Miriam Isaac

Husband: Miriam, I think you got scammed! It says here you paid $300 for a font?? Me: Erm...

@UXdesigner42869 Significantly

Is it just me, or has the quality of work on Dribbble dropped significantly?

[For every designer who is scared right now 🩶] If the AI stress is catching up to you or you're feeling left behind, take out 5 mins and read this. Nobody really knows how to survive this 'wave'. Even the people building these AI products don't know the future. And if someone's handing you a clear cut path, they're probably selling something. I'm writing this based on the people I know. Some of them are building these tools, some are switching roles. Many just reached out because they didn't know who else to ask. Over the last ten years, I have watched parts of this industry shift. Photoshop to Illustrator to Sketch to Figma. Each time the tool changed, the designer role also evolved. With AI, this is a much bigger move, but that sense of fear feels exactly the same. Here's what I'm actually seeing: Design roles are contracting. It is real. The junior and intern-level work is the most exposed right now, because AI can do a lot of what a new designer would spend their first year learning. Senior designers with strong networks and reputations are largely okay, but not untouchable. Many managers honestly, are more worried than they're letting on. A lot of them haven't touched tools in years. There's also something happening with hiring where managers aren't bringing on juniors right now. Some of it is tight budgets, but a lot of it is that they don't know how to grow someone in this environment anymore. There's no clear ladder to point to. – The roles that remain look different. Companies are now deliberately building out senior and principal IC tracks so the best craft people don't have to choose between growing and managing. A senior designer who goes extremely deep, who has strong taste, ships things and shapes product decisions, is very valuable today. The new shape for a design manager is someone who should also build. They should use tools to prototype fast, validate ideas quickly, show rather than tell. A manager who can demo something in a meeting rather than describe it is a completely different asset. UX writing, content design, marketing are merging into product thinking in a way they weren't before. Designers who can write, actually write well are powerful. – Experiment on your own before it's pushed on you. The design process is changing. The double diamond, the wireframe, the detailed case studies are starting to feel dated. What's replacing it has a lot more building and shipping than documenting and presenting. Don't upskill frantically. Just because a new tool dropped doesn't mean you have to master it. At this rate you'll just burn out chasing things. Pick one process you already do and figure out where AI actually helps within it. Pressure test an idea, poke holes in your reasoning, generate great visuals, explore a direction you'd have killed too early. Get really good at one or two things vs half baked many. Don't get attached to tools. The designers who struggled most through every tool shift were the ones whose identity was too tied to what they already knew. Being the best Framer person in the room was never the point. It was always the work itself. – Learn some code. Even a little. I say this as someone who never wrote code before. Think of it like a 30-day experiment, not a career change. I can share more on how I approached this because I know how intimidating that sentence sounds. Build live things. No one wants static mocks sitting in Figma. See if you can do interactive project demos, solve your own problems by building small tools, push things out, let people use them. A live product in your portfolio right now is worth more than ten polished case studies with no shipping story behind them. – People want a point of view. Generic work is losing. Execution is cheap now. A lot of work is starting to look the same and the ones standing out have something to say. Bring that to your work. Freelancing overall has a lot more money in it right now. But if you're producing generic, template-level work, you're probably in danger. Niche and specific is where the premium is going, and that gap is only going to widen. A lot of people who joined design during the covid wave, drawn by the stability or the salary or the sense that the process was settled, will probably leave. That's okay, maybe even good. Design has always been a craft that changes. The ones who stay will be the ones who actually want to build things. – Be someone people want to work with. Being easy to work with is underrated and always will be. Being collaborative, fun to work with, easy to communicate with async – all this builds up over years in ways no tool can replicate. I've seen technically average designers outlast brilliant ones because of exactly this. Being a good hire isn't just your portfolio. People imagine what it would be like to talk to you, brainstorm with you, disagree with you, and sit in a room with you for two hours every week. Work on that too. Who you surround yourself with matters too. If you don't have people to look up to at your work, find small tight communities that do the kind of work you like and actually share it. I prefer these over large noisy ones. Some big Discord ones are mostly anxiety and self-promotion. – If you're early career, this is for you specifically. I've had many recent grads and those just finishing a bootcamp struggling to find work. I want to say this clearly that is not a reflection of your ability. The timing is just brutal right now and that's not on you. If you're just starting out, look for lean startups or agencies. They still desperately need designers who can think and move fast. Get in the room first and figure out long term plans from there. Hiring pipelines are filled due to mass applications. Post your work online, share WIP experiments, DM the founder whose app you redesigned just for fun. Nobody is coming to find you. You have to shamelessly show up. – More people are building now because friction has never been lower. A lot of them are discovering mid-build that design is what separates good from forgettable. That's not nothing. There's also a new kind of client emerging. Solo builders, indie founders, one-person companies shipping at scale. They don't need a design team but one designer who can build alongside them. That role is growing and it's genuinely interesting work. Yes there's anxiety. But there's also more to build and more personality to showcase. That's where I'd put my energy.

