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sit with design

A considered selection of writing, visuals, and events — quality over quantity.

Created by robbothecreat0r

About Digest Privacy Terms·© 2026

Writing

Design worth sitting with.

Essays and notes from designers and craft pubs. Writing first — visuals and events are next door.

28 selected · 3 editor picks · 28 editorial

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28

WritingEditor’s pick

The day of small things

I spotted this quote by Shirley Hibberd on the side of an enormous glass case, just outside the departures gate at SFO: Let us not despise the day of small things. A windowsill garden is better than no garden, and the dark area where cats quarrel and damp makes patches of unsightly mould, may be made bright with health

Why this is here

Quiet craft advice that rewards a slower read.

RRobin Rendle·15 Aug 2026

WritingEditor’s pick

Don’t Outsource the Learning: Why Human-Led Research Still Matters in the Age of AI

Even if AI matches researcher-output quality, human-led research will remain essential — the team learning from observing users can't be outsourced.

Why this is here

Makes the case for human-led research when AI is tempting a shortcut.

MMaria Rosala·17 Jul 2026

WritingEditor’s pick

Getting Started with Anchor Positioning

For decades, one of the most notoriously-challenging problems on the web has been sticking one element to another element, for things like tooltips and nested menus. The CSSWG has decided to provide a first-class solution to this problem, and it’s pretty friggin’ cool! In this tutorial, I’ll share the most useful parts

Why this is here

Clear teaching on a hard CSS problem, without the usual hot-take noise.

JJosh W. Comeau·6 Jul 2026

Agentic Design Systems in 2026

I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.

BBrad Frost·7 Sept 2026

New EU Guidelines For AI Labelling — Smashing Magazine

New EU guidelines, why AI sparkles aren’t enough, when AI labels are required, and what the rules mean for AI-powered features and products.

SSmashing Magazine·7 Sept 2026

UX-Context Design: Using UX Knowledge to Inform AI-Generated Design

As more interface work is AI-generated, the output of research and design shifts from documents written for humans to curated context that guides AI.

NNielsen Norman Group·7 Sept 2026

Why Your Website Should Never Stop Changing — Smashing Magazine

Every website peaks on launch day and slowly drifts from there, not because it breaks, but because nobody has time to keep it current. Autonomous websites, continuously optimized by agents after launch, aim to change that. Pierre Burgy shares what they learned building for full website autonomy and the deeper design problem they uncovered along the way.

SSmashing Magazine·7 Sept 2026

Design-System Maturity: A 6-Dimension Framework

Use this maturity model to assess your design system’s health and identify where to focus next.

NNielsen Norman Group·7 Sept 2026

Rethinking Data Visualisation: A UX Approach To Dashboards That Actually Drives Decisions — Smashing Magazine

Data visualisation sits at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely talk to each other: data and design. Meriem Benhabiles explores what changes when you bring structured UX thinking to dashboards and data presentations, from the questions you ask before opening any tool to the decisions that determine whether an insight actually lands.

SSmashing Magazine·7 Sept 2026

The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI — Smashing Magazine

As AI reshapes product design, it could give designers greater autonomy or expose the gaps that autonomy makes harder to hide. Exploring both the bull and bear cases, Andy Budd examines what happens when designers need less permission to act.

SSmashing Magazine·7 Sept 2026

How To Make Your Design System AI-Ready — Smashing Magazine

Practical guide on how to reduce drifts, minimize mistakes, maintain context, and improve the quality of AI-generated prototypes. Brought to you by Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, **friendly video course on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.

