Heard people talking about “Design tokens” but don’t really know what they are, or how to use them? You’re in the right place. — Here you’ll learn the basics of what design tokens are, how they’re used, their benefits, and some tools and resources that can help. But first, let’s start with a quick story. A common situation You’re a product designer, working on a smallish new product, without an existing design system in place. You have…

Pushing back a little on criticisms of homogenization in modern brand design — I love a good logo, a thoughtfully designed word-mark, and playful use of whitespace as much as the next designer. Designers often pride themselves on being both highly detail-oriented, and being able to zoom out and think about the bigger picture, the audience, and their context. At the same time…

What we can, and what we shouldn’t learn from Rick Rubin’s approach to his craft — Legendary music producer Rick Rubin was trending on Twitter this week (in design circles, but also more generally) after this clip from a 60 minutes interview with Anderson Cooper was posted: Rubin is the co-founder of Def Jam Records, and has produced some incredible records for artists across a…

Part 2 of a deep dive series on specific design system components — Checkbox and Radio components typically share so much DNA, that when we prioritized them early in Castor’s development, we built them in parallel with a lot of shared research and specs. Here I’ll cover some of the design decisions, and tradeoffs that went into both of these components. Design goals We started…

A look at 2022 through the lens of data collected throughout the year — For the last four years I’ve kept records of the games I’ve played, just for my own interest, and to help more closely examine the hobby I put so much time into from different angles. Last year I published an article summarizing the year from my perspective, and through the…

The startup browser taking the tech industry by storm. — It’s a little early to be crowning ‘best-ofs’ perhaps, but I’m pretty confident that Arc, the up and coming web browser by The Browser Company (slightly pretentious name, but very descriptive) is going to be at the top of my list for my favorite app of 2023. I’m calling it…

Existing and future use cases for AI in web and product design — AI text-to-image tools can feel ‘magical’ at first glance but have many problematic aspects in their training data and implementation right now that require solutions (and law changes) to make them more ethical and viable to use for commercial work. …

A look at the ethical debate surrounding AI-generated imagery and its impact on artists. — Like many people, I’ve been watching the explosion of AI tools unfold over the course of 2022. MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, ChatGPT and many others are tools that use machine learning models (which I’ll call “AI” for simplicity and SEO) trained on massive data sets to generate unique images or…

How Onfido implemented focus time across our tech organization — I love productivity tools. I think part of having the mindset of a designer is that the tasks you have to perform to get a thing done, often feel sub-optimal or unnecessarily difficult or unclear. When a little app comes along and solves a little problem (especially one you have…