pari

bonus: if you can drive manual you might be able to take the phone car for a spin

company info: - we build agents (primarily voice, but also messaging) to handle risky and complex conversations for enterprise customers - we’re Series B, ~75 people and growing rapidly

hello designers & machines friends! i’m hiring a second designer to join my team @ Bland.com looking for someone senior, spiky in visual design and UI to complement my focus on the UX / product side of the platform design. full-time, in-person in our shiny new office in Levi's Plaza. $180-240k + meaningful equity. DM me if you're interested or know someone who might be!

designers & machines was so cool. thanks for bringing the design community together @ben_issen!!

i have an unreasonable vendetta against title case input labels in products

On an accidental tyranny of programmers holding back interface invention, from my recent talk: andymatuschak.org/tat/

breaking: the Chinese Room is speaking perfect Mandarin

@bandiaditya @noondesign Get Noon 👀

I’m thrilled to announce we’ve raised $44M to build a new home for product design. Meet @noondesign. No workflow is more broken and fragmented in 2026 than the product designers’. The very same people who care most about building software don’t have software purpose built for them. @kushagrasinha7 and I have lived this problem first hand as designers ourselves. That’s why we built Noon. The first product design tool that works entirely on your product code, so you can design not only how a product looks, but also how it works. With AI at its core that works in seconds, not minutes. For the first time, you can create, iterate, build, test and ship. All in one canvas. No translations or roundtrips to the codebase and back. Comment “Get Noon” and we’ll get you on the list for early access.

i will become exponentially more worried about AGI when the frontier labs begin mass layoffs, and until then i will be linearly more worried

the pace of Things Happening™ is alarming

@coreyward @webflow too bad i wasn’t being paid by the hour :/

@strawpari @webflow That’s…a lot of dots.

when i made this website back in 2020ish, i tried to be clever and build the world map using a csv of coordinate positions, but i shortly found out the @webflow CMS limit was 10,000 items soon after that i found out that the webflow UI limit is about 12,000 elements (i copy/pasted 12,000 dots)

Building robust phone agents used to require deep expertise in the nuances of Voice AI. Not anymore. Introducing Norm. Just tell Norm what kind of phone agent you want to build and it does it all for you. Sign up and try it → app.bland.ai/?utm_campaign=…

Dot was deeply loved by the people who worked on it. We expressed that love through careful curation and editing, through spending months iterating on and developing an intuition for the material. However, it was simultaneously was very much a product of the old “Apple” style paradigm where craft and perfection were king, because in the old world designers had years to play with materials and develop an intuition for them. Multi-touch, aluminum, glass… Now the material (intelligence) changes too fast for that process. So products that live in symbiosis with the material, that embrace its rate of change and probabilistic nature as something to be loved vs optimized away are the ones that win. It’s a new material. We learn to work with it in new ways that celebrate it for what it is vs try to mimic the materials that came before, to express our love for humanity in new forms. so, tldr. Update your definition of design, of craft, or watch it die.

😭

@vanlancker agh i signed up too late for this one—would love to know about the next one! i’m a 2.5-time founding designer and would love to chat with some new folks

FOUNDING DESIGNERS: In demand, misunderstood Taste, storytelling, aesthetics, and creative authenticity are everywhere right now. Designers are leading much of this work in startups, and demand for them is as high as I've ever seen it. There's no shortage of opinions (mostly from non-designers) about how this work should be done and valued. But there's far less conversation among designers themselves. The language has evolved, but the role is still largely misunderstood. I remember the same cycle a decade ago when I was starting a company as a designer—the onus is still on the designer to define their own path: - What is the right structure? What does a great company to join look like? - Do you have to want to eventually be Head of Design, or is staying an IC okay? - Are you also supposed to drive marketing/storytelling? Write production code? With AI changing the expectations, are you expected to be an engineer too? - And beyond the scope of the work, there's the isolation of likely being the only designer in the company. How do you get feedback and improve your craft? I'm hosting a series of informal gatherings, beginning with small dinners in SF later this month (and then NYC and more), for people considering founding designer roles. A few who've done it before, a few embarking on it. The goal is honest conversations about what the role actually requires, what it can become, and connections to companies looking for this kind of person. If you're interested, DM me or register at the link below.

@oguzyagizkara this is making me feel things i haven't felt in a long time. that icon is unreal

The detailed Firecrawl showcase is now live Link below 👇