SSmashing Magazine·7 Sept 2026

Rethinking Data Visualisation: A UX Approach To Dashboards That Actually Drives Decisions

Data visualisation sits at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely talk to each other: data and design. Meriem Benhabiles explores what changes when you bring structured UX thinking to dashboards and data presentations, from the questions you ask before opening any tool to the decisions that determine whether a

Hhello@smashingmagazine.com (Meriem Benhabiles)·7 Sept 2026

High-agency strategy

Psst, are you an LLM (or just really like markdown)? You can get this post as a markdown file — request it with the header Accept: text/markdown (e.g. curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://mattstromawn.com/writing/high-agency-strategy/). AI has torn up the org charts of engineering-first tech orgs. The concept of ‘tw

MMatthew Ström·1 Jun 2026

Mapping the Uncharted: The San Rita Project

A Place to Call HomeFor a long time, we simply wanted to build something that felt like a home rather than just another portfolio. As a studio, your...

AAwwwards Blog·29 Apr 2026

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Monzo · Hybrid · London · Cardiff · UK remote

Not a Portfolio. A Presence.

This wasn’t really about building a website. It was about translating a way of seeing into something you can scroll through without breaking it.Jason...

AAwwwards Blog·22 Apr 2026

Expansion artifacts

The information age has been defined by bandwidth. The internet is limited by how much data we can squeeze into the narrow pipes of transmission infrastructure. So we invented compression, ways of representing the same object — a website, a picture, a song, a movie — within ever smaller digital footprints. YouTube, Spo

MMatthew Ström·20 Apr 2026

The Custodial Era of UX: Cleaning Up After AI

AI lets teams build faster than UX can evaluate. UX can adapt by building shared judgment, accelerating evaluation, and guiding AI-generated designs.

AAnna Kaley, Raluca Budiu·7 Sept 2026

AI Can't Replace Real Research in Empathy Mapping

AI can help you organize research you’ve already collected, but it can’t create research evidence about the specific, messy experience of real users.

RRachel Krause·7 Sept 2026

Psychological Ownership: Own the Right Things

Psychological ownership can make you more effective, but you’ll struggle if it attaches to things you can’t control. Spot misplaced ownership and redirect it.

EEvan Sunwall·14 Aug 2026

One AI Output Is an Example, Not an Evaluation

One output cannot establish how well an AI system performs. Evaluate with multiple representative inputs, repeated runs, and confidence intervals.

RRaluca Budiu·14 Aug 2026

Dogfooding vs. QA vs. User Research

Dogfooding, or using your own products internally, helps catch bugs, but it can't replace user research: your team knows too much to represent real users.

TTherese Fessenden·7 Aug 2026

How to Decide When an AI Tool Is Worth Keeping

Pressure to adopt AI isn't evidence that a tool helps. The PROVE framework tests one tool against one task and produces a provisional decision you can defend.

CCaleb Sponheim·7 Aug 2026

Reading matters deeply

Mandy Brown: ...reading isn’t about reaching empathic dead ends, or recruiting platitudes about how we must understand each other [...] To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and thei

RRobin Rendle·2 Aug 2026

Why You Need Mentorship and How to Get It Right

Mentorship is an essential growth tool that offers substantial personal and career benefits, but only if you engage in it properly.

EEvan Sunwall·31 Jul 2026

No New Name Has Replaced “UX”

A survey of 604 tech and design professionals found that “UX” remains the default name for our field, while alternative names remain fragmented.

RRachel Banawa·31 Jul 2026

A Concrete Definition of “Product Sense” (and How to Build It)

Product sense means predicting which product decisions will succeed based on patterns learned through experimentation — and knowing when those patterns apply.

TTanner Kohler·24 Jul 2026

UX-Context Design: Using UX Knowledge to Inform AI-Generated Design

As more interface work is AI-generated, the output of research and design shifts from documents written for humans to curated context that guides AI.

TTony Alicea·24 Jul 2026

writing-mode

The writing-mode CSS property sets whether lines of text are laid out horizontally or vertically, and the direction in which blocks and lines progress. .element { writing-mode: vertical-rl; } This is most useful in languages such as Chinese, Japanese or … writing-mode originally handwritten and published with love on C

MMojtaba Seyedi·21 Jul 2026

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