features are shipping soon.

I worked on the launch video for this. By some stroke of luck Elon reposted it, and it’s now Cursor’s most watched video at 25M views.

↳ See Here

Agentation

Agentation turns edits and annotations into a structured context AI agents can understand. Click any element, add a note, and paste the output into Claude Code, Codex, or any AI tool.

At Cursor we have our own version of this “Design Mode”, admittedly, it’s not the best… and neither is Agentation, but I’ve been finding myself favoring the latter as it allows you to create lots of annotations in one go and then have one agent act on all of your notes. Both of these tools could be more intuitive, but as a designer, they’re a godsend!

↳ See here

Field Notes

Things I noticed, attended, worked on, and found worth passing on.

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Samsara rebranded, congrats to Imri Larson! Mouthwash created a Shakespearean brand for Bonnie Clyde, Porto Rocha created a type-forward ID for New York’s MoMA PS1, Coca-Cola Unveils a New Global Brand Identity, Robert Beatty on retro Photoshop and Tame Impala album covers.

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The Google DeepMind team seems to have imploded, with Demis Hassabis becoming chairman, the chief scientist leaving and top talent starting Discovery Loop, Jenny Wen joins Cursor to lead Design! Along with Manuel Muñoz Solera and Tyler Howarth. Jared Palmer has ants in his pants Vercel > GitHub > Xbox and now Cognition, my mate and fellow Aussie Tarley Jordan moves from BUCK to Sibling Rivalry, another mate Kate Marshall joins Clay, Mitchell Hashimoto co-founds a new company, Superlogical.

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Thinking Machines launched Inkling, an open-weights model you can tinker with, Reve, an image model maker launched with a genuinely good video, Replit launches Replit Design, Elorian AI is building a foundational AI built on visual thinking, Figma launches Nested Folders, Pond is a Linux OS by Butterfly Interaction Inc, hilos is a team chat where agents are members.

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Big month for slop discourse. LinkedIn adds a “seems like AI slop” button, Carly Ayres also wrote everything I don’t like is slop, Mouthwash wrote Welcome to Scamtopia, Substack launched a new tool that can detect AI slop in your inbox. OpenAI launched some pretty interesting merch, including this mini keyboard,

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Paul Jun wrote Execution over everything, David Hoang wrote about agent experience, Webflow announced some big architecture changes, my colleague Justin Wang wrote a piece on designing with code, I read The K shaped agency economy from the Dieline.

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2 Cursor events I worked at and attended, Cafe Cursor New York and Cursor Creator Dinner New York. Graphite had a send-off party and I checked out this Ramp event.

monishkhara.com

A new study by Lenny’s Newsletter finds.

The question left is why? Why are designers taking things particularly hard in this moment? I found the article left that unanswered.

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State of the Craft: Among designers, 63% feel “overwhelmed by the pace of change” and 61% feel “tired,” the highest of any role.

Figma Conf

Figma Conf is Design Christmas for me, a) because I’m an insufferable nerd and b) it’s so fun just to see everyone, amped and ready to go, IN PERSON. In particular just talking shit and acknowledging that this is such a weird fucking time, with AI and all the other industry changes. It feels more bearable being reminded no one knows what really happens next.

My list of the best talks.

Zach Lieberman - 10 years of daily sketching
Zach was just so naturally funny and charismatic here, the dedication in a body of work 10 years deep is crazy. Easily my highlight talk this year.

Ryan Powell (Waymo) - Legibility by design
What Waymo has built still feels like science fiction to me. I can’t think of a more interesting design problem to be working on.

Brent David Freaney (Brat Album) - Death of the finished state
Throughout this lively talk the things that stood out to me were rigor and taste. Thousands of iterations, and what must be a library of millions of references.

Anna Oh (Norbert Health) - Designing for robots and seniors
A mission with real impact, users often choose design decisions and patterns we would never pick for them. That’s not friction, that’s a solution presenting itself.

Holly Herndon (Artist) - The rules are the art: creating with AI
Creative metaphors like Centaurs and Minotaurs, Holly had more philosophical points to make about using AI, some of the clearest thinking I’ve encountered on the topic.

Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) - Designing Math
Grant had a herculean task: make math interesting to designers. He understood the brief, no wonder his channel has over 8 million subs.

All of the talks from this year are on Figma’s YouTube channel here.

↳ See Here

Cursor Compile

Cursor hosted its first conference last month, Compile! A full day chock-a-block with devs, talks, cafe cursor (of course), keyboards, chalkboards and 3 big announcements!

My favorite part of the identity was the logo, designed by my colleagues Kenny and Justin and our agency partner. It’s a set of Lissajous curves, spelling out “C-O-M-P-I-L-E”, attendees could collect a pin of each letter at the conference as well, different pins were placed in bowls across the Fort Mason conference space.

The 3 big announcements?

• Our Github competitor, Origin (more on that below)

• A new 1.5T parameter model effort

• Cursor mobile app

↳ See Here

Graphite and Origin

It feels quite strange to see this ship, in a way. When I joined Graphite in August last year, the dream of taking on GitHub seemed 3-4 years away. That all changed when Cursor acquired us in December, the timeline accelerated… precipitously, given it’s July now and the waitlist is active. My colleagues and I have barely had time to adjust to the acquisition whiplash.

That speed comes at a cost. To be frank it’s been quite a chaotic and messy journey. There are many on the team that worked so incredibly hard on this, were so incredibly dedicated, that they’re completely burnt out and have quit. Mass exodus is common in acquisitions, but I feel quite sad to see many engineers, designers and close friends leaving. Tech can be cold and coin-operated at times, but the Graphite team had a knack for hiring kind, compassionate geniuses. Something that gets chipped away with each departure.

So if you get a chance, try Origin, be interested in it, follow it, test it out. The team behind it put a shitload of time and care into it. Code is moving faster than any infrastructure was built to handle. Origin was designed for this moment.

↳ See here

Field Notes

Things I noticed, attended, worked on, and found worth passing on.

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Koto with a great rebrand of Stack Overflow, Forth + Back shared a behind the scenes on their LA-inspired typography, BUCK helped design an entire stadium down under, Fast Company on America’s iconic designs, the UK launches a visa specifically for designers, Clay launched a new website and wrote about it.

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Microsoft hires their first Chief Design Officer (insane it took them this long), Fidji Simo leaves OpenAI, Harvey is hiring a head of creative operations, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose are starting their own media company.

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Pierre’s Designer is the biggest swag lord. Snapchat released some truly wacky looking specs — consult a designer bud! Meta also launched new glasses, but theirs had style, and Kylie Jenner to boost the brand.

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I read through The Subtle Art of not giving a F*#k (cringe I know), and bought a nicely designed Dyson vacuum, over better alternatives and the protests of my girlfriend. Leland Maschmeyer wrote the best thing I’ve read all year. Eli Heuer wrote an insightful piece on AI type design.

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Figma hosted Design Worm at their New York office, Ramp and Clay hosted Designers who Dim Sum, Anthropic and Notion hosted Mock Trial (one of the funnest events I’ve been to).

monishkhara.com

Figma just gave it a new spin, by throwing design a funeral.

An actual one, in New York. Complete with hats.

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State of the Craft: Figma’s Q1 earnings reported +46% revenue YoY to $333M and two straight quarters of accelerating growth. Design, definitely not dead.

Right tool, right interaction

The canvas feels like the center of gravity for a designer. It’s paper on a screen, a place to explore ideas spatially that feels natural and intuitive. Use your eyeballs and move the thing, simple.

And so naturally in this AI era, companies are introducing the idea of: Canvas, meet Agent? I’ve been wondering, does the canvas feel like the right place for AI Agents? E.g. a stated use case: update a property across every instance in your file. Didn’t components solve this ages ago?

