Editing

Turn every page is worth a watch. It’s the story of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. Two brilliant people dedicated to making outstanding work (and they often had entertaining arguments). Caro is a fantastic writer, but for me the true hero of that story is Robert Gottlieb. A brilliant and prolific editor. My favorite Gottlieb story is that he renamed Catch-22. Heller had originally titled the book Catch 18, and Gottlieb wanted to avoid confusion with another title and thought 22 was somehow funnier. Which, weirdly, it is.

Editing might seem like an unusual topic for a design newsletter, but if you’re leading design teams, it’s hard not to think about the relationship between generating work and shaping work. It’s very difficult to sit down as a designer and design something alone. The process of design requires outside input. People who might use the product, people who’ve built similar products in the past, people who come at the problem with a completely different perspective. All these inputs are incredibly valuable for any good design process. What’s weird is that we seldom talk about the necessary skills for managing these inputs and turning them into great designs. What to cut, what to include, how to form an opinion, how to express that opinion constructively.

At their core, these skills are the skills of a brilliant editor—someone dedicated to the quality of the work, not the egos of the people involved. There’s a lot we could learn from people like Gottlieb, particularly as editing is getting more and more important. 

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Time to tap

It used to be the case that an early career designer could become instantly valuable to the team, by turning ideas into tappable prototypes everyone could respond to. I’ve done this myself, capturing ideas from the group discussion and turning them into something more tangible. AI tooling has changed all that—it now takes seconds to turn a thought into something real. 

Here’s an example. As I type this sentence I’m trying to think of a small product idea. The type of thing that might come out of a design sprint. Lightweight but worth exploring. Let’s go with a blinking hover state on a toggle switch—something to warn users before changing a high-risk setting. Not my best work, but you get the idea. I’m going to prompt GPT5 to build me a prototype.

It took 33 seconds after I typed the prompt. 

So let’s say 60 seconds from thought to tap. 

When it’s this easy to prototype, the role of every designer shifts to a more valuable part of the design process. We no longer need early career designers to make the intangible concepts tangible. We need everyone to be shaping the output from an army of design robots. We need people who can combine, discard, and reframe these ideas, moulding them into something truly great.

Creative Directors at fashion houses do this already (minus the robots). Someone like Pharrell Williams can steer menswear at Louis Vuitton by reviewing, combining, discarding and reframing ideas to edit the overall output of the label. It’s part of their working culture to defer to one, singular vision from a human.

This is very different from our collective design process. We use crits and team workshops to refine ideas through consensus, we shape experiences with data, we refine concepts by testing them with real people. Our work culture is at odds with our new reality—consensus, data, testing—these are things robots do better than humans, and things Pharrell doesn’t do at all.

Edge of an editor

The more I learn about Gottlieb, the more I see echoes of his wisdom in our industry.

Remember the reader 

“An editor is someone who notices when the writer has lost the reader.” 

I love the way he frames the challenge here: there’s no blame. It’s not adversarial. He acknowledges that it’s very common and quite understandable that a writer may lose the reader.

If your experience of working in close partnership with PM and Engineering is anything like mine, this will resonate. Nobody intends to lose sight of the person who’ll ultimately use the product, but it often happens. Design is the voice of the user—but I love this extension: that design helps the team course-correct when we’ve lost sight of the person we're building for.

Cut without mercy, but with care.

When Caro turned in his million-word draft, Gottlieb said:

“Bobby, it’s too long. You have to cut it by the length of a book.”

Caro asked, “Which book?” Gottlieb replied:

“Take your pick.”

This, to me, is one of the hardest parts of seniority: getting comfortable with how much good thinking you leave behind. If you’re lucky enough to work with brilliant people, it’s very rare that you’ll be choosing between a good idea and a bad idea. A more common scenario is that you’ll have different types of great ideas. Competing consequences, divergent implications. Add to that the human aspect of leading a team or project and being the person who has to make the decisions—I can’t think of a better credo than without mercy, but with care.

Trust your instincts

“I don’t have a theory of editing. I just read the thing and see what works and what doesn’t.”

I love this. At its core, Gottlieb sees editing as a natural response to something someone created. It’s wonderfully subjective.

By contrast, I think there’s been a sustained effort to make design (and any type of commercial creativity) a more objective practice. Data, rapid feedback loops, user testing. These are ways to remove the subjectivity from our practice (often a good thing), but there’s a tension here, between the head and heart of design.

I love that Gottlieb was able to demonstrate so much rigor and dedication to the reader, but balance that with his own instincts on the work. Something I suspect will become more important for all designers over the next few years.

If you watch the documentary, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I loved the intensity of Gottlieb’s approach, but was also amazed by how much he cared. For Gottlieb editing wasn’t part of the process, it was a unique opportunity to turn something good into something spectacular. In a world where ideas can be turned into prototypes in a few seconds, we need that same belief—that our judgment—our ability to edit the output of very capable robots will become the only true differentiator for any successful design team. 

What an amazing time to be a designer an editor.

A drop of links to keep the signal strong. Videos, essays, books, oddities. Anything I find that’s worth sharing. Email sam@readwireframe.com with any suggestions.

• Kelly Wearstler wrote about how she uses AI in her studio. For creative types struggling to be inspired by AI tooling and how it can push the creative process—it’s worth a read. It’s for paid subscribers, but access to Kelly’s newsletter is worth it.

• Mia Silverio is part of the Prof Galloway crew and wrote a wonderful piece on storytelling. It’s perhaps best summed up by a Derek Thompson quote at the top of the piece: “There’s something overlapping in the Venn diagram between what is demanded of standup comics and what is demanded from public intellectuals. And that is: Explain this shit to me — make me feel something.”

• If (like me) you don’t understand what quantum computing is, but know it’s going to be incredibly important—you might find this explanation by Dr. Michio Kaku useful.

The Intention Economy

As machines learn to make everything smooth and functional, there’s more value in the unmistakable signal of human effort

Do you have a favorite mug? I bet you do. I bet it’s not perfect. Not in the strict design sense. I bet the proportions are outside the mean. Perhaps it was handmade so it’s not perfectly round. Or the handle is just a little bit longer than other handles? Whatever it is that makes it your favorite mug, I’m willing to bet it could be seen as an imperfection. 

Cultures all over the world have long celebrated imperfection in different forms. Wabi-sabi is the most well-known. The Japanese philosophy of finding beauty in impermanence and imperfection. There was a brief moment where Kim and Kanye were devout followers of wabi-sabi, but I digress. Wabi-sabi is far from the only one.

In Italy, sprezzatura is the art of studied carelessness. It’s effort disguised as ease. It’s the reason everyone looks so chic in Milan. In Morocco, traditional zellige tilework is intentionally irregular to reflect humility before the divine. In Nigeria, adire indigo dyeing is prized for the uniqueness of each print, where subtle variations are a sign of the maker's hand.

I think people find beauty in these imperfections because they carry signals of effort and intention. They are proof that someone, somewhere, really cared about the thing that was made. The way it was styled. The way it functions. The way it feels in your hand.

Increasingly, I don’t think this is limited to physical, hand-crafted goods.

People have been dunking on Apple’s Liquid Glass system, but I really love it. The way light bends through materials, how what's beneath subtly distorts and refracts as the liquid glass moves over the surface. It’s undeniably full of intention. There are real concerns about accessibility that should be fixed, but what an incredible demonstration of effort. 

The criticism has been a little predictable. Style over substance, disconnected from utility, form over function. But I think the critics are missing the point. It’s intentionally more than utility. When I use it, I can’t help but feel the intention of the team that brought it to life. All the tiny interactions that surprise me, or catch my eye, they’re each reminders that a group of people had to go to great effort to deliver such a beautiful thing. There’s huge value in that.  

For me, this level of intentionality is an extension of the interactions we celebrate. How many times have we praised charming microcopy, playable 404 states, delightful Easter eggs, even confetti!?

These design investments have always been a risk, but we know they pay off. Engagement, sure. That’s one way to measure it. But the elephant in the room is the emotional response. The smiles, laughs, and “hey come here, look at this thing” responses that some of these design contributions create. So much so that Google built a team dedicated to the Google Doodle, a lovely group of humans who are always looking for ways to put a smile on everyone’s face.

As we’re all starting to adopt AI tools to speed up and expand our output as designers, it’s important to remember that we, as humans, bring something unique that has the potential to connect with other humans who use our products. Our intention.

We already have the technology to generate a functional, brilliantly usable UI. It’s our version of just-in-time manufacturing. Just-in-time UX. The technology is good enough to do this live for many applications. We’re entering an era of generative user experience—visual but probabilistic—a menu generated for you that only contains options you’re interested in seeing. A card that summarizes a set of actions that meet your unique needs. 

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of this. It fills me with hope. There’s been a lot of chatter about AI replacing designers, but I think the opposite is true. When the baseline experience—simple, functional, predictable—is free, where will the value and differentiation come from?

People already seek out experiences with rough edges. They can feel the inherent value in something that was intentionally made, at great effort, by another human. The irregular tiles. The hand-dyed adire. People have always responded to the care you can feel in a product or service.

Perhaps we’re underestimating how quickly AI-crafted experiences will feel careless. We’re already seeing terms like clanker emerge to describe AI outputs. Is it because it’s easy to spot the absence of intention? 