@writenicecode Because there was a time where you could sell awful looking software. That has changed though. That being said, there are still people in executive positions who remember those times.

Why do enterprise softwares don't care about design ?

@soulegit You are forgetting the OG!!!

Designers: it's time to say goodbye to our friends. It's 2026.

@gokulr I do think the design and PM role will merge into one, slowly followed by at least the front end skill. It’s already happening now.

DESIGN: THE FIRST AI CASUALTY I'm increasingly sure that 2026 signals the end of product design as a full-fledged stand-alone function within companies. If so, it will be the first role / function to be eliminated by AI on a go-forward basis. Instead of hiring FT designers, startups are hiring / will hire design consultants to create a design system that the founder likes (this takes a few weeks max). Once the design system is finalized, PM/Eng feed it into their AI tool of choice to generate prototypes. The design system is refreshed annually by the same consultant. Larger companies will likely not backfill design roles and will do some targeted attrition to reduce the design department to 20% the size it is today. If you're a designer, I think you have two choices: 1. Become an entrepreneur: Start a design agency and become the go-to resource for design systems for startups and even larger companies. This can be a good recurring revenue business. 2. Become a builder: Add PM/Eng responsibilities to become a product builder. Would suggest you embrace this proactively vs waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm really sorry about this - some of my best friends and the people I admire most and have learnt the most from are designers - but it seems inevitable.

Polish isn’t decoration. It’s the accumulated effect of caring about every small thing until the small things stop calling attention to themselves.

@karrisaarinen @hussamfyi This is pretty true, when I ask Claude about subjects I don’t know I’m always impressed, but when I ask about UX, I’m always disappointed. And the pity of it all, is now when I ask others for feedback on my work, they tell me to ask Claude…

A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the you want. This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive. Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.

My ideal AI design tool probably something like: A canvas tool, where you can get any view of your app rendered to edit or use as the starting point for a new view. You can freely explore, duplicate, and make changes visually. You could start these renders from other tools like @linear. User feedback -> render the screen to be edited. It would have design language, system and product guidance files that help guide the overall design based on your product. Each artboard carries metadata, like the origin of the view, who created it, what changes was made when, so you could query things across your whole team. You could create areas that you want AI to fill or complete. Fill this list, complete the columns with this data or using this screenshot or something. Edits in the artboard are tracked as a diff. You export those diffs as a plan for a coding agent to build against your actual codebase. The design tool agents keep check-ins with the coding agent and try to communicate the nuances of the design so it gets built as a prototype.