Lots of companies are jumping in the mix here; Claude Design, Figma, Framer, Magic Patterns, Flora, Paper, even Cursor (see our latest Design Mode below). Every SaaS company in the world is facing pressure to squeeze AI into their product. Sometimes where it doesn’t fit.

For canvases, a balance of old and new might be the answer.

Just like the new Ferrari Luce.

Which is the all new, electric Ferrari, launched last month and designed in partnership with Jony Ive and LoveFrom,.

I’ll be real with you here. I couldn’t give a fuck about cars. So I’ll breeze over the apparent controversy with the creation of this car. What did intrigue me though (and I promise I’m circling back to a point) is what Jony Ive said about the interactions inside the car.

Turns out when cars are electric, people assume everything in it needs to be, too. Screens for everything. Buttons, knobs, levers -- Flattened and digitized.

What Jony explains is how wrong that is. Cramming every interaction into one paradigm is not the answer. It makes no sense to replace a gearstick with a touch screen. Screens require you to look at them. In a car you should be looking AT THE ROAD, pulling a physical gearstick requires only your sense of touch.

So you combine, gears, toggle, switches, handles plus screens in some places. Each interaction merits a decision for what type of tool. Right now it feels like we’re hitting every nail with an agent-shaped hammer, distressing.

The right balance will get sorted as these tools reach more designers. But right now it feels a little clunky.

↳ See Here

Cursor on Canvas

Essentially Cursor’s answer to Agents, meet canvas. Design Mode lets you click any element, draw on the page, or narrate the change by voice. Built by my colleagues Ryo, Erik and Ian.

Cursor’s POV on this comes from software development, using the browser as your visual canvas. You point at elements, annotate regions and describe what's wrong with what's in front of you.

Coming from a design background, the paradigm (browser as canvas) takes a minute to click. But once it does, it’s genuinely fast. Give it a go.

More updates to Design Mode to come.

↳ See Here

No-code vs Go-code

A little while ago I wrote about how the Grammarly CEO must have slept like shit for weeks when ChatGPT launched. Sometimes a new technology comes around and breaks apart your current business model.

No-code design platforms feel similarly outmaneuvered.

Wix’s stock is down 50% in the last 6 months, Squarespace went private years ago and Webflow recently laid off a large number of staff, including some embarrassing cases where folks were publicly asking their managers on social media if they still had a job.

But I think no-code ideas will come back, whether Wix and Webflow recover will depend on whether they pivot in the right directions.

The idea of no-code is it abstracts code away, making it more accessible. AI initially was disruptive here because it’s “Go-code” — Agents made it easier than ever to write code, in front of your eyes. The GitHub surges I talked about last month feel more possible because AI made people move closer to code.

To me there will still be a market for no-code. Look at Codex, Cursor 3 and Claude Code all of them now have tonnes of options to see no code at all when using.

As a counterpoint Framer has seen great growth, reportedly reaching a $2B valuation in 2025, and raising a $100M Series D. A testament to pivoting in the right direction.

↳ See here

Field Notes

Things I noticed, attended, worked on, and found worth passing on.

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Design Fund launched the AI in Design Report, Dan Shipper wrote: AI progress creates more work for humans, not less. Tommy Geoco gives an on-the-ground assessment of the design industry.

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Joan hires Gerry Graf. Sebastian Speier becomes head of design at Perplexity. And the big one, Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic.

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The striking and unsettling design of Liminal spaces takes over the movie industry. Xbox hits peak nostalgia with an OG anniversary design. Knicks fever takes over New York with painted subway stations.

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I read through Claire Hughes Johnson Scaling People and subscribed to Kira Klaas’s On Brand, Leland Maschmeyer’s The Punchmark and AUFI’s A Short List.

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Double Diamond hosted Dive Club live here in NY at Ramp’s office, watch here. Shopify hosted Demo Night: Shopify Design Studio Opening. Google hosted I/O 26 and Apple WWDC26.

Cursor is launching it’s very first conference, Compile, as well as launched Developer Habits Report. What we’ve learned building cloud agents and Development environments for your cloud agents bit the blog. Oli Cillo joined as motion designer.

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monishkhara.com

GitHub's brand promise is that they're the place code lives, reliable, always on.

What happens when internal politics, corporate malaise and complacency erode that promise?

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State of the Craft: 85.51%. That's GitHub's platform uptime over the last 3 months. The industry standard is 99.9%.

GitHub Has a Brand Problem, Not a Design One

GitHub is an interesting example of how Design and Brand are different (despite their many overlaps). GitHub has good design, the Octocat logo is iconic, a brand refresh and continued collaborations with BUCK over the years have created an exciting and dynamic visual language.

But GitHub doesn’t have a design problem right now, but more a brand one. When GitHub goes down, so does shipping code at thousands of companies. GitHub's brand promise is that they're the place code lives, reliable, always on, the bedrock layer.

A downtime page GitHub intentionally hides (but a third party tracks) reveals their uptime woes. Having part of your service down 15% of the time is… kinda shit. April piled on: a critical vulnerability flagged by Wiz, and merges reverted across hundreds of repos. The frustration is palpable, as legendary engineers like Mitchell Hashimoto publicly announced they’re moving on.

Many of these issues are ironically from suffering success. AI coding is leading to record amounts of new repos, PRs and commits. The demand is putting strain on the entire system. Part of the influx is us, designers, enabled by the AI coding wave.

[source: GitHub]

Another interesting element to this, but far more mushy than stat-driven, so bear with me, is politics. In 2018, Microsoft bought GitHub. In 2025, GitHub was officially moved under Microsoft’s CoreAI business, the CEO left and was never replaced.

Not replacing a CEO is a classic corporate‑politics signal: It reduces GitHub’s ability to make decisions on its own and puts it on an equal‑or‑lower footing with other teams inside Microsoft. Battles over control and general malaise set in.

So now, this all appears on customers' doorstep. The brand, the promise that code lives here, reliably, always — is eroding. Stress-tested by AI load, a huge influx of new users (like designers), Microsoft's politics, and a CEO-shaped hole at the top.

Which leaves one thing clear. This brand has work to do.

↳ See Here

ChatGPT and fake Monets

ChatGPT Images 2.0 has arrived, and it’s quite a step change.

But don’t worry, AI slop is here to stay.

But this release brings real improvements for designers: better text rendering, denser compositions, and stronger preservation of fine detail.

Still, as these models get better, people remain surprisingly confident they can tell real from fake. Take this Monet posted by concept artist @schl0ms.

He asked people to explain why his AI depiction was inferior to the real thing. Detailed replies poured in, 6M views. The catch was the image wasn’t AI, but rather a screenshot of a lesser-known Monet, a real one.

The replies to this post dissected brushwork and palette choices. Users circled clear "telltale" AI artifacts in the composition.

“I'm disappointed I have to even point it out. There is no cohesion to the depth and color choices.”

These tools will continue to fool and and blur the lines between fake and real.

↳ See Here

Design Engineer Fellowship

Design Engineering has gone from a rather niche skillset. To a well sought after seat for EPD (Eng, Product, Design) teams. It’s absolutely still a niche role, but I was taken aback recently when I met a Design recruiter that only looks for Design Eng candidates.

Right now those roles typically split into two archetypes:

1. The “brand” design engineer, who works on more visual web surfaces like marketing sites and landing pages. Often a stronger Graphic Designer.

2. The “product” design engineer, who works in the weeds on product with EPD teams. Often a stronger Front-end Engineer.

Here’s a recent job description from Ramp, for a design engineer.

If this space is exciting to you, the linked fellowship might be as well.

There’s an impressive list of industry leaders who’ll be joining. OpenAI, Stripe, Google Labs, Vercel, Figma and more.

↳ See here

Web Watch

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GT Mechanik
A dynamic, engaging storefront for a beautifully crafted typeface.