The uniquely valuable contribution from design has never been limited to simplicity, utility, form, or function. We’ve all known for a long time that designers leave a little bit of themselves in everything they do. It’s a creative act, and requires an artistic commitment. A series of choices that add up to an intention. I’m just excited that the rise of AI might make this more valuable than ever. Where differentiation and engagement are driven by the unmistakable mark of a human who cared enough to make a product a certain way.

What a time to be a designer.

A drop of links to keep the signal strong. Tools, essays, books, oddities. Anything I find that I feel is worth sharing. Email sam@readwireframe.com with any suggestions.

• If you want to geek out on how LLMs actually work, check out this conversation with Josh, Emmanuel, Jack, and Stuart from Anthropic. Fantastic discussion.

• If you share my predilection for Wu-Tang, check out Raekwon’s set at Amié Leon Dore. Shimmy Shimmy Ya at 15:20 is a treat ❤️

• I thought packaging a Bose speaker as a stick of butter to celebrate the launch of a new yellow colorway was cute. Not for everyone, but will really speak to some.

• Rick Rubin has this great phrase in his book The Creative Act: “the audience comes last”. Here’s him explaining what he means by that. Something to think about in an Intention Economy.

These little helpers are everywhere. When you set out on a journey with your Maps app, there’s a little robot somewhere in the code ready to change the route based on real-time traffic.

If you take photos on your smartphone one of these helpers is adding tags to every image. The date, the time, what it can see in the photo.

We don’t ask for these actions, they’re examples of AI that operate unprompted. I’m old enough to remember using the F7 key to run a spellcheck on my documents. It was a process that felt like it required my attention, nothing like the background tidying of spelling and grammar that exists today.

This background tooling that we’re all so happy to ignore raises some interesting UX questions for the future of AI interactions. Because I’m pretty sure nobody wants to always have to type their request into a small, empty box full of endless possibilities.

Filling the void

People who design things for a living deal with empty spaces all the time. A blank piece of paper, a fresh Figma file, an empty room, or a plot of land. They all make demands of us. They ask us to pour part of ourselves into a process that fills the empty space with something useful and beautiful. 

This act of creation is tough. You have to know what you want, what you really, really want (it was tough not to link to the Spice Girls there).

I think there’s a strong argument to say that the entire industry of User Experience design is built on the fundamental concept that people do not know, intuitively, what they want to do with technology. They need to be guided, prompted, reassured, and kept safe. I don’t mean this to sound patronizing. That’s where the value is—for me as much as anyone else. I don’t want to write Wireframe by starting in a command line. I want to be guided by the invisible hand of someone who understands my needs and desires, who’s built an exquisite game for me to play, that leads me to my intended goal. UX can make doing things easy, sure, but it’s at its best when it makes doing things enjoyable, repeatable, emotional. These aren’t creative indulgences—they’re the reason design is such a formidable economic force.

With that in mind. Consider the launch of ChatGPT5 last week and the brutality of the blinking cursor. 

I know for some people it’s rationalized as a limitless start-point for human creativity—but I bet plenty of people feel, if only for a fraction of a second, either (a) stuck—not knowing what to write, or (b) disappointed that they need to type the whole thing out.

Not automation

There’s a way to interpret the AI helpers I mentioned above as automated. My British spelling of colour is automatically changed to color when AI spots it. But it’s not the right way to think about a future ideal for AI interaction design.

If you take automation and expand it into more sophisticated scenarios, it gets complicated. It’s now technically feasible to make the automation work in some pretty complex problems. The average dumpster-fire inbox is a good example, but that type of automation is unlikely to feel good. 

Consider for a minute, I design a new AI hammer. My AI hammer has safety features that mean it will never hammer anything but a nail. All the nails in your life will disappear, hammered into material to bind whatever it’s intended to bind. 

If you’re anything like me, you find this notion terrifying. Not because automated hammers are in and of themselves frightening (although, I suppose they are), but the nature of a nail is such that once it has been hammered, it’s very hard to un-hammer it. 

The same is true of email. It’s not the sending of the email that’s the hard bit. It’s the consequences of sending the email. I suspect ChatGPT could run my inbox better than me. I bet it could adopt my style and tone, I’m sure it could even improve my emails, but every email it sends has real-world consequences that are as hard to un-hammer as a nail. 

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as asking every time you want a nail hammered or an email sent. Imagine how quickly you’d get bored of that interaction. 

Collaboration

Perhaps the space we don’t talk about enough is how humans collaborate with each other. The patterns, exchanges, interactions and underpinning assumptions that power human collaboration are incredibly complex. But they’re not beyond analysis and application to AI. 

To highlight the absurdity, imagine you didn’t know ChatGPT was an AI. Imagine someone had told you at work one day that you had a new colleague. They’re smart, earnest, enthusiastic. Keen to help. Good at data processing and always willing to complete complex or menial tasks. The catch is that you can’t meet with them. They only communicate through chat. 

That would be frustrating. You’d want to meet with them. You’d want to invite them along to meetings you were attending. You’d want them to watch a big presentation you were delivering so they had additional context for an important project. 

The odd thing is, all of this is possible with AI right now. We just haven’t figured out the interaction patterns. 

Take meetings. We invite AI along to do a very specific thing. We say, transcribe the whole meeting, summarize it into notes for me, then share it with all the attendees. Very useful.

What if we said to the AI, can you come to this meeting? It’s important. Not to take notes, not to summarize actions, just to be present and witness what’s going on. Just absorb the context that will help our collaboration next week. Imagine how much more powerful that tool would be with the context of the meetings you’ve attended. 

There are plenty of people working on products that will solve this problem. They’ll make AI part of an ambient computing movement, where the intelligence recesses into the background and observes everything. Humane’s AI pin is a good (and terrible) early example. But in making it omnipresent, are we running past an obvious opportunity to treat AI like a direct collaborator? Inviting it to meetings. Asking it to join presentations. Having 1:1s with it?

The design gap

I started this article by referring to my little AI helpers as tools. They correct my spelling, find me a faster route while I’m driving, keep my photos organized—but that’s the wrong mental model.

I think it’s better to think of them as collaborators. They’re independent of me. They’re doing their thing, and when it makes sense, they overlap with my thing. I never prompt them, instruct them, or even ask. That might be the critical test we should be applying as designers.

Plenty of people walked away from the GPT-5 launch feeling underwhelmed.

I walked away with one clear thought: the relentless excitement driven by model improvements is losing momentum. The next phase of growth for all of the big AI players is going to come from better product thinking.

We need smarter feature design. Innovative interaction patterns. Proactive, rather than reactive AI. We need AI that fits seamlessly into our lives, AI that knows when to step in and when to stay quiet.

We don’t need AI with bigger brains, we need AI with better manners.

Yancey Strickler, who you may know as a Kickstarter founder, has an incredibly interesting idea for a new type of corporation. The Artist’s Corporation, or A-Corp would “allow artists to take full advantage of all the benefits of capitalism”.

If you haven’t seen the sculptural flower arrangements of September Studio on Instagram, you really should.

This wonderful interview with Katie Dill touches on so many important parts of design leadership—her vulnerability is so inspiring and I love her articulation of how beauty has an inherent value for design [shoutout to Lenny’s Newsletter for recording such an amazing interview].

Google AI Storybooks is cute. I think many people were already doing this, but Google put a UX wrapper around it. Very interesting tool if you’re building customer journeys.

I’ve started to end my showers with what can only be described as an undignified 20 seconds of cold therapy. I stand there, breathing heavily as ice-cold water charts an unwelcome path. I make noises and try to keep my breathing regular. I repeat in my mind that it’s worth it, that I’ll feel better, but it’s miserable. 

I’m sharing because I’ve been thinking a lot about habits and routines. I just started a new job and I’ve been amazed at how disruptive small changes can be. Different subway stops, unfamiliar coffee shops, not knowing the location of a single meeting room in a building. These small things add up to a big tax on your brain. I’ve been exhausted at the end of every day—so much so that I’ve been trying to optimize my routine—I’ve tried to use the disruption as an opportunity to improve. 

If you’re worried I’m about to list a variety of supplements and protocols that have worked for me, fear not. I would never do such a thing to Wireframe readers. 

I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t matter how elaborate you make your morning routine. It doesn’t matter if you use Himalayan salt in your lemon water. You don’t need to biohack your way to productivity. 

Like most things, it’s simple, but hard. 

I’ve always enjoyed reading and listening to Naval Ravikant. He’s not a hustle-culture Valley-bro. He’s well read and stoic and talks a lot about fundamentals that work—like the compounding nature of all investments. I heard him talking to Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom and he said:

“I reject this frame that efficiency, productivity and success are counter to happiness and freedom. They actually go together.” 

Are you having fun yet?

I coach a lot of designers and hearing Naval say productivity and happiness go together made me realize that most of my coaching conversations focus on efficiency, productivity, and success. I can’t remember the last time we talked about happiness or freedom. 

It’s not to say productivity conversations aren’t valuable, but understanding the relationship between enjoyment and productivity is, I think, the key to everything. It’s the simple but hard thing.

Think back to the projects where you had the most impact. Think back to the times when you felt your contributions were the absolute best they could have been. Now consider whether you were having fun. I bet you were. Or at least, I bet it didn’t feel like a grind.

I worry that the hustle bro nonsense has framed success as something you have to grind out. As though you need to push your way through the purgatory of work, only to emerge on the other side where you can have fun in a flow state.

It’s the wrong way round. You need to engage in your work in a way that you enjoy first, because only then will you ever reach any type of true productivity.

