A new essay! In which I use a weird metaphor to describe what it’s like to design inside extremely ai-accelerated product teams. mattstromawn.com/writing/desi...

Design from the inside

Matt Ström-Awn · Designer, leader, and coach focused on building exceptional products and teams.

mattstromawn.com

New essay! In which I try to define the toolmarks that AI leaves behind in the process of turning your prompt into a generated output. mattstromawn.com/writing/expa...

Expansion artifacts

Matt Ström-Awn · Designer, leader, and coach focused on building exceptional products and teams.

mattstromawn.com

Today @mattstromawn.bsky.social is my guest on Wireframe Live for the first show of the new year! Catch us at 5pm ET today. 👀 wireframe.ds.house

Wireframe Live weekdays @ 5pm ET

Transparent Design Talk

wireframe.ds.house

Just re-read @mattstromawn.bsky.social: buff.ly/xqE8kN9 - #DesignSystems are moving from static “dictionaries” to dynamic “functions” - Dynamic logic enables adaptive, personalized, and accessible UIs - Tools like CSS clamp() and Material’s dynamic color make this future possible

Functions and the future of design systems

A new paradigm powering the next generation of design systems

buff.ly

New essay! What the heck is "quality", anyway? And how can we intentionally and meaningfully create it in our work? matthewstrom.com/writing/dece...

Decentralizing quality

Why moving judgment to the edges wins in the long run

matthewstrom.com

New essay! Bad news: the “check engine” light is on for the practice of product design as a whole. matthewstrom.com/writing/prod...

The product design talent crisis

Why we should invest in the next generation of product designers

matthewstrom.com

Putting it into the universe: any company out there want to hire me to help them build an "associate product designer" program, modeled after many tech co's "associate product manager" programs (apmlist.com)? There's a lot of potential in the market right now.

You know what's better than a 3-legged stool? A 4-legged stool. (please send biblically-accurate stool memes)

The current desire for “Super IC” designers is possible because of a previous investment in coaches, mentors, and managers, that helped develop those folks. As companies cull managers and hire “player-coaches”, the next generation of ICs will lose out on much-needed development opportunities.

Is there anyone out there doing AI for design using computer vision (segmentation, world model, etc) instead of using language (LLMs, transformers, etc)?

Based on a few weeks of using a coding agent, i think the recent result that coding AI slows developers comes down to two factors: 1. Coding agents allow the developer to multi-task 2. Multi-tasking involves context switching, which has a penalty

If you're working with design tokens, you might have noticed that the color format has been updated in the latest editor's draft at tr.designtokens.org/color/. But updating your tokens files is a snap! Here's a node script you can run that will get you up to speed: gist.github.com/ilikescience...

After ~10 years of in-house design leadership, I'm going back to my roots as an independent designer. If you need: - 0 → 1 design partnership - Mentorship, coaching, or design org design - Early stage design strategy, especially in AI and Fintech Get in touch: hello@mu.design

Regardless of the aesthetics of liquid glass, I think the enduring change in ios26 is that chrome (tab bars, url bar, etc) no longer has a background, and content extends edge-to-edge — @itsdpark.bsky.social‬ was ahead of the curve with their 'no tab bars' manifesto: itsdpark.com/research/tab...

It’s a simple, slightly-opinionated WebGL library called Shdr. It won’t help you write shaders, per se, but it will help you render them without a lot of boilerplate or ceremony. I don’t know if it will be useful to anyone else, but it was useful to me. Check it out here: shdr.andystew.art

Shdr: a lil WebGL library

shdr.andystew.art

Doing some experiments with Figma's AI image generation; surprising results! Images generated by each model vary little within a consistent prompt. While the current image generation features might currently fit into graphic-design-type use cases, I don't see how they'd fit into UI design.

I often see design craft positioned as a reaction to the ubiquity of design systems. As in: great designers know when to break out of the system in search of higher quality. But there's a convergence that happens at high levels of systems thinking; exceptional systems result in well-crafted UI.

Really excited that the Design Tokens Community Group has published a new version of the Color module, giving the format a robust way to express colors in many color spaces with high precision. Congrats to everyone who contributed! tr.designtokens.org/color/

a good provocation from @peterme.com: design's recent focus on craft admits that we don't have that mystical "seat at the table." I agree; craft (and quality) as an end unto itself is a shriveled ambition dressed up in a black turtleneck. buttondown.com/petermerholz...

[TMA] Quality >>> Craft | Reframe Your Mandate

This past week, I participated in the Design Leadership Summit in Toronto. It filled my head with many ideas. Here, I’ll share a couple of overarching...

buttondown.com

I started this on a plane 6 months ago, forgot about it, and finished it on a plane last week. There's a lot more that I could do with it, and I may bang around on it occasionally going forward. I've found it useful on some recent projects, though, and wanted to publish it. www.colorpalett.es

Reading Jennifer Tidwell's "Common Ground" (published in 1999) for the first time, and it's amazing how little has changed between it and the design systems of 2025. www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/co...

Love this provocation from @lambert.fun. As much as it pains me to say, grids are just not as useful in modern web/app development. Designs are expected to constantly adapt to fluid contexts, and the constraints of grids quickly lose their heuristic value. www.imkylelambert.com/articles/whe...

Where did all the design grids go?

Grid systems provide structure and organization that benefit both designers and consumers. They help establish clear visual hierarchy by...

imkylelambert.com

Sebastian’s videos are inspiring because he shows how he gets things wrong much more often than how he gets things right - and includes all the false starts and branching paths he takes. I’d love for more design case studies to look like this, since it’s the reality of creative work.

Sebastian Lague@sebastianlague.bsky.social · 2y ago

Hello everyone! I've been experimenting with some different ways of rendering a fluid simulation, and made a video about the journey over here: youtu.be/kOkfC5fLfgE

👋