Field Notes

Things I noticed, attended, worked on, and found worth passing on.

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Shopify Design hosted Design.md and Demo Night 2, Double Diamond also held their first demo night, where my colleague Cam presented. Eric Hu spoke at Pentagram, my old boss Nadia Lung spoke at 1st Round. Figma released their 2026 Config agenda, who’s coming? Tech Week is soon.

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Karri Saarinen reminds us to be sensible about AI, Scott Galloway wrote “The AI jobs narrative is BS”. Jasmine Sun wrote a popular “underclass” piece and included a behind the scenes on the art direction. Coinbase announced layoffs and the stock dropped, not popped.

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Jared Palmer moved from GitHub to Xbox. Carl Rivera, head of Design at Shopify moved to Nubank. Thomas Wilder left Wolff Olins to start Reunion Studio.

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Sam Altman and Mira Murati’s texts leaked “Yes for you to be gone”. Charlie Gearside launched Build Australia. Cosmos relaunched with a spot featuring Odessa A’zion. Are.na launched an image frame that quickly sold out.

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I tried out Figma Weave and read through Julia Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager and added Sibling Rivalry and Studio Addition to my radar.

Cursor launched an SDK, and 3 blog posts I worked on Autoinstall, Model capabilities and App stability posted. Dan Hollick and Luke Barker were hired to join us on the brand team.

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monishkhara.com

It protects them from almost everything their users do on their platforms

A recent verdict changes that.

To hold a company liable, a plaintiff now only needs to prove they experienced harm because of the way a platform was designed.

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State of the Craft: $6 million, that’s the total amount Meta and YouTube were found liable for, in damages related to their platform design features.

The Liability Loop

PMs chase engagement. Marketers chase clicks. Designers just build things.

The algorithm that serves diet content to a 13-year-old, the infinite scroll, the notification barrage, those were product decisions. Design was just the execution. The blame landed on product managers chasing engagement metrics, or executives optimizing for quarterly numbers. The ethics problem belonged to someone else.

That defense just got a lot harder to make.

Meta and YouTube have been found liable for damages tied to the specific design of platform features. The mechanism itself is on trial, made smooth, frictionless and engaging by a designer.

The question isn't really whether designers knew these features were harmful. It's what happens now that their work has legal consequences.

↳ Read Here

Claude Design

“Figma is c0ok3d” Fuck me. Here we go again. Last week, Anthropic’s new Design tool gave sales bros on Linkedin permission to proclaim Design dead, again.

Despite never having designed anything themselves, ever.

I’m not totally discrediting the take, Anthropic is on a tear right now. They’re on track to overtake OpenAI in valuation, their models kickass and they have an x factor right now, momentum, hutzpah.

But Rasmus Andersson said it best, this is a production tool. And the practice of design is mostly about what comes before production.

↳ See Here

The Brand Age

Venture capitalists have a sharp handle on what parts of the business recipe can make them money. So I wasn't surprised to see Paul Graham write a pretty good piece on branding.

Paul’s critique of branding is it promotes fake value by selling status and cultural cachet. He’s a features and benefits kind of guy, not unusual for a technologist.

I kinda agree, one of my favourite ways to describe branding is “unearned margin”, it’s that extra juice beyond what a product can directly do for you, the signalling, the promise over time.

Paul seems to view this with disdain. But cachet isn’t nothing. The promise, the cultural shorthand, the trust that compounds over time, it’s a richer more substantive form of value. Just harder to put on a term sheet.

↳ See here

Studio Brier

Excited to see Alejandro Rodriguez start his own studio, BRIER specializing in identity design and brand strategy.

Starting your own thing takes guts, and there's a tonne of thorny challenges particular to agency models and the creative industry.

When Alejandro Rodriguez, Danny Owens and I started Toil, I experienced the most violent, sudden inadequacy in my abilities in my entire career.

Lucky I had those two as business partners, it's incredibly rewarding to see Danny continue to grow Toil and for Hondro to now start Brier.

Go check out Brier at the link below:

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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Intercom
Intercom’s new site leans into a refined editorial style, but with a surprisingly warm, humanistic touch.

Some of the best creatives in tech are on the chopping block.

Block, (the company behind Cash App, Square and Afterpay) is cutting roughly 40% of its workforce.

Right now is a rare buying opportunity if you’re looking for talent.

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State of the Craft: Block’s layoffs are one of the largest percentage reductions in workforce ever announced by an S&P 500 tech company.

Block Layoffs

There’s a lot of noise around these layoffs, my mate Hang Xu wrote an excellent post on ‘AI washing’ and the murky reasoning around Block’s reduction.

Andy Welfe’s post was also biting. A world in which layoffs = a 20% pop in stock price is a shitty one indeed, and AI is a convenient scapegoat.

It’s all incredibly difficult to parse, is AI killing creative jobs? or acting as an accelerator for hiring, as outlined by this Figma report. What’s more clear to me in regards to hiring designers is a growing appetite for senior talent. 56% of respondents in Figma’s survey are increasing hiring of senior designers.

Well now is the time sharks, there’s blood in the water. Block is well known for having some of the best creative teams in all of tech, spread across Cash App, Square and Afterpay.

Go forth, snap up these people if you’re on the lookout, I know our teams will be. On that note Graphite and Cursor are hiring, don’t hesitate to reach out.

↳ See Here

Xbox’s Brand Collapse

Xbox’s current brand crisis is an example of chasing tomorrow’s customer at the price of today’s. Xbox makes a video game console (brand anchor), but also buys video game makers to bring IP exclusively to its box (brand content).

In 2022 Xbox (through daddy Microsoft) spent $69B to acquire games maker Activision Blizzard. The sale took longer than expected, putting pressure on Xbox to sell to a wider market for more scratch.

Abandoning their anchor, (the actual physical box), Xbox launched a campaign called ‘this is an xbox’. Encouraging users outside of their player base to engage with their content, without buying their hardware.

This backfired massively, leading to an early retirement from Xbox’s CEO Phil Spencer and a Game of Thrones-style betrayal and surprise resignation of their second in command, Sarah Bond.

Without something to anchor to, Xbox’s player base soured and revolted. It’s not that this brand needs a physical device, but it changed too much all at once. It cut loose the actual connection people had to the brand, which was through the hardware.

↳ See Here

Granola Rebrand

This was a divisive one, some highlights from my work Slack channel. “This green is kinda criminal”, “terrible” and my favorite “The spiral is giving True Detective serial killer”.

But I… kinda like it? At least it doesn’t look like every other SaaS software brand clone. This rebrand was also done by Ragged Edge, who rarely summon boring, check out my interview with them on Wise from a few years back.

↳ See here

Canva buys Cavalry

There’s been increasing competition in the motion design software space, one where Adobe’s After Effects has held the undisputed crown for years. There’s Rive, Jitter and there’s of course, Cavalry. Which just got acquired by Canva.

Canva is on a mission to fill out their suite of tools as they go upstream to creative professionals. Giving them an attractive set of software to compete with the likes of Adobe and Figma.

What’s interesting about Cavalry is it isn’t an AI tool but functions similarly to one. It’s less precise and more of a sandbox you throw effects and layers into. Check out Fafa Zu and Elena Kudriavtseva who are both wizards with it.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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graphite/wander
A Microsite I recently worked on for Graphite. Agents represent a new paradigm in technology, but the message is still yours.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan coined "The Medium Is The Message".

The idea is simple: the form through which information travels matters more than the content it carries.

Software is the medium of our time, and increasingly design shapes it.

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State of the Craft: Globally, people spend 4.2 trillion hours in mobile apps per year, about 3–4 trillion of those hours are social and messaging apps.

George Interview

George is a brand studio run by Dave Clark and Andrew Guirguis, two creatives who cut their teeth at agencies like Anomaly, Mother, and Host before starting their own studio. They partner directly with founders from pre-seed to scale, and in some cases, take equity stakes in the companies they build brands for. They share their take on why direct founder access and skin in the game makes for better brand work.