I’ve found this to be particularly helpful in my new role. I have to hire a new team and I’ve approached that with a sense of excitement. I sold it to myself. How often do you get to hire a team from scratch? Bring together a group of people who are greater than the sum of their parts? It’s a really exciting prospect—and something I could have approached as an operational task, or a design challenge. When I framed it as the latter, it was some of the most fun I’ve had at work in a long time.

Why not decide you’ve won?

If you read this newsletter, you’re someone who’s engaging with work in a meaningful way. Why else would you be here reading about design, technology and leadership, when you could be watching Love Island or rereading Great Expectations (both noble uses of our short time on earth)?

You undoubtedly earned your place on your team. I’m sure you probably pushed to get the role you’re in right now. So here’s a question that’ll fester; are you enjoying it?  

Simon Sinek presents an interesting framing in The Infinite Game: you can’t win. We’re not playing the type of game where you can beat other people and win. It’s unwinnable. The game keeps going, so the only choice you really have is to shift from the mindset of winning, to a mindset of perpetually playing. If you’re going to play a game forever, enjoying it isn’t a byproduct of your approach. It shouldn’t be something you put off to the next chapter of your career. Enjoying the game is the strategy.

Now this is obviously easier said than done, but having gone through a huge change recently, I can attest to the fact that it’s within your power. 

You can choose how you show up to everything you’re doing. And like I said, you’re probably in a role you once longed for. You’re probably on a team you fought to get onto. You’re probably doing work that your younger self could only dream you’d have the opportunity to do. 

You don’t need to rise’n’grind.

Decide you already won.

Then hard work will feel like play.

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A drop of links to keep the signal strong. Tools, essays, books, oddities. Anything I find that I feel is worth sharing. Email sam@readwireframe.com with any suggestions.

• Andrew Dominik made Nick Cave a beautiful film using AI, archive footage and historical photos. It’s great—as is Nick Cave’s articulation of how essential it is to keep an open mind.

• Naval shared my favorite productivity hack on Modern Wisdom. Enjoy it. No, that’s the productivity hack. Enjoy what you’re doing and you’ll outwork everyone else. [The Identifying our happiness chapter starts 32 minutes in]

• This sort of thing is why I cannot get enough of New York. Freestyle rap on the street. Some guy with a wearable mixing desk. I love everything about Ari at Home—you want to freestyle to a soul sample? Well I’m making it from scratch. Wanna record your own soul sample so we can use it on the track? Perfect.

• I skimmed Simon Sinek’s book The Infinite Game and found it to be very helpful. His framing of the shift in mindset is the main insight for me: enjoying the game is essential. But he also elaborates on certain practices that can support succeeding in the infinite game. Trust, flexibility, continuous improvement. It’s worth a look. 

• If you’re unfamiliar with Derek Guy, I recommend you follow him on Threads. He writes about menswear, but in such a way where you start to appreciate the socio-economic and geopolitical dimensions of what we choose to wear. I also suspect Wireframe readers will enjoy his wit. 

Forget frameworks. Taste is about distilling your intention into something that's uniquely valuable.

I love USM furniture. It’s not for everyone. It’s powder coated and chromed steel, made in a limited palette of colors, and it’s configurable. You can turn a shelf into a bedside table. You can combine a storage unit, maybe turn it into a headboard or a room divider. The flexibility makes it sound a bit cheap and Lego-like, but it’s not. It’s very precisely engineered. The powder coating process was standardized in the 1960s, so it’s possible to color match metal panels bought 50 years ago with panels bought today.

I love it. I love the rigidity of the system. The constraints invite you to play with what’s possible. There are all sorts of hacks out there, with people building weird and wonderful living solutions. 

Business consultant types would have you believe that USM is a triumph of targeting; of understanding a user base and designing with that persona in mind. They’ll share persuasive data on how my personal preferences and motivations align with thousands of other customers. How USM Haller has built a product with unique appeal to a valuable audience—but they’re wrong.

It doesn’t matter how much compelling data is shown, or how many compelling frameworks are shared. I love USM furniture because…well…I’m not even sure why. I’ve loved it since the first time I saw it. There’s something inherently artistic about it, in the broadest sense, where art is fundamentally about creating a reaction in others.

I’m filled with hope (and some pride) that these fundamentals of art and artistry are making their way into conversations about business. It’s long overdue. Kahneman wrote the definitive work on how emotional response governs our decision-making in Thinking Fast and Slow, but I love the simplicity of Antonio Damasio’s quote:

“We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think” 

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Taste is the new business buzzword

If you caught Nitin Nohria in the Atlantic, you’ll know what I’m talking about. He makes the case that in a world flooded with AI solutions, taste—the ability to discern what’s most meaningful, resonant, appropriate—is the most crucial human skill. So far so good.

He then goes on to give readers a framework for how to cultivate taste. You should expose yourself to more stimulus, you should curate your own personal collection, and reflect on what’s meaningful to you.

Unfortunately I think this misses the point. 

In a world where AI is going to create best practices and recommend shipping solutions that are good, we need to be careful about how we define innately human characteristics like taste. Taste is not some higher plane of analytical understanding you reach through dedicated effort and discipline. It’s not another framework for thinking. It is, at its core, something you feel. It’s not objective, it’s wonderfully subjective. 

That’s not to say it can’t be taught. It’s not to say you can’t improve your own taste, but it’s a mistake to implicitly frame taste as some sort of rare, cultivated judgment of what is objectively best. I think people that don’t understand taste think of it like this. They think of it like a shared sensibility; something that with enough dedication to your craft, you can suddenly see. That’s not what taste is. 

There is no best. There is only more or less of the intention. 

There are millions, probably billions of people who would hate to live with USM furniture, but when Haller joined USM in the 1960s, he didn’t use his taste to identify an audience for his vision. That’s the wrong way round. He didn’t collect, curate, and reflect enough that he could be the objective arbiter of what is high-quality, tasteful modular steel furniture. 

Instead, he refined a unique intention that he found somewhere deep inside himself. He felt modularity was important. He felt sustainability was essential. Durability was not to be compromised. We can’t possibly know the myriad influences that led Haller to create something that now sits in the MoMA permanent collection, but we know it was unique to him.

And most importantly that intention connects with certain people. Not everyone. Very deliberately, not everyone. Weird people like me who like metal furniture.

I understand the desire to make it accessible. I know why it’s valuable to turn taste into something you can refine like any other business protocol, but it’s not the same as other business concepts. There isn’t an equivalent of Porter’s Five Forces for taste. Taste can’t be turned into a framework for decision-making. A taste-based two-by-two won’t deliver the kind of value created by people with great taste (my favorite recent example being Jonathan Anderson at Dior).

Developing great taste (and I say this as someone who is still very much on that journey), is about distilling the most essential parts of your judgment and sensibilities. It is fundamentally a journey inside yourself, not a body of knowledge you can accrue. That’s what makes it so difficult and so rare. So how might we start?  

The most essential parts of you

There’s an early stage to developing your taste that simply requires exploration. You need to see, feel, sense enough stimulus to start to formulate preference. It’s different for every person—it wasn’t until I was well into my 20s that I started to really notice my preferences for things like shape, color, texture, style. Whereas my 8-year-old seemed to emerge from the womb with a strong sense of what she is and isn’t willing to wear. 

Once you’re beyond this stage, once you have preference, once you can articulate it (even to yourself), you can explore the following practice. It’s certainly helped me and many mentors:

Notice with intention

Our brains are built to predict—it’s the most efficient way to move through the world—but it means we sometimes fail to notice what’s right in front of us. A critical step on any journey of refining your taste is to actively take the time to notice aspects of everything that moves you—and perhaps more importantly, what repels you.

You should do this with art—all forms—books, games, movies, music—but perhaps more importantly, you should train yourself to do it with everything else around you. The shape of a particularly pleasing fork in a restaurant, the action of a satisfying door handle. It’s in the everyday objects I’ve found more to love (and more to hate), which has really helped me with my design practice. 

Some people keep notebooks, or sketch these observations. I’ve done that from time to time, and find reviewing these notes to be satisfying. But also, who has the time? I think actively noticing is significant enough for most people. 

A deeper approach for this practice is to consider how your personal perspective aligns with society. Is everyone frustrated with the way this turnstile works, or is it just me? This can be a really valuable practice for designers working on products with significant scale. It’s like you’re tuning your taste to that of the world.

Make things as inquiry

Last week I shared a great quote from Ira Glass about the gap between your taste and your ability. Ira’s quote is meant to reassure, and it should, everyone feels that gap. 

But the gap between your taste and your ability is also an opportunity to better understand the depths of your taste. Why does this prototype fall short of your vision? Or a recent example from my life: What is it about this air-dry clay penguin that doesn’t quite live up to your expectations? (It was a rainy Saturday afternoon and the ideal activity for my 8-year-old.) 

For me, writing is a constant source of this inquiry. I have a thought, and I try to express it with words. It so often falls short. But the act of trying, the act of assessing how much it falls short of that thought that elicited an emotional response—well, that’s where the magic happens.

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Sharpen through friction

Finally, something that should already be part of any good design practice is friction. Constructive friction. 

In your personal practice this can mean many things. It can mean sharing your work with someone you trust, but it could also mean publishing something online. 

The important thing is that you practice the act of detaching yourself from your work at this critical moment. Not because the wisdom of the crowd is better than your own taste (it annoys me that sometimes our design processes can lean this way). You should detach so that you can make a judgment call that’s driven by your taste and is not defensive or reactive to criticism. 