After advising 50+ consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't: Having a full-time designer in the room at all times I've met with countless companies that have raised millions—and even one that has raised billions—that do not even have a designer on payroll. This makes product development broken: 1/ You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time 2/ Your experiments will frequently have inconclusive results because users cannot discover features or they misunderstand how they work 3/ There is no one who can galvanize the team with a vision of what the product could look and feel like And to be abundantly clear: I'm not referring to visual UI or graphics. I'm talking about someone who can think through the fundamental building blocks of product comprehension—like navigation, interaction and copywriting—and is technically savvy enough to visualize those components in high resolution. There can certainly be exceptions to not having a designer, like where the CEO is an exceptional visual thinker, but that does not scale beyond a small team. At the end of day, products live and die in the pixels: it's what the users see and tap. And without someone shepherding that process, you are effectively wandering the desert blind.

the tech industry has lost the plot man. where is the thinking happening? when you throw a bunch of context at claude and ask it to produce some artifact, whether it’s a “design” or a “prd”, you’re completely disconnected from the invisible but critical work of translating fuzziness into something coherent. the outputs aren’t yours. you’ve lost the mind-body connection to the artifact. you’re running blind. what’s the point? to move faster?

I spent too much time on this: CLARK: My contention is that with Claude’s new design tool, Figma has essentially been rendered obsolete, the canvas-based paradigm is most aptly characterized as a legacy artifact from the era before models could generate production-ready interfaces from inten— WILL: [interrupting] Of course that’s your contention. You’ve never shipped anything and just watched the launch video twice. You just got finished reading some hot take, probably a Twitter thread or whoever’s got a Substack this week, and you’re gonna be convinced Figma’s dead until next month when you actually try to iterate on a flow and realize “regenerate” isn’t the same as “nudge this four pixels.” Then you’re gonna pivot to talking about how the canvas was always just a lossy interface for intent. That’s gonna last until next year when you’re in here regurgitating some take about how design tools are collapsing into a single agentic surface, you know, the post-craft utopia and the disintermediation of taste by foundation models. CLARK: [taken aback] Well as a matter of fact I won’t, because generative design drastically reduces the need for a manual canvas in the first pla— WILL: “Generative design drastically reduces the need for a manual canvas, especially as models get better at reasoning about layout and hierarchy…” You got that from that Figma-is-dead thread, right? The one that went viral last week. Yeah, I read it too. You gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us, or you have any thoughts — of your own — on this? Or is that your thing, you come into a bar, you skim some trending tweets over lunch and you pawn it off as your own idea to impress some founders, embarrass my friend? [Clark is stunned] WILL: See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in about fifty product cycles you’re gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in building things. One: don’t pick a side in a tool war you’re not actually building in. And two: the people shipping right now are using Claude and Figma and Claude Code before you’ve finished writing your LinkedIn post about which one won. CLARK: Yeah, well I’ll have Claude build my whole product stack, and you’ll still be pushing rectangles around in Figma. WILL: [smiles] Yeah, maybe. But at least I’ll still know how to think when the model’s wrong.

Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs: make prototypes, slides, and one-pagers by talking to Claude. Powered by Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable vision model. Available in research preview on the Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, rolling out throughout the day.

@jdomito_ Stunningly beautiful!!

Pigment AI designed by Fiasco fiasco.design

@michalmalewicz Nice!

Your Mac OS folders don't have to be boring. Grab the PNG's attached and change them:

@UIbyBiba Sick shots right here!

I like the animation. I need to learn animation, it gives your work this peak work rate!

This is exciting! 👀

Had an interesting discussion with my front-end UI developer. I was asking him why he does not use more claude code to do things faster, and I quickly built a prototype in front of him to show how it was done. He calmly asked me, "Well, if you observe here, this button does not look like the design given in Figma." I said, "It's okay, but look at how fast we quickly built it." Then he told me, "Why is it okay to be fast but wrong with AI, but with me it has to be fast and correct?" 😁

undo → summon it back from the rocks 🫴🪨

the guy keeps saying "you can already do this with a canvas behind the element" so here is another gratuitous animation where the scanline physically distorts the form content as it passes (warping the actual rendered HTML pixels)

Who is the designer of this design? - I want to hire him at a high salary. (From Google)