Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.
“Online used to be a place you could leave. We designed the exit out of it because an exit reads as a leak. Here is why building it back is a design responsibility, and what that means now that AI is dissolving the last seam.”
Take your meeting context to new places with AI →
[Sponsored] Granola’s new Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration connects your meeting notes to your AI app of choice.
Editor picks
- What is the purpose of software →
Practical and existential questions for Design & Dev.
By Michael Burnett - AI adoption and the slow erosion of design idealism →
Reshaping a designer’s relationship with emerging technology.
By Michael Buckley - Is the future of software certain once AI is everywhere? →
Extinction is the wrong lens. Evolution is the right one.
By Arin Bhowmick
The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.
Syntax: examining core concepts shaping our designed world →
Make me think
- The human is the loop →
“When I eventually opened my laptop a few days ago, I was greeted with eleven cmux tabs, each with multiple agents paused midway through various efforts. Some professional, some personal, and a lot in between. I also had unread badges on Claude chats across everything from taxes to landscaping ideas to policy doc review. Is this the 2026 version of having a bunch of tabs open?” - Design is how it tastes →
“Lately, everyone and their brother has a design tool startup. Code to canvas. Canvas to code. Lift your design system into a different abstraction. Assemble components by yapping at your agent. Useful, incremental, but not all that much has changed. The same primitives moved around the same board. Then things started actually changing.” - Is design dead in the age of AI? →
“Designers are unsettled right now. We’re all out here, expected to make, create, ideate, and promote our work, and underneath there’s this quiet dread we don’t really talk about. Watching, in real time, a technology being developed that could dismantle the livelihoods we spent years building. But we have bills to pay, so most of us keep showing up, making things, and posting that reel about our work.”
Little gems this week
Who gets the meter? →
By Takuma Kakehi
It really wasn’t your fault, Coyote →
By Perre DiCarlo
How to become an AI Designer →
By Maya Brennan
Tools and resources
- Using AI as a tool, not a person →
Reminding ourselves it’s 1s and 0s behind that screen.
By Erin Schroeder - How I vibe coded my portfolio →
A case study.
By Laís Lara Vacco - Creating a Responsible AI audit skill →
When judgment becomes a material.
By Richa Sehgal | Senior Product Designer, Microsoft
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No log off, How to become an AI Designer, vibe coded portfolios was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.