What does that mean? Well, imagine you write something that’s deliberately funny. You think it’s funny, but you share it with five people who don’t laugh. That doesn't mean it’s not funny. Taste is about knowing when to adjust and when to hold firm. Now, the obvious trap here is that you end up creating for yourself and yourself alone. That’s not good. But recognizing that your creation, your contribution can be wonderfully subjective (and will likely have an audience amongst the 6 billion people on Earth) is an important aspect of refining your taste. You should actively choose when to depart from something you think is wonderful, or when to preserve it in the face of criticism. I think this is the hardest, but also most valuable part of building any discipline around taste. You will absolutely be in the minority at some point. You will be in a room where everyone is telling you that you’re wrong and that you need to change whatever you’ve made. It’s a question of taste, and how you handle that feedback—whether you adjust or persevere. Well, that’s the whole point. So the more you can practice that, the more you can feel your way through that challenge with lower stakes experiences. The better prepared you are for when it really counts. 

Taste isn’t hidden knowledge waiting for a framework to make it accessible. It’s not universal and it’s not teachable in a business school debate. It’s innately individual and subjective. It’s the result of practice, and a deeper connection with yourself and your own intention—a refinement of what you believe matters the most. 

It’s this that makes it unmistakably human in a world that’s increasingly made more efficient by AI. 

I suppose Aristotle hit the nail on the head when he said “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” but my personal taste leans towards Taylor Swift. I think she put it better when she said I'm the only one of me / Baby, that's the fun of me.

My gift to you

Whilst writing this week’s edition, I had the idea that Wireframe might help refine the individual taste of every reader. You all had great feedback on the links I shared last week, so from this issue forward we’re going to build on that and share cultural references for you to notice with intention. I’m not going to share what I think is good, or what talks to my taste, I’m just going to share a collection of references that could lead to interesting conversations in the paid subscriber chat. As always, please keep the feedback coming.

Notice with intention

Every week we share cultural stimulus to help Wireframe readers refine their taste. You can join the subscriber chat to discuss.

Tyler, The Creator

I find it so inspiring that someone so prolific and creative can be so comfortable with their early work. I often cringe at work I’ve produced earlier in my career, but I love that Tyler’s reaction is “aaah that’s cute”.

[Interview] Ask it anyway | Tyler the Creator

Jonathan Anderson at Dior

I promise I’ll shut up about this next week, but his debut collection was covered in Forbes magazine—which I think talks to the importance of taste for the business world. JW Anderson has turned his taste into something with huge commercial value, his first collection had more than a billion views. I also think the way he seemed to curate every aspect of the launch: The invite with a simple image of an egg. Using the Close Friends feature on Instagram to leak some of the content. The fact he brought priceless artwork together to inspire and contextualize the show. It’s a great example of an organization being structured around a single person’s intention.

[Behind the scenes] Loic Prigent takes us on a tour of the show

The Louvre, Copyists

“Imagine a copy of a work of your choosing from the collections of the Musée du Louvre” What a fantastic prompt to give 100 contemporary artists. The exhibition of the resulting work will be displayed through early 2026. This raises questions for me. I wonder how each artist felt copying, even when given permission? I suspect they felt fine—perhaps liberated?

[CNN Report] The Louvre Copyists

If AI can make it good, how will you make it great?

I’ve been making movies this week. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. I’ve been playing around with Veo3. If you haven’t taken the time to play with AI video production, you really should. Not because we’re all destined to become filmmakers, but because there’s a clear line between how AI is disrupting the movie business and how it’s set to revolutionize the product design business.

A few years ago, we were all laughing at the nightmarish memes of Will Smith eating spaghetti. A few weeks ago, Veo3 absolutely crushed this informal benchmark. Technology is no longer the limiting factor. AI can create beautiful video content to the same standard as talented artists and production people.

But what’s more exciting to me than the technical prowess of these new models is the narrative arc for the industry. Back when you couldn’t tell where Will Smith ended and spaghetti began, it was easy to either be a skeptic and assume the technology would never be good enough, or a pessimist and assume this was the beginning of the end. SAG-AFTRA went on strike. Industry leaders talked about mass layoffs. It was pretty bleak.

This week, I watched a showreel from 3.11 Labs (an AI Research Lab and Production Studio) and the reel is fantastic—but what’s even better is how the founder, Benjamin Benichou framed the work. He said:

“We’ve spent the past year working behind the scenes with some of the world’s most iconic brands, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI. Not to make memes, not to fake ads, but to bring real vision to life. Because it’s not about shortcuts, it’s about removing the creative compromises that kill ideas before they’re born.”

I did my own (admittedly low-effort) research by messaging a friend who makes movies for a living. I asked if he used and/or liked any of the AI video tools. “I’m all in on AI,” he replied. “I collaborate with all the tools all of the time. They’re shit at iterating, but they’re amazing if you know how to use them.”

Through a weird twist of fate, I found myself at the Edinburgh TV festival in 2012. I’ll never forget sitting in an auditorium, listening to Netflix explain their approach to House of Cards. The series hadn’t been released yet, but the executives played the title sequence—which was made by David Fincher—and explained how they planned to release the whole season in one go. There was this weird energy in the room—somewhere between awe and fear. It strikes me that those Netflix executives could have said the same thing about their technology-fuelled 2012 approach as Benjamin did above: “it’s about removing the creative compromises that kill ideas before they’re born.”

This makes me question what’s possible with AI in product design. In a matter of months, the movie business has gone from fearing layoffs to being energized and empowered. It makes me wonder where we are in the cycle as product designers, and whether we’re building the right tools. Are we focused on empowering designers to land more of their vision? Or are we simply taking a step in the process and seeing if a robot can perform that part of the job?

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The movie business didn’t just adopt the technology—they shaped it to pursue creative vision without compromise. Brilliant, creative people like Eliza McNitt are making films with these tools. It would be so easy for that industry to stay in the realm of efficiency. To ask what AI can do to speed things up and make things simpler. But instead, creative people are channeling the momentum from the technology to serve their creative vision.

We all spend so long honing our product design craft. We fight for what we know is good design—clear, scalable, easy to use, accessible. I’m proud of the work I’ve done. But when I see filmmakers embrace these new AI tools—not to cut corners or chase efficiency, but to remove creative compromises—I can’t help but swoon.

It’s this spirit we need to capture in product design: the idea that value can be created by the unique vision of a creative person (or team of creative people). In a week where Jonathan Anderson brought an unmistakably personal vision to Dior, we’re reminded of the commercial value of vision, clarity, and human intention.

Put another way, when AI means everyone can make something good, we should all be thinking deeply about how we make something great.

There’s no playbook for this. There shouldn’t be—just like there’s no playbook for being an artist, or a musician. It’s a combination of skill, empathy, craft, vision, but most of all taste. The brilliant Stephanie Tyler expressed something in Taste is the New Intelligence that I can’t stop thinking about:

You build taste the same way you build strength: by choosing the heavier lift. The richer input. The slower hit. The thing that doesn’t give you a dopamine spike, but gives you a deeper signal.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to put my phone down for the rest of the day to see what might light up my creative mind.

🔗 A few great links 🔗

This is our first week sharing links (a request from many readers), they’re intended to be interesting but tangential.

AI Research feels smart…until it isn’t

Ezra Klein gives a characteristically thoughtful take on how he uses AI and where he’s found the edges: the killer point for me is “[AI research instead of reading yourself] doesn’t change you…what knowledge is supposed to do is change you, and it changes you because you make connections to it.”

The Gap by Ira Glass

A film originally shared by the film-making friend I referenced in this week’s edition. A great reminder for everyone that disappointments shouldn’t lead to quitting—it takes a while and you have to fight your way through it.

Rick Owens in Concordia

Speaking of taste and design intention—I love Rick Owens and this story of how he goes into “monk mode” when making his collections in Concordia, Italy. I find this to be a fascinating contrast to the way we (Product Designers) tend to swarm around problems with cross-functional teams of people.

Designing for people, not progress…oh, and Jane Jacobs ❤️

I used to work in an office that had a tiny kitchen just off the reception area. Deeper than it was wide, it was filled with what you’d expect: a kettle, a sink, a toaster, drawers full of knives (but no forks), chipped mugs, a microwave, and some paper plates for serving birthday cake.

It was fantastic.

That tiny, awkward, frustrating space was the single biggest contributor to company culture. It forced everyone to interact with each other. If you wanted a cup of coffee after a long commute—or a slice of toast after too many beers—you needed to squeeze into that kitchen with everyone else.

It led to friendships, a few weddings, and lots of spontaneous laughter. But I’m certain whoever decided to put that kitchen into such a cramped space, had no idea it would lead to such positive outcomes.

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The impact of design is often emergent. People don’t always react the way we imagine they would. They surprise us in how they use the things we build. We can predict it, anticipate what might happen—but we don’t always know. This is why designing for serendipity has been an important part of town planning and architecture for some time [Jane Jacobs wrote the original manifesto on this].

But what about UX? One of the first things we’re taught is to map out a user’s journey. To observe or predict user behavior and define it in a series of steps (often, ideal). Now we’re building products that don’t really do journeys. They’re open-ended. You say what you want—and something magical happens. A simple dialogue where you can ask the AI to do anything. It’s like a magic wand. And I don’t want to storyboard what 3 billion people could do with a magic wand.