↳ See Here

Software as Content

A few weeks ago I attended what I can only describe as a software performance. Entertaining and strange due to its mix of formats, it was part product demo, part stand-up set, part performance. With crowd work, wigs and a breakout in song to boot.

Danger Testing drops a new app every Thursday. Each one piggybacks off a cultural moment trending that week. When Timothée Chalamet’s chaotic Zoom call went viral, they shipped an app that let you join it. When friend.com subway ads blanketed NYC, they shipped an app to vandalize them.

Most apps and software optimise for retention and revenue. Danger Testing optimises for resonance. Build fast, ride the cultural moment, give someone something worth posting, move on. The moment is the product.

↳ See Here

Software Beef

Anthropic is using its brand creative as a weapon, using Super Bowl ads to take a jab at OpenAI, which recently announced it will introduce ads. The campaign is sharp, using a simple, age-old format: we're this, they're that. And it clearly touched a nerve (reminder, never write an essay in response to a joke).

Both these companies create the same thing, but they’re starting to diverge on identity and target markets. OpenAI has gone consumer, Apple-like minimal design, claiming massive reach with 800 million weekly users. But it has eroded trust with consumers, with AI slop, erotic bots and sycophantic models.

Anthropic has its sights set upstream at enterprises. Warmer, more human design, eloquent writing, smaller market share, more discerning but also snooty and pretentious.

Different philosophies, same race. Anthropic made ‘we won’t show you ads’ the most effective ad to differentiate.

↳ See here

Software is Culture

“Software used to feel separate from us. It sat behind the glass, efficient and obedient. Then it fell into our hands. It became a thing we pinched, swiped, and tapped, each gesture rewiring how we think, feel, and connect”

• 255–300 billion mobile apps are downloaded worldwide per year, and projections for 2025–2026 sit near the 299 billion mark.

• Day to day, people use about 9–11 apps, which effectively become their personal “cultural stack” for communication, work, entertainment, and utilities.

In the attached piece, Little Troop designed creative that brings to life the 10 most iconic digital interactions through time.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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read.quest
Quest is an online magazine that uses sci‑fi and fantasy to examine politics, culture, and society. A project by Ross Gendels, see his past interview here.

The best rebrand in recent years is, gambling to prediction markets.

This is the magic of branding. Reframing, premiuminizing, coercing.

Call it what you want – “event derivatives,” “information markets,” “crowd-sourced forecasting”. It’s gambling. But the rebrand worked.

Polymarket and Kalshi went from fighting federal gambling bans to securing billion-dollar valuations and regulatory approval.

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State of the Craft: In the 2016 election, PredictIt handled about $1 million in total bets. In 2024, prediction markets processed $2 billion in a single week. Same activity, different branding, thousand-fold scale.

Jessica Rosenberg Interview

Jessica Rosenberg is a multidisciplinary brand and creative leader who's spent two decades building bold brands. Jess recently led the Jasper AI rebrand and now heads brand at AirOps, where she's making AI tools feel more human instead of cold and lifeless. Jess vibe codes with Claude Code for fun and co-hosts Ladies Who Create when life allows, and is raising 4 kids in Austin while preaching that quality beats AI slop every time.

↳ See Here

OpenAI Devday

One of the funnest, most expressive pieces of creative I’ve seen in the devtools space. A new, now kind of tired style called “ASCII” is popping up everywhere in this segment, but somehow Studio Dumbar’s take feels fresh and full of character.

There’s so many exciting things happening in this space, and creatives are having a field day.

↳ See Here

Apple Creator Studio

Increasingly big money in creative software is attracting increasingly bigger dogs on the block. Apple just launched their new Creator Studio. It bundles Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage into a single subscription for $12.99 a month. Students for $2.99.

The play here is pretty clear. Adobe Creative Cloud costs an arm and a leg, so Apple is undercutting them by 75% while loading the suite with AI features—Transcript Search in Final Cut, Beat Detection, Visual Search, the whole nine yards.

↳ See here

Creative Studio (but in-house)

Hardly a new phenomenon, creative teams are structuring themselves in-house, and recreating their own mini “Creative Studios”, inside the apparatus of big tech and corporate America. Client cash is replaced with something better and more consistent, deep-pocketed companies.

We talked a little about it last week with Meta poaching Apple talent to establish a “Creative Studio” at Meta, Intercom has an internal “Brand Studio”, Coinbase has “Creative Office”. They’re popping up everywhere.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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Shopify Editions
Shopify’s long-running design playground, not a fan of the AI gen images, but the design engineering here is cracked.

Is the big creative agency model collapsing?

It feels easy to blame AI, the economy, clients?

The real answer is plain old competition.

Advertising spend is flowing from traditional full-service agencies to platform holders (Meta, TikTok, YouTube) and direct creator partnerships.

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State of the Craft: Omnicom, an ad agency holding co. is cutting 4,000 jobs & retiring several long-standing agency brands. Altogether, a recent merger has axed roughly 10,000 positions.

Kate Marshall Interview

Kate Marshall is an independent senior copywriter and personality hire based in LA. No portfolio school, just Google searches and good instincts, Kate has worked for the likes of Webflow, Clay, Indeed and more. She loves her spanish-style apartment and microscopic dogs. She also recently gave up caffeine. Brave!

↳ See Here

Why Big Creative Agencies Are Losing
(Hint: It's Not AI)

Remember when Cannes was cool? When a Clio meant something? When the Mad Men era wasn’t completely mythologized. Remember when a campaign could actually move culture. Creatives at big agencies weren’t just vendors; they were tastemakers. They built empires on culture-shaping work.

That world is hollowing out.

Advertising spend is flowing from traditional full-service agencies to platform holders (Meta, TikTok, YouTube) and direct creator partnerships.

Creator content just works better. 28% lower cost-per-click on Meta. 3-5x more engagement than brand posts. 4.5% conversion rates versus 2.3% for traditional paid media. When a brand can partner directly with creators and bypass the agency entirely, they get superior performance at lower cost, ouch.

The industry will adapt, we’ll find new ways to provide value. But the big, bloated full-service agencies are economically unviable, the world of landing 3-4 Superbowl spots to boost through the year is fucking toast — it’s done.

This is not AI, its not Covid recovery, its your garden variety, full-body-contact free market competition.

↳ See Here

Apple Design Execs Poached

Two key Design execs from Apple are leaving for Meta this month, Alan Dye, who led Apple’s user interface team for the last decade and Billy Sorrentino, who will become VP of Product Design.

The story for me here isn’t actually the talent drain from Apple, but rather that two of designs sharpest, with unlimited options and resources, are deciding to go to Meta.

They’re joinging a new “Creative Studio” at Meta to “bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of our products and experiences.” This move has some teeth, Meta’s design investments will be one to watch moving forward.

↳ Read here

State of the Brand - Red Antler

Red Antler just dropped their 2026 State of Brand report, it’s very culture focused, which I think is super useful. Some themes I noticed:

• Cultural polarization as strategy Brands picking their people and saying “no” to everyone else. Kind of tracks with the political environment.

• Rejection of performative messaging Proof over platitudes, increasignly consumers see through the bullshit, especially the young-ins (Gen Z).

• Consumer appetite for authenticity Rejecting corporate nice-ness, this tracks with the rise of influencers, who are seen as more authentic than a company’s social media account.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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Alter Mag
A really unique editorial site that’s easy to digest, with elegant interactions to boot.

Let’s talk about Cursor.

I attended one of their design events this month.

And I’ve been learning to code with their product.

I wanted to dig into some investments they’ve made into design, and why their product is appealing to us pixel pushers.