The problem with linear thinking

I know user journeys can be useful, but I’ve disliked them for some time. I can’t shake the feeling that they over-simplify. They reduce the complexity of humans into a series of tidy steps, and I think people are inherently messy. They forget why they opened the fridge, splurge when they should save, and have unexpectedly deep thoughts whilst standing in the cereal aisle.

I know some journey maps can be nuanced—layering emotional states, contexts, touchpoints—but they’re still linear. They assume a beginning, middle, and end. And you can see it in the products we build: we design for completeness. Book the flight. Buy the bag. Sign up for the course. We call people to action. We convert. We follow up. We re-engage. Then we start over.

AI disrupts this thinking. A user can take it anywhere, and do pretty much anything. I think that’s why we started calling them co-pilots and agents. The names help us make sense of open-ended experiences by anchoring them to a user’s immediate intent. I’m doing a thing, I need a co-pilot to help me. I can’t be bothered to do a thing, I’ll get the agent to do it.

But what happens when intent isn’t linked to an immediate action or outcome? What if you want to talk about your love life with ChatGPT? Explore whether you’re in the right job with Claude? These aren’t linear tasks. They don’t have a beginning, middle, and end. They meander and they’re all the better for it.

How might we flip, nudge and tilt?

What if instead of trying to turn the messy human experience into an easy to understand journey, we spent our time thinking about how we might shape the messiness? How we might build in pleasant surprises, or tools that help people get the most from the chaos?

More like designing a pinball machine—aware there’s no way to control where the ball goes, but excited by how we might turn that momentum into something special.

In a world of open-ended tools and AI-powered magic, maybe people don’t need help getting from A to B anymore. Particularly if co-pilots are there to show us the way, and agents can do simple tasks for us.

I find this exciting. The idea that we get to build new types of experiences that are less like linear progressions, and more like sandpits or playparks. Jane Jacobs campaigned for this type of thinking in New York City, and it’s what makes it such a vibrant and unique place. Paley Park is my favorite example. A tiny space on E 53rd street. The type of space that might be a parking lot or a low rise building. Some very simple design choices made in the 1960s turned Paley into the perfect pocket park. A huge waterfall dampens the noise of the city. Chairs and tables are free to be moved around according to need or whim. Trees shade people from the sun, and ivy on the walls reminds them it’s a park. But the design of Paley Park is singular. It’s a space that asks people what they’ll use it for. It’s full of potential. The perfect spot for a first date or a break-up. A fun lunch with colleagues or some much-needed time alone.

These spaces—the tiny kitchen, Paley Park—they’re charged with potential because they’re designed with enough room for people to add themselves.

It makes me think the most exciting part of AI is that we can finally stop designing the steps in the journey, and start marking the edge of the dance floor.

That first boss set the standard for me. A standard I’ve continually failed to meet. So much so that I’ve often thought of him before any big presentation. He’s the metaphorical salesman in my pocket. The problem is, I think AI just killed him.

The first cut is the deepest

A few weeks back, I wrote about how I often use AI tools like extra RAM in my brain. I outsource something I’m working on to the AI, then come back to it. With presentation writing, I’ve found myself adopting a pretty compelling pattern I wanted to share.

I’m working on something (or reviewing something) in Figma. I take a screenshot. Give it to the AI, and then ask it to draft a general structure for my presentation. Here’s an example of the type of prompt:

[I wish I could share the mock I included with this prompt. I’m sure you can imagine, but including a screenshot is important.]

You can see from this image that we're considering adding a right-hand toolbar that operates as an asset library interaction for event creation. I need to convince a group of senior executives that this is the most appropriate UX approach, can you give me a clear, concise structure for a presentation that persuades them of the merits of a side panel approach to this feature?

There are two things I love about this approach:

1. I get to avoid context switching. I can review designs in Figma—or in many cases continue to work on the more detailed aspects of an interaction—then throw my AI the task of starting to think through how it should be presented. It feels like the equivalent of me sending a quick slack or ping to someone.

2. I get to approach my first draft as an editor. This makes a big difference as it would usually take me a day or so to get to the level of completeness in a presentation where I could review the whole thing. That first boss of mine—he made us print out copies of his presentations and lay them down on huge conference tables. He’d walk the length of the table, silently reviewing, rehearsing in his head. I feel like having AI do a first draft gives me a comparative experience (albeit somewhat less chic). I can direct my energy to reviewing and pacing my way through the story. It means I’m considering the whole of the presentation, right from the start—which makes a big difference.

I’m not saying that the first draft from an AI is ready for prime-time. It never is, right? But this is a helluva shortcut and could be really powerful for folks who struggle to pull together compelling arguments.

Ask your AI to be mean

A few weeks back the concept of AI Glazing got some traction. The danger that chat interface AI can become a self-reinforcing ego machine. I get it. I’ve occasionally blushed when Gemini takes it too far “This is a superb draft!” etc. Perhaps this says more about my personality than I’d like to share on Substack, but I’ve started asking my AI to be mean to me.

Not in general. Being generally mean isn’t helpful, but when you ask an AI to not hold back—to give you both barrels. Well, you get better feedback.

For example, here’s my prompt:

“I'm going to give you the narrative for a pitch presentation. I want you to critique it. I want you to be as harsh as possible. Don't hold back. I can take it. But give me actionable guidance on how to make it better. Here's the draft: [insert draft]”

I thought I had a pretty good draft, but to give you a sense of how spicy Gemini can get when you turn it up to eleven, here’s some of the most constructive criticism:

“This isn't a pitch narrative. This is an internal project update memo that you've tried to disguise as a pitch. It's riddled with jargon, it lacks a soul, and it commits the cardinal sin of pitching: it asks the audience to do the hard work for you.”

I can’t share the draft as it’s too sensitive, but it’s a lot better. Gemini’s directness helped me build a much stronger argument. Even if I had to go to the bathroom for a little cry halfway through.

That first boss of mine could be quite mean. Perhaps it’s a necessary part of crafting any story—the willingness to confront any shortcomings without fear or platitude. I know plenty of writers who regularly hate their work. They read it back to themselves and feel an overwhelming sense that they lack talent and don’t deserve the privilege of putting words on a page—but it’s part of the process. You have to write bad things to be able to write good things.

The new salesman that fits in my pocket might be an AI, but counterintuitively it’s made me more human. My job isn’t to do the first draft and lay out the pages of the presentation anymore. I get to walk the metaphorical conference table and run through the story in my head. I get to focus on the parts of the presentation that make it compelling; I get to think about it as a whole story, rehearse in my head, challenge the weaker parts of the structure, and consider ways to bolster my argument.

Most impressive of all? It’s made it fun.

Something I never thought I’d say about writing presentations.

I’m not here to hate on how they got the predictions wrong. In fact, I love how accurate they are. They’re so close. Video chats from a phone booth? Well, kinda. Concert tickets from a cash machine? Yeah I suppose so. The whole series is like the uncanny valley of predictions. It reminded me of my most recent beach holiday, where a particularly annoying guest was sitting on his sun lounger with his headset, yabbering away on his conference calls. I would have much preferred it if he were only able to send a fax from the beach…but I digress.

I’m sharing these old AT&T ads because I think we’re at a similar inflection point with AI and conversational interfaces. Everyone’s trying to guess what’s next, and we’re all circling the same design questions.

Translating human intent

Julie Zhou wrote a brilliant article on the limitations of conversational interfaces and I absolutely loved this line:

“The entire design discipline can be distilled into the craft of translating a creator’s intent into a user experience that fulfills the desired intent.”

It got me thinking. Wondering if my intent is the same as everyone else’s when I approach my AI. When I think of Gemini and how it might be able to help me. I then had a typically millennial experience with AI—I went and asked it to do something for me.

I asked it to write itself a prompt. I wanted it to go and do some deep research into how different generations are using AI and conversational interfaces.

It then returned with a comprehensive report, and offered to code an interactive web page to explore the results. I said yes, and hosted it on my website so you can dig around in the results. It took Gemini 20 minutes from me asking the question to having the site live. Impressive.

Open-ended vs. Closed

But here’s the thing. The report points out the main difference between generations using AI—and Sam Altman has also spoken about this—is that their intent seems to chart over a spectrum. This might be an over-simplification, but the way I see it, the younger generations are more comfortable using AI to navigate open-ended problems. Their intent might be unclear, even to themselves. They might want advice on a big life decision. They might be weighing the pros and cons of something. Expanding their individual understanding of a topic. Whereas older generations (like me) often have a closed problem to solve. A specific task that needs to be done. A request to make of the system.

Now this might be more to do with the situation than anything else. Folks in their 40s are busy with work and other commitments and use tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to get shit done. Whereas 18 year olds are focused on learning and generally expanding their minds—so why not use these tools to do just that?

But what if the difference is driven by something else? A level of comfort younger people have with sharing. Sharing their thoughts, sharing their hopes, dreams, desires. When I was 18 (and admittedly, I was in the UK where everyone is emotionally repressed), it would have been really odd to be as openly hopeful or ambitious as many 20 year olds are today. I love it. I’m here for it. But it has design implications.

How should we design for these open-ended intentions? And if younger users are using tools like Gemini and ChatGPT as operating systems, why aren’t we designing them to work that way? In my own experience of writing this article I had a very closed-task approach to using Gemini. I asked for some research. Gemini did that research to a high standard. It then offered to turn it into an interactive website. That’s nothing short of amazing—it was incredible to see Gemini code the interactive report in real-time. But I don’t think Gemini truly understood what I was trying to do. Sure, I could have asked it for charts or quotes to drop into this Substack piece. I could have nudged it to help me formulate the narrative of the article. And it wasn’t short of ideas. Gemini even offered to turn the report into an audio summary for you folks who prefer to listen to Substack instead of read it.

The thing is, I can’t shake the feeling Gemini just sent me a fax from the beach.

What an incredible time to be a designer.

It’s also a common pattern for a story I find myself watching again, and again. A story about flawed but brilliant individuals who come together to create an unstoppable team.

Once you look for it, you see it everywhere: The West Wing, Mission Impossible, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ghostbusters, Ocean’s 11, Star Trek, Seven Samurai.

Some of our most famous and popular stories are about unique characters that are wholly unsuited to operate alone, but absolutely unstoppable together.

I see the same pattern in designers. Often what makes a designer unique is the source of their power. It’s their difference that gives them an edge.

What’s an edge?

The first thing to say is that your edge isn’t a skill. You can do motion design? Great! That’s not your edge. Award-winning color theorist? Good for you. That’s not your edge either. Background as an illustrator? That’s wonderful. Still not your edge.

Your edge is a unique combination of skills.

How you combine skills is up to you. That’s what’s so liberating about the idea. You might have a really deep aesthetic sensibility—some people are blessed with impeccable taste—you should cultivate that. You should look to expand it across many skills, express it in new ways, and find interesting applications of your natural ability. As you invest, it will grow and evolve into something singular. Something only you could do.

I have a systems-thinking content designer in my team. They’ve got great taste and a unique ability to have a calming effect on difficult or high-pressure projects. That combination makes this person a fantastic leader for certain projects, but it also creates a blueprint to build on.

They could take their career in many directions; so it becomes important to be intentional about how they build on those skills and improve that edge. They’re great at calming difficult situations. Maybe team transformation is something to explore? They’ve got great taste. Perhaps taking the lead as Creative Director on a project will help them explore their abilities?

When working on individual development plans, the trick is to aim for an increase in both uniqueness and impact. Imagine a two by two, and aim for the top right. It makes me more me, and it makes me more valuable. That’s the sweet spot.

How do you keep it sharp?

Once you’ve got an edge and you feel good about it, it’s important to understand how to keep it sharp.

There’s the pattern above, which you should continue to repeat. Identify an opportunity to double-down on your uniqueness, particularly where it adds more impact or value to your role.

But there’s a counterintuitive part to maintaining your edge: saying no.

You’d think that now you have this newfound confidence in your abilities, you could turn your attention to any problem. You can seize opportunities previously out of reach.

That’s not how it works. Defining your edge gives you a better sense of who you are, but also the type of products or projects you should be working on. It becomes immediately clear where your edge will have the most impact—cut the deepest—and that’s not always a comfortable part of the experience.

You might have planned your career moves, you might love the team you work with, you might have bought into the company vision—but as you double-down on your unique skillset, you might start to have this creeping sense that you’re in the wrong place, or surrounded by the wrong people. Do not ignore that voice. It’s trying to help.

Saying yes to everything might have gotten you to the point where you’re successful and you deeply understand the value you add—but that doesn’t mean you need to keep saying yes. Early in your career, you’re solving a different problem. You want to expose yourself to the abundance of opportunities. You want to explore and test and learn.

As you start to define your edge, as you have a better sense of what you’re good at and what makes you, you. Well, it’s a different problem you’re trying to solve. It’s a fit problem. Are you well suited to do this work? Or the way I prefer to think of it: is this work well suited to you? Is this work, this project, this challenge, the type of thing that needs someone like you. Will this project light up every part of you? Will it have you leaping from bed every morning to get back at it.

It’s not arrogant. It’s self-aware. It’s not about being better or worse. It’s about knowing yourself, doubling-down on what’s brilliant about you. Then finding the work that fits. If you do that, you’ll be unstoppable. Or at least, I pity the fool who tries to stop you.

At this point, I speak to Gemini more than any other colleague(!)—which got me thinking about how I’m using AI, and how my use has changed over the past few months.

I thought it might help to share:

More neurons, not infinite interns

I know plenty of people have made the comparison between interns and AI—as though AI agents are an army of early-career workers, but I really don’t see it like that. For me, using Gemini feels like I’m adding RAM to my brain. As though I have more capacity to think, instead of having an army of robots to do the work for me.

My workflow looks a bit like this: I’m working on a problem and I start breaking it down into separate considerations. I ask Gemini to do some of that thinking for me. It could be rewriting some product strings in 5 different tones or styles. It could be researching the use of a particular interaction pattern across a category. It could be offering criticism of an existing design or storyboard. I use it more like an extension of myself, asking it to make a start on something I would usually do from scratch. Then I flit between the work I’m focused on, and the work Gemini is doing.

I’ve also found it can do things like watch videos I’d like to watch. I wouldn’t have it watch the Sopranos and summarize it, but I’d have it watch a training video, or a new update, or maybe a research interview.

So I suppose in some ways it acts like an extension of my brain. It creates a bigger playground for me to play in. But in other ways it represents me. It’s present for me, watching a YouTube video I should really watch about how to get the most from a new Figma feature. I can then read a quick summary and ask any follow up questions, which is undeniably faster for me…but perhaps not for everyone.

Weirdly, all this doesn’t feel like context switching. That’s why I think the RAM analogy is a good one. It’s as though I’ve increased the breadth of my thinking—I can do more of it at the same time. Which is different to many of the agent narratives I’ve seen—where AI does stuff for you and you can forget about it. I guess that might work in a service setting (like help centers?) or in some personal experiences (like booking a restaurant?), but I think this concept of expanding brain capacity is really powerful for knowledge workers—and we’re yet to figure out how to create the ideal interactions to support it.

Hard on myself, harder on my robot

I’m also surprised by how personal and private my relationship with my AI has become. I squirm at the idea of someone browsing through my prompt history—much more so than my search history. A list of Google search terms can tell a story, but a list of Gemini prompts would give you a deep understanding of my foibles.

I think appreciating the depths of this feeling, could help us design better AI experiences. Over the months I’ve used it, I’ve learned how I can be vulnerable with my AI, because it’s mine. I can ask it a stupid question, I can get it to do something I’m too lazy to do myself. I can have it perform a wholly unreasonable task, and it never complains. I asked Gemini to look at a presentation we were due to deliver to a VP with a certain reputation. I asked it to look at the deck we’d prepared, then look at three previous decks that had been successfully presented to this particular VP. I then asked it to compare and contrast, offer some guidance as if it were a pitch consultant helping a start-up secure funding. We got a brilliant set of observations, recommendations back. I suppose I would have done that work, given infinite time, but I certainly wouldn’t have asked a member of my team to do that work. I’m not sure why? I suppose it would be a useful experience for someone looking to refine their narrative or presentation skills—but it feels like unreasonable work because it’s quite arduous and not really design work.

In my experience every good designer is really, really hard on themselves. They push and push because the nature of design is that it never feels done. It could always be better. I love that about design.

So perhaps the most breakthrough part of AI for designers isn’t the capabilities of these models, but the resilience. By definition, the AI is as resilient as you are. It’s an unfeeling extension of you. Or it could be. Mine certainly feels like mine, and once I’ve used it enough, it won’t feel like yours. You can even push it harder than you would push yourself (if that’s even possible).

So rather than inventing workflows that simplify, or delegating simple tasks with AI agents. Perhaps the more impactful approach would be to sit, quietly, and think about the most unreasonable requests we could make of ourselves. The downright outrageous, never-in-a-million-years-would-we-have-time-to-do-that requests. The ones we’ve trained ourselves not to even consider. Perhaps we should make a list of all those things—then ask our robot to do them.

The problem is that organizing and facilitating a really great design sprint is a lot of work—and who has the time? If your team is anything like mine, we’re all doing more than we’ve ever done. We’re using fancy AI tools to scale people’s individual impact and we’re moving really fast. So the idea of asking someone to take a few weeks to plan a sprint is starting to feel weird.

Instead of continuing to implement sprints, we spent some time thinking about sprint techniques that might be useful to implement as daily practices. It’s worked well, with the team having plenty of “doh, why didn’t we do this before” moments. So here they are, our top three sprint techniques that have benefitted the whole team when implemented as a daily practice:  

1. Setting intentions: If you’ve ever run a design sprint, you know how important it is to set a clear intention for each exercise. Bringing this same intentionality to meetings, 1:1s, working sessions, crits—the whole team has found it to be incredibly beneficial. We’ve not added formality. We’re not sharing crisp agendas or reading memos for 20 minutes before discussing anything. We’re just using the same techniques we’d use as facilitators, to articulate the actions, ideal outcomes, and intention of every team interaction. Something as simple as “Here’s what I’m hoping to get out of this session:” can have a huge impact on the quality of the time together. 5 stars. Would recommend. 

2. Prompting contributions: In a Sprint setting, a facilitator is mindful of including everyone—nudging the quieter voices in the room to speak up. As a team leader, I try to do this all the time, but having the whole team think about it has been transformational. Hearing team members call on each other for their opinion, directly, has been amazing. There’s a hidden strength in this behavior—it’s impossible to do it without sounding like you really value the person’s opinion. So it’s good for team health, transparency and culture too. Perhaps most exciting is that it’s improved the quality of the design critique across all our projects.