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State of the Craft: Cursor just raised a $2.3B Series D at a $29.3B valuation and crossed $1B in annualized revenue.

Cursor’s Design Moats (And Why It Matters)

Cursor makes an AI-assisted IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which is a mouthful I’ll translate to: ‘they make a code editor’. At an event I attended last month here in NY, Ryo Lu, Cursor’s head of Design shuffled up to the stage with his laptop and started demoing Cursor 2.0. Soft spoken with a shock of bleached blonde hair, he showed how the interface could collapse from a traditional code editor view (rows of multicolored syntax, the whole developer setup) into just a simple chat box.

These new updates felt specifically targeted at users like designers. “You don’t even need to see the code if you don’t want to” he whispered, clicking open a built-in browser (something most code editors don’t bother with). That choice felt deliberate. A built-in browser in this context may as well be a Figma canvas or artboard and Ryo treated it like one, clicking through a vibe-coded webpage and calling out tiny flaws with a designer’s eye: spacing off by a few pixels, tracking too tight, inconsistent padding. The kind of stuff engineers miss, but designers don’t, then directing Cursors AI Agent to edit the underlying code and fix the mistakes.

Should designers code? It’s a silly question without the specifics, why the hell would a social media designer need to learn React? It really depends, but increasingly Product and Web Designers, whose final designs ship as code in browsers, are finding opportunities to get closer to the codebase. Tools like Cursor or v0, Lovable, Bolt, invite designers in without overwhelming them with syntax and steep learning curves.

Cursor hired Ryo Lu as head of Design in February this year, previously a founding designer at Notion, in several interviews he’s voiced a mission to make software creation accessible to all. A strong systems thinker, one of his first tasks at Cursor was to streamline many of Cursors disparate features; tab completion, inline editing, chat — all were consolidated to one concept, “Agents”. This feels like clear design thinking: consolidate the complexity, give users one clear mental model instead of five.

But Cursor’s design investment didn’t stop with Ryo. They’ve been busy snatching up creative talent from places like OpenAI, Github and Vercel. Past pedigree obviously isn’t everything, but to poach a designer from OpenAI, which is likely paying in the top 1% of comp for designers in the industry, signals some real scratch being thrown around and a committed investment to a deep design bench.

Then there’s the brand work. This year Cursor also invested in a brand design refresh, from a little known German studio and type foundry called Kimera. Kimera helped build a complete custom typographic system. They created a new typeface ‘Cursor Gothic’, refined logo ligatures that echo the typeface itself and built a custom icon set that works across marketing and surfaces inside the code editor interface.

I can’t tell you if a $29.3B valuation — 4x the size of the total global Developer Tools market makes any fucking sense. But they are building real design moats around talent, branding, product strategy and pushing beyond their core developer audience.

In a panel discussion to close out the event, we heard from Ryo again, about software designers losing their way: “Code is our material, and we kind of lost that for a while…” “I want Cursor to fit you, or anyone who’s making software.”

↳ See Here

A Superhuman Pivot

Picture this: you wake up with a jolt in a cold sweat. It’s Nov 2022 and you’re the Grammarly CEO. OpenAI just dropped a product called “ChatGPT” that can do everything your product does, times 100.

Your $13 billion valuation suddenly feels like it’s built on sand. Grammar checking? Sounds quaint, cute even. What once was a sophisticated product now feels like a feature.

To their credit, Grammarly’s top brass saw the writing on the wall. We can’t just be a writing tool anymore, so in 2024 they acquired Coda (it’s like a shitty version of Notion).

The story above is helpful context to what felt like a confusing rebrand to most this month, when Grammarly acquired another much smaller company called Superhuman, and went forward with their name in a full rebrand.

Grammarly couldn’t just be a writing tool anymore. The new company, Superhuman, is an AI-native productivity platform that combines Grammarly, Coda and Superhuman’s features into one package.

↳ See Here

Figma’s Craft Moat

Figma just acquired Weavy, a design tool with layers of node-based bells and whistles to help generate images.

Here’s what everyone else is doing: Midjourney, Runway, Sora, Firefly -- it’s all about who can turn text into pixels fastest.

There’s traction there, but “automate me out of this” is a positioning that’s grating to designers and makers.

Figma’s building a moat around generation and craft. The line that matters: “We believe the first prompt is the creative starting point rather than the final destination.”

The bet is the sticky part isn’t the generation, but the workflow around it.

↳ Read here

Canva Makes Affinity Free. Should Adobe Sweat?

Adobe’s current Pro subscription costs $70/mo or $840/yr.

That $70/month can sting, and Adobe made it worse by being complete dicks about their subscriptions, so much so they invited intervention from the FTC.

Enter the little Aussie battler, Canva. Although we can hardly call her little anymore. This week Affinity (owned by Canva) made their software suite completely free.

Affinity’s tools are comparable to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, with a handy toggle at the top to switch between, instead of opening several programs.

The catch is, not everything is completely free: Affinity’s sloppity slop features (AI) and collab tools live behind a Canva paywall, but the central tooling is truly free.

The play here? Canva’s already got marketing departments hooked. Many are paying for Canva Pro. But businesses still pay Adobe separately when their teams need proper design tools. By making Affinity free, they’re positioning one subscription to replace two.

As someone who primarily lives in Figma now, it’s tempting to cut Adobe loose completely and pick up Affinity, for free.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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Cloudflare Workers
Whoever designed this site for Cloudflare should be hired to redo their main site, asap.

Text, Code, and Image Generation. All have creative dimensions.

But AI Image Gen encapsulated the coming “end of designers” most.

Of the 3 amigos, Image Gen may turn out to be the least valuable to businesses.

Sora’s hellscape of slop feels like the perfect caricature to put a bow on this thought.

From a business standpoint, it’s just as shaky: each video costs about $5 to generate.

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State of the Craft: Ever since ChatGPT’s image gen was released in 2022, Google search interest in it has fallen nearly 80%.

Double Diamond Interview

I met John and Chase at design events here in New York, for a period of time while running Toil, I was going to 2-3 events per week.

Consistently I would run into these two “oh hey again.” I became used to keeping an eye out for them to every event I dropped into.

And that’s why it makes so much sense that they’re now running their own design event, Double Diamond.

Keep on eye out for these two, click through to read.

↳ See Here

Nostalgia Marketing

Both Anthropic and OpenAI launched traditional ad campaigns in the last few months. Anthropic worked with Mother while OpenAI worked with a little-known shop called Isle of Any.

OpenAI’s campaign has a distinctly retro, analog feel and was shot entirely on 35mm film.

Anthropic’s “Keep Thinking” film goes even further back in time, evoking the 1970’s with a warm, approachable aesthetic.

What’s striking is these companies are supposed to be building the future, and neither could come up with a compelling vision for it.

Because if OpenAI’s Sora is any indication, the future looks fucking terrible.

↳ See Here

Joining Graphite

A personal update, 2 months ago I joined the team at Graphite, a tech startup in the devtools space, working on the future of coding tools.

As a creature of the agency world, it’s a big change.

But weirdly a natural one, my focus on Web Design and Webflow has been bringing me closer and closer to code, Graphite is all about the developer experience.

Cofounding Toil Studio the past few years has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. And it was really hard to leave.

I’ve learnt a tonne alongside my two cofounders Danny Owens and Alejandro Rodriguez and I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved together.

I’m excited to cheer them on as they continue scaling Toil.

↳ Create, Review, Merge

More Design Acquisitions

Earlier in the year I wrote a post about design-driven bets from markets this year. Here’s another one.

Visual Electric is a Sequoia-backed AI design startup known for its image and video generation tools. Perplexity just acquired them for an undisclosed amount.

Despite my dunking on these tools in the intro, its clear companies see a market for image-gen AI moving forward.

But its been interesting to see which players have committed to this space, notably Anthropic does not make an image-gen AI tool. They position themselves as the anti-slop AI platform.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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Oxide Computer
Simple, clean, and comfortable owning one color.

Lots of talk about a tech bubble this month.

You’ll find this reporting everywhere, but what I’m interested in exploring is:

Within all this investment activity, what portion of investments are design-driven bets?

I’d argue, more and more?

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State of the Craft: Cracker Barrel's recent logo rebrand sparked significant backlash. The stock fell over 11%, wiping out $100M in value.

Toil Web Process Doc

This generated a fair bit of interest on Cringedin, (30k impressions) so here’s the open source version.

I’ve craved more process in the design field since college. And no, not the process of using the “tools”, or doing the actual work.

End-to-end, running and scaling effective design projects, and I think others are craving the same, too, hence the interest.

That said, this document is a very broad strokes outline of how we run Web projects at Toil, its highly custom - so much so that if your team doesn’t use Webflow its half useless. So keep that in mind!

↳ See Here

Design, Markets and Acquisitions

A list of what I would argue are big design-driven bets from markets this year:

• OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s team of 55 creatives for $6.5B, averaging $118M per employee. It’s the second-highest per-employee acquisition in history. Largely an acquihire, for, you guessed it, designers.

• Figma raises approximately $1.2B in its IPO. Hyped? Yes, but Figma is no WeWork, and has rock solid fundamentals. Revenue grew from $500M to $820M in a year.

• Atlassian bought The Browser Company for $610M. Many see it as a tech play, but Dia is built on Chrome’s stack and its value (imo) comes from design.

• Shopify acquired Brooklyn studio Molly (undisclosed amount). Shopify also reinstated the Chief Design Officer role this year, with a focus on AI interaction patterns.

↳ See Here

Design reaches highest office

Something odd happened last month: the president weighed in on a logo.

The Cracker Barrel redesign caught his attention, calling it a ‘mistake’, he urged a crawl back to the old mark.

He even sketched out a strategy for how they could turn the fiasco into a “Billion Dollars worth of free publicity." - linking design to marketing and shareholder value.

I’m sure unrelated, but just days later, the White House issued an executive order:

“Improving our nation through better design”. A federal initiative to overhaul government websites.

That same day, Joe Gebbia, a tech billionaire and actual designer, was named America’s first Chief Design Officer.

Is this the final boss of a seat at the table? Design has reached the Whitehouse.

↳ See Here

OpenAI Hires Global VP of Creative

With over 700 million weekly users, OpenAI has created a mass market product.

Which calls for mass market creative.

Michael Tabtabai’s portfolio is heavy on big, culture-shaping ad work—viral Superbowl Ads, Wieden + Kennedy Bona Fides and top-of-funnel brand moments.

By hiring an ad-world heavyweight instead of a product-first creative, OpenAI is signaling that its next battle is for cultural relevance, not just feature adoption.

Not “a tool for techies” but a household name.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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Retool
Positively over-engineered, this site cooks with delightful interactions, elegant design and illustrations that… make no sense. Love landing on this one.

In the meantime, Grafik Paragraph is a newsletter about design, business and features interviews from top creatives working at Webflow, Koto, Base and more.

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Hey, what's up.

Figma’s IPO has been a blockbuster.

A great signal that markets/ investors see growth opportunities in design.

Demand was frothy, the stock popped 250% by days end.

The IPO was 40x oversubscribed, compared to 12x for a typical “hot” IPO.

Markets move on belief. And right now, belief in design is running hot.

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State of the Craft: “Rule of 40” is a benchmark for assessing the strength of Saas companies, Figma’s score is 64, placing it in the top 5% of Saas companies.

Laura Carrick – Growth Director at Blurr Bureau

Laura Carrick on the biggest shifts in brand growth—and the outdated practices she’s ready to leave behind.

From challenging unpaid creative pitching to navigating the tension between data and delight, she shares how brands can embrace strategy without losing spontaneity, where AI adds value (and where it falls flat), and why authenticity remains the most powerful growth tool.

↳ Read Interview

IPO Blockbuster, Figma

Remember when Adobe almost brought Figma? Excuse my French but thank F*$k that never happened, we have EU regulators to thank, merci.

Figma received a $1 billion breakup fee after that deal fell through, and reportedly funneled $600 million of it straight back into R&D.

These and other smart decisions reflect well on how Figma is run, and the numbers don’t lie:

Financials & Metrics:

• Revenue grew from $500M to $820M in just over a year.

• Net revenue retention: 134% (clients spending more YoY).

• Raised $750M to date, still has $1.5B on hand — highly capital-efficient.

• Market capitalization: About $67–68 billion post-IPO

• 80% of the Fortune 2000 use Figma.

↳ See Here

The Designer Investor Era

Figma’s IPO turned CEO Dylan Field into a billionaire, and made many of the company’s design-forward employees wealthy in the process.

Carly Ayres explores how this windfall and others happening across design-forward thinkers in tech could spark a wave of “design-led capital,” with designers using their winnings to back the next generation of tools and shape not just how products look and feel, but what gets built in the first place.

↳ See Here

Disruption in Search

AI search is already having a measurable impact on web traffic. Depending on the industry, some sites are seeing 15–25% declines, largely because AI-generated answers are replacing traditional search results.

The good news? AI search still only makes up around 2% of total search share — for now.

But the shift is already underway. If SEO was about ranking in search results, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is about showing up in AI answers. Webflow recently shared a smart framework for how brands can adapt.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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Tola
My hot take: most SaaS sites suck for lacking photography—Tola cleverly uses mockups to bring it in.

Talent wars continue.

$14 Billion for Alexandr Wang.

$100 million for a single AI scientist.

Google guts Windsurf’s key talent for $2.4B.

And a few months ago, the most expensive design team ever? Jony Ive x OpenAI: $6.5B

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State of the Craft: Workers with AI skills now command a staggering 56% wage premium—more than double last year’s 25% baseline

Rebrand in the Wreckage

Windsurf is riding waves, just not all of them smooth.

A top AI coding tool, Windsurf’s $3.5B OpenAI deal collapsed, then Google poached the CEO and key talent, leaving the 250-person team in limbo.

Drama aside: their new rebrand absolutely rips. One of the strongest for a Saas product I’ve seen in a while.

Led by MetaLab, the identity positions Windsurf as “athletic gear for devs”.

I considered reaching out for an interview… But given the current chaos, the odds were near zero.

↳ See Here

You talk, it designs

200+ senior designers. 1 Ramp office. 1 magician.

Sorcerer Steve Witmer took the stage at this Designer Friends event in NYC and proceeded to summon design mocks out of thin air.

He walked us through his workflow using Magic Patterns—a prototyping tool that creates fully coded, production-ready UI designs.

Steve didn’t just click around a few times, he spoke, recording his voice through the ChatGPT app, which then transferred to Magic Patterns.

Mixing voice prompts and some clicking, he generated fully fleshed-out designs live, from scratch.

It felt less like designing, more like conducting, orchestrating, interactive art directing.

No Figma. No Adobe. Just voice prompts and some clicking.

↳ See Here

The Art of Claude

At Figma Conf this year, I spotted someone.

He was MUCH taller than I expected irl, 6’5”, easy.

I’d never met him, but I was a big fan. He’d posted on Twitter the week prior that he’d be at the conference and welcomed people saying hi.

So I walked over, made sure I wasn’t interrupting anything, and introduced myself.

Kyle Turman is one of the designers behind Claude, the frontier AI model and assistant from Anthropic.

Kyle and the team have designed Claude to feel less like a machine and more like a collaborator.

Warm, human, and intentionally handmade. The piece below unpacks how they pulled that off.

↳ See Here

Form follows perform

So much content out there (including mine) just recycles headlines. Same ideas, slightly reworded, with a light editorial tilt for an audience.

But there’s a few people who actually move the conversation forward.