3. Dedicated moments of reflection: Something we do in sprints all the time is take a moment to intentionally reflect on concepts or discussion. Doing this at the start or end of everyday meetings has proven to be a really effective way of cutting down churn outside of the meeting itself. We hear if someone is apprehensive about a direction, we get a sense of the team’s appetite for taking on a bigger challenge, and we occasionally get surprised by a new idea or consideration from a quiet voice on the team. I’ve personally found these mini reflections to be most valuable when focused on the work. I know there are similar practices for team health and culture—but I’ve loved creating space to reflect on the work we’re doing and how we’re feeling about it. I think it’s improved everyone’s craft. 

There are more examples—of course there are—I particularly like trying to bring some of the prototyping and user testing methods into everyday design team practice. We’ve done smart things with NotebookLM and some built some handy prototyping frameworks that have really helped in that space, but I’ll write about those in a future issue. 

For now, have a think about what you can steal from the Sprint method for your daily practice—and let me know if I’m missing something.

Jeffrey Katzenberg thinks up to 90% of creative roles on animated movies could be replaced by AI within a year. I think he’s got the wrong end of the stick.

Pixar released Toy Story in 1995 and has since produced 28 animated features. They're all brilliant in their own way (although Brave is a personal favorite).

They've also done a fantastic job balancing commercial success and artistry. Pixar never ran out of road with their ideas (unlike Marvel's recent superhero mega-movies). Pixar has been consistently recognized at the Oscars, winning Best Animated Feature for many movies, and for those of you who like a little more quantification, Bob Iger paid $7.4 billion for Pixar back in 2006 when $7.4 billion was real money.

Yet despite this success, despite their cultural status, artistic credentials, business value — they've made less than 1 movie per year.

Instead of cutting 90% of creative roles on an animated movie, isn't a better question, "what happens when Pixar can make 10 movies per year, not 1?".

I suppose it depends, right? Would each movie be any good? Would we even have time to watch every movie? Are Pixar fans ready for a new movie every month? It sounds relentless...but I don't hate the idea.

If inventions like YouTube, Netflix, Kindle, Substack, Tiktok, Steam Deck, and Spotify have taught us anything, it's that we have a seemingly insatiable appetite for content.

Perhaps it goes deeper. Perhaps we're looking for meaning and connection; but that's kinda besides the point. Whatever the motivation, we know that folks are spending more time on various devices, metaphorically glued to stories and experiences—and we're nowhere near the upper limit of "human time on device" in any given day.

So instead of worrying about AI technology taking away, perhaps the real concern should be how much it will add. The obvious fear is that the technology facilitates an abundance of mediocrity. When it costs very little to make a bad idea, there's nothing stopping bad ideas being made. But I don't buy that. I've seen plenty of bad movies that made it through the studio system. I've interacted with (too many!) terrible experiences to know that there's room to improve our human-managed approval processes for UX. And it's the same argument that was made when YouTube became successful. If anyone can create a "film" and distribute it online, then it's going to erode the overall quality of the industry. Pff. Rubbish. I spend hours watching things on YouTube I LOVE, that no commissioning editor in their right mind would ever spend money on. Martijn is a great example; I've loved watching him renovate two stone buildings in the Alps, but I suspect you wouldn't. That's okay. It's the niches that make YouTube so great.

The niches give me hope for a different type of future. Not a dystopian reality where the PixarBot makes one movie per year, but not the omnipresent-terrible-content future either. I see a different path, where AI makes it easier for humans to do remarkable things that other humans will love, and pay money for, and spend time with. That's a future we can all be excited about.

I find most advice about building high-performing teams to be annoying.

If often assumes you’re building a team from scratch. Put some skilled people together. Define a common purpose. Clarify roles. Deploy excellent processes. Ensure there's open communication. Perhaps add a trust fall for good measure.

You get the idea.

You didn't have a high-performing team, and now you have one—congratulations!

In practice, it's rare we have the chance to build a team like a carpenter might build a chair or a table. It's much more common that as leaders, we have to act like gardeners. We cultivate team culture. We plant people in positions where we think they'll thrive. We give them sunlight and water, then we see how they grow.*

This type of high-performance gardening (now there's a show I'd watch) is a nuanced task. It's about balancing process with culture — product with people. If you've ever overhauled a company-wide process, you know how painful it can be. And it's not the nuts and bolts of the process that's tough. Streamlined approvals and planning processes? Yes please! But every organization has interpersonal dynamics; every team has a memory. People find it hard to be transparent when they've been burned, or embarrassed. It's not enough for leaders to say "let's all streamline our approvals and improve our planning process from now on, ok?"

The solution to this problem is to focus on behaviors instead of processes.

Behaviors can be modeled by leaders. They can be recognized and rewarded, and they can be celebrated by the whole team. You can squeeze them onto powerpoint slides (if you must) but unlike process and principles, you can feel behaviors — every member of the team can experience them.

And if there's one behavior that's been the secret ingredient for every high-performance team I've ever been a part of it, it's this:

Generosity.

The thing about generosity is it that it's big, and plentiful. Generosity is more than kindness, it's an abundance of good things. I think that's why it works so well with high-performers; they always want to do more, they want to win, push themselves and everyone around them. Generosity is the positive way to do that. It can act as an overwhelming force for good, a disproportionate response to opportunity.

When I was a kid, the phrase "like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut" was used to dismiss an approach as excessive and wasteful. But if you put your best people in a team, and they're generous with their time, attention, and talent. They become a metaphorical sledge hammer, cracking nuts all over the organization.

It feels good for the team too. They get to throw themselves into the highest priorities for the business, they get to use their skills, but most importantly they can operate with freedom. Generous acts build on one another. Someone might start a document to capture the ideas, another might start sketching. Someone else might take over and contribute more ideas. Another person might help animate a visualization. There's cumulative impact for generous creative teams, a pattern of behavior that builds momentum.

I say all this because every organization is focused on efficiency right now, and knowledge work—particularly design work—doesn't comply to those same principles that made Toyota and General Electric so good at driving operational efficiency.

There's no production line for design, and the efficiencies to be had can seem counterintuitive. If you have 5 designers and 5 priories, it can be less efficient to give each designer a priority. The nature of the work means teams are faster and more impactful when they're working together, riffing off one another's ideas, and challenging each other.

It's not easy, but if you're trying to figure out how to guide a design team to high-performance, don't focus on the mechanics. Don't think of them like resources that need to be optimized.

Imagine the future state, visualize how you want the team to be operating.

Think about the behaviors necessary to make that a reality.

Now write those behaviors down.

I bet generosity is high on that list.

*I am eternally thankful to Alison Gopnik for the brilliant carpenter/gardener framing.

Creating the equivalent in UX is tricky. We've all enjoyed the unexpected confetti when clicking a button. The first time is great, but it gets a bit annoying. My personal threshold was mid-way celebrations on my tax return. Surprise, but no delight.

I think part of the challenge is that UX easily becomes a very rational process. We often turn feelings into thinking. We understand a user motivation, only to break it down into steps. Tasks we can measure. Stages we can track. It's why someone (quite reasonably) suggests we celebrate the onboarding with confetti, without wondering if it underserves or overlooks the feeling of finally being able play with your new phone.

Before you write strongly worded letters, I know there are examples of great emotional design in UX (yes, hello Apple), but these experiences aren't common. They're certainly not as common as the confetti celebrations, and I'm not sure most come close to the feeling of my cast-iron pepper grinder.

So when I saw this clock I got excited.

It's a very clever clock that uses generative AI to create a rhyming couplet that tells you the time. Every minute of every day, forever. It is, in my mind, the UX version of my cast-iron pepper mill. I feel it first. There's something magical about how each couplet only exists for 60 seconds. Something brilliant in the expectation — what will the clock say next?! But perhaps most important is the simplicity. It isn't a layer of artifice. It's necessary. It's the way you tell the time with this clock. The time itself is written in words, not signaled with numbers, so the poem is essential. I love it. I ordered one, and you should too. Well done Matt Webb.

So while everyone is talking about generative AI reinventing work, speeding everything up, replacing people, and democratizing creativity, we should take some time to consider the new frontiers for design.

Because AI isn't just changing how we design, it's changing what it's possible to design. Before an LLM, the clock above was impossible to make. There are 1440 minutes in a day, more than 10,000 in a week, more than 500,000 in a year. That's too many couplets for anyone to write. It's too complex a task for a simple program to solve. But as Matt says in his video about the clock: it's worth it for the vibes?!

I asked Gemini to give me a couplet that sums up my issues with UX confetti. I thought these were pretty good:

Confetti’s shower, a designer’s delight, / But users may find it, a distracting sight.

Confetti’s explosion, a jubilant display / Insensitive to users, who’ve lost their way

How many times have you sat in a meeting room at work and thought "this is a colossal waste of time"?

If you work in a large, complex organization, chances are, you think that frequently.

Unproductive processes are everywhere in modern companies. Unnecessary meetings. Pointless conversations. Duplicative tasks. Here's some data if you don't believe me (although I'm sure you do).

And sure, AI is going to fix some of this problem. But if you believe that humans are going to continue to have a role in productive creativity (and I really think you should), there's always going to be this challenge — this frustration — of getting folks to work effectively, together.

I'm not talking about collaboration. That's different. There are tried and true ways of driving collaboration and designers are very good at it. I'm not talking about the broader world of business process either, where there are significant and impressive best practices (I don't want the Six Sigma fan club coming after me).