I consider Scott Galloway one of those people.

Carly Ayres as well.

Elizabeth Goodspeed.

And now I’m adding Leland Maschmeyer from COLLINS to my list.

His talk features some genuinely new ways of thinking about design systems. Fresh, strategic, and original.

“Form follows perform.”
“Performance components.”
“Augments.”

↳ See Here

Web Watch

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ZapConnect 2025
ZapConnect is Zapier’s annual flagship event—designed to showcase the future of automation, AI, and modern workflows.

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Inside Access Below

• 💬 Extended interviews with bonus insights

• 📁 Templates, tools, and resources

• 🧠 Behind-the-scenes at Toil

• ⚙️ Personal workflows and systems

Read more

Apple’s WWDC just landed.

With their biggest UI redesign in 10 years—Liquid Glass.

Innovating is hard, and Apple is getting old.

Senior citizens hoard cash and take less risks.

Stock buybacks replace R&D budgets.

Buffett knew before all of us.

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State of the Craft: In fiscal year 2023, Apple spent $77 billion on stock buybacks—more than twice its $30 billion R&D budget.

Apple Liquid Glass

Liquid Glass is Apple’s all new (glassy) look for its operating systems.

Rather than regurgitating Twitter’s “Liquid Glass is meh” takes, I’ll take another tack.

One which can help explain why Apple’s products and design don’t feel like they’re getting much better.

The S curve of innovation. Innovations follow predictable patterns: Most new technologies struggle initially, take off, then plateau.

I believe we’re reaching that plateau with the iPhone, know as “paradigm paralysis”.

And that’s why Liquid Glass feels like Apple polishing the same pane over and over.

↳ See Here

Amazon Refresh

Amazon’s brand has long been a big, messy mix of endless sub-brands, confusing logos, hideous UI, and bland creative.

What’s interesting is it never mattered. Design is valuable and cool right, I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but it isn’t everything.

Bring incredible value to consumers and you can create a dent in the universe.

As the company matures, design’s clearly getting more attention, leading to this refresh.

I wonder what Koto charged for this one. Can you fucking imagine? If anyone’s got gossip, share with ya boy, ok?

↳ See Here

Airbnb App and Icon Redesign

Airbnb’s expansion into ‘experiences’ came with a redesigned app and some interesting icon designs.

They’re bringing dimensional UI back, you may have forgotten (like I certainly did), that we’ve been here before.

Also known as Skeuomorphism, early digital design was full of this playful 3d aesthetic.

Of the new design language, Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO (A rare designer/ founder combo) had this to say.

“The future of tech isn’t flat—it’s multi-dimensional, personal, and more immersive than ever. We’re building interfaces that truly understand you, not just chatbots. The next era is about depth, not just data.”

↳ See Here

Framer Workshop

We’re big fucking Webflow nerds and users over @ Toil Studio, insufferably so, I even flew my ass all to SF last year just for their 2 day conference.

But it warms my cold, dead heart to see Framer, their closest competitor, really pushing the no-code space forward.

AI-generated components: a rare genius idea that just makes sense (and makes you wish it was yours). Don’t do the layouts for me, but make the smaller building blocks—YES.

They’re years behind, but they’re aiming for the jugular with every innovative, thoughtful, and differentiated update.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

Jasper AI
Recently rebranded, Jasper AI has one of the largest and most robust Webflow websites out there.

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Inside Access Below

• 💬 Extended interviews with bonus insights

• 📁 Templates, tools, and resources

• 🧠 Behind-the-scenes at Toil

• ⚙️ Personal workflows and systems

Read more

OpenAI just acquired Jony Ive’s startup.

This might be the strongest bet on design-led thinking in the history of tech.

Jony is famous for designing Apple’s most iconic products, including the iPhone.

I’m hopeful this move will spark a wave of design investment across industries.

And that excites me.

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State of the Craft: OpenAI’s $6.5 billion deal for Jony Ive’s team of 55 creatives averages out to $118 million per employee—making it the second-highest per-employee acquisition in history.

Clarence Kwan, NewWorld

Clarence Kwan is Chief Creative Officer and Partner at NewWorld, where he oversees brand strategy and creative. A seasoned design thinker and cultural strategist, he’s shaped iconic work for culture-driving brands like A24, YouTube, and more.

NewWorld has an amazing Substack you should check out. A favorite issue of mine includes their “American Trust Crisis Explodes” report.

↳ See Here

Jony Ive, do we all care again?

Across from the massive Moscone center I was sitting in for Config in San Francisco, was Jony fucking Ive giving a talk at Stripe Sessions.

His talk felt like hearing an alien from another planet. Creating products with care? Thinking about users beyond squeezing dollars out of them? What a loony am I right!

It’s in stark contrast with the optimizing, kpi’s, layoffs, stock buybacks, ARPU, TAM’s and now pay for play Kleptocracy the world is moving towards.

And clearly the talk resonated (500k+ views and counting).

If we’re moving to a world where machines may do all of our jobs, are we all more drawn now to this emotional language around design?

So much emotion in fact, that watching Jony and Sam Altman’s launch video left me thinking, are you guys gonna make out?

Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch echoed this sentiment of care.

”Good design is a signal that you care. People prefer products built by people who care. Markets reward good design. The end.”

↳ See Here

Config 2025

This year I had the chance to fly out to Figma’s annual conference in San Francisco.

It was awesome.

The talks, the after parties, great conversations, so many new connections. If you get a chance to go, its totally worth it.

My very short wrap-up on the product updates is:

Figma Buzz: A Canva Competitor
Figma Sites: Wonky but has potential
Figma Draw: Great, can’t wait to ditch Adobe
Figma Make: Yawn! Another wrapper over Claude

The best part is undoubtedly the talks, they’re all available for viewing on Youtube. I made a list of my favorites in a post on Cringedin.

↳ See Here

Toil Studio: One Year in Party

Celebrating one year of producing, designing, and creating something bigger together. We launched our one year party here in Brooklyn, New York.

Huge thanks to everyone who came out, the place was bumpin! We’re hoping to do more parties in the future so keep your eyes peeled.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

Made with GSAP
A collection of Javascript effects made with GSAP.

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Inside Access Below

• 💬 Extended interviews with bonus insights

• 📁 Templates, tools, and resources

• 🧠 Behind-the-scenes at Toil

• ⚙️ Personal workflows and systems

📡 Also On My Radar

State of AI in Design Report
AI is transforming design. But how, exactly?

AgencyHabits
Go behind the scenes of real agency businesses.

🔭 Bonus Insight: Clarence Kwan

MK: What’s a system or operational shift you made recently that’s made your team stronger?

CK: Our world is changing faster than ever and I don’t think it makes sense to look at design, story and research in separate vacuums anymore. The pace at which technologies, tools and mediums are moving requires on-the-job training every single day. This has forced us as an agency to collapse traditional silos and work in a hyper-disciplinary manner. Understanding every aspect of every project is mission critical, which is why we have embraced Cultural Intelligence as a foundational practice. Typographers can’t work in a bubble. Copywriters can’t ignore algorithms. Strategists have to be prompt engineers. And we have to be prepared for everything to change again in the blink of an eye.

📚 Resources

Competitive Analysis for Designers

Prompt Engineering Whitepaper

OpenAI’s image tool was everywhere.

Your feed was probably full of Ghibli-fied portraits.

Carly Ayres nailed it:
“We got a ‘create anything’ tool and all made the same thing.”

Low hanging fruit has been to criticize people using this.

But here’s another take:
The mainstream adoption of a creative tool at a scale never seen before.

That actually delighted and invited people in. That’s kind of cool.

- Mon 

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State of the Craft: Over 700 million images were created in just one week after OpenAI’s 4o image generation release.