The processes I'm talking about are the ones we deal with all the time as design leaders. The process of kicking off a project. Getting from brief to concept. The process of approval — particularly in complex organizations — where my launch might affect your launch, and your launch might affect mine. I'm talking about the integration of important process steps that sometimes get missed, like localization and accessibility. It's these processes. The ones we use every day. It's these processes that I seldom see anyone design.

It's easy to understand why. Process improvements are put in place to correct issues or prevent disaster. If design is all about focusing on a human and understanding how they experience something, process is the opposite. Process often ignores the humans who use it. Instead, process focuses on potential disaster, and how to avoid it (often at the cost of the human experience).

As design leaders, we can fix that. We can design processes that will improve the overall experiences of our people. We can empathize with their frustrations, seek to understand their deeper needs. We can use our creativity to solve their problems, whist building enough safety into the system.

We can do all this, because before we were leading large teams of designers, we were designers ourselves. Where design process is concerned, it's time to get back to fundamental questions: Who is this for? What do they need? How can we help?

It's not easy. Process for design teams, particularly in big, unwieldy organizations, is a wicked problem. But wicked problems are the most fun to solve.

Giving effective creative feedback is one of the toughest parts of leading creative teams—here are five things that might help.

Treat every idea with respect

My first proper job was at a London advertising agency. I was lucky enough to be part of the graduate training program, which meant I was moved around from department to department, learning as much as possible along the way.

Before my time (and perhaps apocryphally), the standard Creative Department training for graduates was for the Creative Director to task grads with building model airplanes. Each graduate was given a kit, some glue and some paint. The Creative Director would say "I'm looking for people who really take their time, make sure every detail is perfect, because that's what working in this business is all about: craft!"

The merry band of graduates would then spend a week constructing, painting, and detailing. By Friday, each graduate would have a splendid example of what can happen when someone applies themself to a creative task. A beautiful, detailed model airplane.

Legend has it that the Creative Director would then bring a cricket bat to the final creative review, and proceed to smash each and every model into tiny pieces in front of the graduates.

The lesson? When someone spends time working on something creative, treat it with respect, treat it with care. If you don't, it'll feel like this.

Putting aside the problems with the teaching method, I do think respecting people's work is the most fundamental principle for effective creative reviews. If you don't show respect for people's ideas, if you don't acknowledge the work that went into the thinking, then it's very hard to keep people engaged in making it better.

So don't smash people's (figurative) model airplanes—or their real model airplanes, come to think of it.

Clearly express the problem, don't try to fix it

If you're leading a creative team, I sincerely hope you've tried to hire people who are better than you. There is no greater feeling than bringing talented people together who can achieve things it would be impossible to do alone. It's magic.

If you have hired people who are better than you, then you need to hear this story from Gary Oldman. It's a minute or so and the link below will take you to the relevant part of the interview. It's the perfect example of a creative leader respecting the boundaries of craft. I am not a brilliant visual designer, but I try to hire and work with the best visual designers. It makes no sense for me to try and do their job for them—they're better than me— but if they've done something that's not working, I try to succinctly, clearly articulate what I think the problem is. Then I trust them to fix it.

I wish I was as succinct and clear as "The stakes are higher", but everyone has room to grow.

Ask questions

If you've ever tried to write, draw, sculpt, or paint something, you'll know that as part of the process, the idea reveals itself to you. Great work is made over time.

Design is no different. When you review an idea, it might not be ready.

A consistent mistake I see across senior leadership is the assumption that all design work is complete. Many leaders are used to signing-off work as a final check before shipping. It's easy for them to slip into that mode — to assume they're flipping their approval switch, and not working with the team to refine an idea.

This is sometimes because of the process. We find ourselves in the wrong meetings, or we set the wrong expectations.

Questions help. Instead of stating you do or don't like something. Instead of stating an issue or a potential highlight, ask questions of those who designed the concept. E.g.

"What's the thinking behind this choice? Can you talk us through it?"

"Why is this a modal and not some other solution? Did you consider other options?"

"What did users think when they got to this page?"

Asking questions changes the dynamics of the meeting. It helps move everyone from adversarial to conversational. It's easy for a review to feel adversarial if a group of doers are seeking input from a group of approvers. It can quickly feel like a check, or a gate. Questions help put the problem, design, or opportunity in the middle of the room and give everyone the chance to discuss it. They help open up the conversation, turning the review into a collective opportunity to improve the ideas.

Just be careful how you ask. "Why did you do that?" can mean very different things when delivered in different tones.

Plus up

Dave Zaboski is an artist who worked at Disney for a long time. When I worked at Google Fiber, Dave came to speak with us about creativity, collaboration, and craft. It was fantastic training. If you have the chance to work with Dave, you should. A concept he introduced to me is "plussing" — a term that Walt Disney used to demand more from his creative teams.

Plussing isn't about adding. It's about extending ideas. Making them better. Taking them a step beyond where they're at. It's a really hard practice to instill in a team, because if someone has a great idea and they present it, it feels weird to help refine it. It feels like you're starting to take credit for their thinking. Steal their idea. Hijack their concept. But that's not what plussing is all about. It's about creating an environment where creative people can share perspectives on what they think would improve a concept. No judgement, no need to adopt the suggestion. It's just that, a suggestion.

"You know what'd be cool, is if you could..."

"I bet users would love it if we included...."

For me, plusses are suggestions in service of the idea. They're tweaks that add that extra bit of magic. I've had the fortune of working on a team that felt comfortable plussing up each other's ideas—and it was fantastic. Five stars, would recommend.

Tough on the idea, kind to the people

The idea of being 'tough' on ideas seems counterintuitive. Aren't assholes tough on the ideas? Yes, they are. But I think if you use the four practices above, it's possible to create a really powerful version of creative feedback culture. A culture of relentless interrogation of the ideas, where the people involved feel safe and secure in their contributions. I've helped make this happen on a number of teams, but it requires everyone to embrace the practice. It's something you need everyone's permission to create, but it's worth it. I think it's the most fun you can have at work.

Whatever you call them (sprints, workshops, brainstorms), they can be tricky to run. Not for technical reasons. It's easy to find all the templates and tools you need on the internet. Leading a sprint is difficult for the same reason designing something is difficult: it involves humans.

Humans make it messy. They have expectations, hopes, fears. As designers, it's tempting to use all that empathy and skill to solve the problem. You spend weeks defining a sprint brief, but you're also secretly thinking about the solution. But running a sprint isn't so much about designing a solution, as designing the conditions for a solution to appear. As a facilitator, you're not there to solve the problem. You're there to make it possible for the team to solve the problem.

If you give in to the temptation to do the design work yourself, the sprint suffers. Your focus as the sprint leader shifts from what the group needs, to what the problem needs. You become participant-in-chief, rather than a trusted guide for the team.

Sound familiar? Here are some common coaching tips I share with new sprint leaders who are having the same problem.

Ask people to do stuff

You're running a sprint. It's going well. The most senior person in the room makes a contribution, but they don't write it down. You feel the need to pick up a marker and make a note. Don't! You need to learn how to shift responsibility back to participants:

"That's great, can you write that down and add it to the board please?"

"Brilliant, would you mind moving those ideas together and coming up with a theme that captures what you just said?"

You're not there to turn participant thinking into a post-it.

You are the orchestrator. You're there to get the best out of everyone in the room, not do all the work yourself. The brilliant Daniel Stillman refers to this as Lazy Facilitation — and I've never worked with a better facilitator than Daniel.

Be specific

Being specific about how you want people to complete a task stops you from having to step in and make corrections during the sprint. Saves you time. Means you can focus on the important bits. I think it’s also the clearest indicator of an experienced facilitator.

For example, try to avoid statements where the how is open to interpretation: "OK everyone, write down your How Might We statements on a Post-it note"

Instead, try something like: "Write 10 How Might We statements, on yellow Post It notes, with a Sharpie. One HMW per post it. When you're done, place them up on this area of the wall here.”

You should also have an example prepared that you can share with the group. 

This gets particularly important when you’re running large, complex sprints, or longer sprints where you have to refer back to content over multiple days. 

If you’re not specific about the how it leads to more overhead for you (the facilitator) later in the sprint. You're making work for yourself—stop it!— be specific and get the participants to do it right first time.

Get critics working for you

If you're leading a sprint, you'll likely have people involved who want you to change the approach. It's often for good reason, but it can feel like you've done something wrong.

In my experience, these situations are usually best handled by indulging the critic. They want to spend more time on problem definition? Let's do it. Want to review the quarterly results in an additional lightning talk? You've got ten minutes.

The trick is to guide these critics and contributors towards the overall goal of the sprint. Just like the techniques above, you need to take your hands off the wheel of the sprint. You're letting someone else in. Creating room for something unplanned or new. But in doing so, you're creating a new opportunity to steer the group towards a solution.

Let's say someone isn't happy with the ideas selected by the group. Want to do another round of voting? Sure. But let's set some guidelines. Let's stack rank or define criteria. Why don't you chart them — rate them for impact and viability? Why don't you do a secret vote? Do we need to talk about how we're voting? Should we be doing it differently?

These are all questions that experienced facilitators use to push the responsibility back onto the participants. You're using the critic in the room to shape the overall experience.

As you refine your facilitation practice, you'll find unique, authentic ways to solve some of these problems. You should experiment to figure out what works best for you, but remember, don’t try to do the whole thing yourself. Tell the participants what to do, be specific about how you want it done, and if someone disagrees, lean in and solve the problem together.