Ross Gendels Interview, 12 Matcha

From mixtape covers to Base Design, Ross Gendels shares his path into creative direction and what it means to build brands with cultural weight.

We go behind the scenes on 12, a matcha brand built from the ground up — from naming and identity to interiors and packaging, every detail crafted with intention.

↳ See Here

A Big Design Opportunity — Gaming

The gaming industry is fucking gigantic.

As of 2024, the global gaming market is valued at approx $184 billion.

To put that in perspective:

• Film = $33.9B

• Music = $28.6B

While Hollywood shrivels, gaming has thrived.

Koto knows this, they’ve worked with gaming clients.

And they’re clearly courting more.

Because this space isn’t niche anymore.

It’s mainstream. Cultural. Global.

And it needs good design.

Read Koto’s article through the link.

↳ See Here

Design Ruined My Life

“There’s a meme going around that says, “Job market so bad I started following my dreams.” It works as a punchline, but it also doubles as a manifesto.”

“The collapse of design’s stability and power has forced a lot of people to rethink why they’re designing at all. If the industry no longer offers security, prestige, or even clout, then who is all this self-styling for?”

↳ See Here

MOMA Family Festival — Little Troop

Festival identity for The Museum of Modern Art — a first-of-its-kind family festival, featuring art and activities celebrating nature through creativity.

Little Troop’s style to me always celebrates fun, joy and play.

↳ See Here

Web Watch

Cosmos
Cosmos is a discovery engine for creatives.

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Inside Access Below

• 💬 Extended interviews with bonus insights (coming soon)

• 📁 Templates, tools, and resources

• 🧠 Behind-the-scenes at Toil

• ⚙️ Personal workflows and systems

Read more

If you’re up for joining me in cringe land I’m going to be posting more regularly on Linkedin as I cycle away from the other platforms.

Here’s my recent 1:7:1 take and “Figma is dead” post.

- Mon 

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State of the Craft: Adobe products command over 80% of the graphic design software market

Pay day loans for a burrito

Klarna’s in the spotlight with its new buy now, pay later deal with DoorDash.

Me being the insufferable design nerd I am...

My first though was, did you know Klarna has a kickass brand guidelines website?

The power of great branding.
Klarna is a predatory bank camouflaged in a pink trench coat.
But you’d never know.

Prey on low income teenagers, but make it Gen Z 💅 ✨

You can only applaud them—
They’ve timed their IPO perfectly for America’s Robber Baron Renaissance.

Side Note,
There’s some blockbuster tech companies coming out of Sweden: Spotify, King (CandyCrush), Klarna, Zettle.

And with that success comes the signature Scandinavian design sensibility:
Clean. Cool. Convincing.

Even when it’s selling you debt.

↳ See Here

Siri, Squandered

“Ugly and Embarrassing.”

That’s how a (now demoted) Siri exec described Apple’s latest AI delay.

Siri launched in 2011.
Everyone knows it.
No one thinks it’s good.

Now, AI explodes into the mainstream—arguably the most transformative tech in decades—and what better brand to lead it than… Siri?

The name. The function. The familiarity.

It was perfectly positioned.

Instead, it’s become a symbol of Apple’s stumble.

↳ See Here

Coding’s Eulogy

“After machines conquered chess, some thirty years ago, the fear was that there would be no reason to play it anymore.”

”Yet chess has never been more popular—A.I. has enlivened the game.”

A great read on programmings transformation. Artwork by Dev Valladares who I’m interviewing soon!

↳ See Here

Eventbride by BUCK

Eventbrite’s Vibrant Refreshed Identity Puts the Joy of Live Experiences Center Stage.

BUCK designs an electrifying brand system that amplifies connection, culture, and creativity.

↳ See Here

Also On My Radar 📡

YouTube’s New Hue
Designers—the sort of weirdos to make a post about one color.

Web Vitals
A great quick overview on the health stats of websites.

Salotto
Is a hub for cultural research and production run by NYC-based Italian creative professionals.

Silicon Valley School of Design
A fresh new approach to design education.

Cover by MW.S
Beautiful branding and web project by Mouthwash.

Web Watch

Area 17
AREA 17 is a brand, experience, and technology company with studios in Paris and New York.

A little later in the month for this one.

Been a busy one and crazy to be in year 2 of Toil Studio already.

And excited to share this interview with Pseushi’s founder, I’ve wanted to do this one for a long time!

Hope you enjoy this issue of the newsletter.

- Mon 

Wesley Chiang Interview

Wesley Chiang is the founder of Pseushi, a brand crafting clothing meant to be worn, lived in, and aged in—filling wardrobe gaps with garments that prioritize longevity, comfort, and conscious design.

↳ See Here

OpenAI Rebrand

Some pretty nice work coming out from the OpenAI team, a rebrand as well as a Superbowl spot. I’ve heard some rumours that its incredibly gruelling to work there. Do with that gossip what you will.

This is the type of work you avoid sharing with someone outside of the industry — “what’s the big deal, its just a dot!” — and they’re kinda right.

↳ See Here

Sneak Peek

As some of the best design work happening in the industry moves in house, a resource like this is a goldmine. Look inside Figma files of top companies for free.

↳ See Here

Dell Technology Capital

Toil Studio’s latest work for the venture capital arm of Dell. This redesign enhances usability and positions DTC as an attractive partner for the next wave of groundbreaking innovations.

↳ See Here

Also On My Radar 📡

Seasoned
Koto’s recipe for everything brand.

The BrandReview by Hyperfocus
For anyone who prefers a video format for design news.

Design Engineering
A great piece by investor and head of AI at Atlassian, David Hoang.

Findings by MW.S
A monthly newsletter on the influences/ trends that are quietly shaping culture.

Ragged Edge — Wise
Friend of the newsletter Ragged Edge, with more work for Wise.

G.F Smith Rebrand
These guys seem to rebrand every two years, like why dude.

Designgram

@browsing_mode
A curated collection of websites thoughtfully picked for their design and functionality.

First of the year, let’s run it back.

This month I chatted with Gosha Kuznetsov from BUCK.

BUCK has been doing amazing creative work for almost two decades now. And in such great breadth, too. What other studio has done a Netflix episode?

Big thanks to Tarley Jordan and the team for organizing this one!

Hope you enjoy :)

- Mon 

Gosha Kuznetsov Interview

Gosha Kuznetsov is a Creative Director focused on Strategic Brand Design at BUCK. BUCK is a global creative company that brings brands, stories, and experiences to life through art, design, and technology.

↳ See Here

2025 Predictions

Reports, Reviews! Predictions! What does it all mean!

End/ Start of years are full of these. And it’s rather obvious that most are just ads for various studios.

But I think the purpose isn’t to be right, it’s about starting a conversation.

So if you’re an insufferable nerd like me and read these, I’ve collated a few for you:

State of the Brand — Red Antler

Best Global Brands — Interbrand

The FutureBrand Index

Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2025 — Flowninja

The State of UX

Canva Design Trends

↳ See Here

People are the new brands

Trump > Republican Brand

“Taylor’s Version” > Big Machine Records

Messi > Sporting Leagues

Tim Cook 2x Followers > Apple

Joe Rogan Viewership > CNN and MSNBC combined

Caitlin Clark > WNBA

Ryan Reynolds > his portfolio of companies

Lisa Su > AMD

Influencers > Platform

↳ See Here

Also On My Radar 📡

Dive Club
Dive is where designers never stop learning 🤿

Figma Ship
Everything Figma shipped in 2024

Popular Designers
Having a list of “popular” designers is both cringe and interesting

Pentagram AI Hate
I’m just here for the comments 🍿

Sandisk Rebrand
A very “cool” rebrand, who knew these guys were still around

Donate — Scope of Work
SOW is fundraising into 2025, chip in if you’re able!

Designgram

@madeforstudio
A workplace architecture, design and research studio based in Melbourne, Australia.