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Mariusz
Mariusz
@mariusz.cc
Designer. Made things before. Often seen dumping links to what I read. 🔴⚫️ I don’t know what HD is but my doctor says I have eighty of them.
1.3K followers547 following2.1K posts
“There’s your own private garden of code, which you can grow infinitely in all directions with the help of AI, but you never have to leave the garden and go to the bazaar to trade with people. Under these conditions, it’s hard to care or do anything.” borretti.me/article/no-m...
Treat published token names as an API that other teams depend on. Mark deprecations, identify replacements, and publish changes. A rename needs a migration path for the components and design files that still reference the old name. southleft.com/insights/des...
“Continuous delivery is built for good enough: the sprint exists to ensure that nothing stays open long enough to become remarkable.” justin.stach.uk/nothing-to-s...
Once the way a product looks stops setting it apart, what's left to compete on is the writing, the brand voice, the way the thing behaves, and visual design, what most designers spent years getting good at, gets pushed out of where products now compete. www.hipuku.dev/writing/the-...
The foregoing was mostly about how design systems impact end users, but design systems aren't just components and code: they're also patterns and guidance, and one very clear way a design system can tell you what it does and for whom is its documentation. matthenry.fyi/posts/a-syst...
“Maybe we’re reaching the limits of treating technology as the answer to every problem. Or, at the very least, we should be much more suspicious of the assumption that every problem has a neat technological solution.” thefuturehunter.substack.com/p/ai-agents-...
For a long time, many ideas stayed small because they needed too much: a team, a budget, the right timing, permission, technical help, momentum. Again, the distance between seeing something clearly and making it real is much shorter. That changes the responsibility too. shedsgns.me/taste
Every component in a system was a decision. Someone set its hierarchy, its density, its colour, its motion, under real constraints, for a particular product, on a deadline. Adopting it without asking why it's shaped that way moves the decision upstream. www.hipuku.dev/writing/the-...
“Make it easy to use” is a uselessly broad design principle. It is a surprisingly good test for a strategy. Because humans go for the path of least resistance. All of them. liamnugent.me/posts/produc...
When a job is difficult to do precisely—or tedious to do repeatedly—you make a jig. A jig, by its broadest definition, is a tool that makes it easier to make something else. every.to/p/designing-...
The irony is that the fundamentals are what actually help you discern which new tools matter. The fundamentals are the filter. But to develop that filter, you need time and space that the acceleration won’t give you. buff.ly/RTX2dmE
Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. buff.ly/5Sf9QfH
An argument can be made that Design owns coherence—how a suite of offerings, across channels of delivery, adds up for the person on the other end. buff.ly/9nOyVZu
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“Empathy and boundaries are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are best friends.” Dr. Emily Anhalt, beyond tellerrand Berlin 2023. Full talk: beyondtellerrand.com/events/berli... #mondayMixtape #btconf #beyondtellerrand
When you engage in research — whether it’s thinking about the questions you might ask in an interview, wondering over a participant’s response, or doing the thinking to understand what’s relevant and what the data mean — you apply the self-generation effect. buff.ly/nYIM3XT
The problem is not simply that companies are moving too quickly or cutting too deeply. It is that many are approaching AI-driven restructuring from the wrong starting point: headcount rather than work. buff.ly/R9tZTm6
We all have great ideas, and now we all have agents that can code for us. Deciding what to build is officially not a resourcing debate. It is an impact debate. “This or that”, not “this or nothing.” buff.ly/c1QkN5s
Design is flattening. Not getting worse, exactly, getting narrower. Less weird. Less range. Less of the thing that only one person, or one challenging brief, or one long night can make. buff.ly/R5z1wfi
In 2021, weak product management was slow and painful. You felt it in endless refinements and delayed releases. In 2026, weak product management is fast and comfortable. You ship your way through it, one prompt at a time, and it all looks like progress. buff.ly/lsA82VU
"Give someone three knobs and they can spend six months making three excellent knobs. Give them thirty and you’ve probably invented enterprise software. Three isn’t inherently better than thirty. Attention just doesn’t scale with the number of knobs." buff.ly/yFJRn3m
UX needs to preserve the ability to provide design input while changing how and when this input is provided. Even if the original process changes, the questions it was meant to answer should still be addressed, even as production moves faster. www.nngroup.com/articles/ai-...
“The government shouldn’t be allowed to shoot you from an unmarked vehicle and then cover it up by deporting you.”
Good news: a federal judge just paused Wilber's deportation. The government shouldn’t be allowed to shoot you from an unmarked vehicle and then cover it up by deporting you. Keep speaking out, it's working.
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“If every designer has to remember which green means success, the system hasn’t done its job. If an engineer has to inspect three nearly identical components and decide which one is appropriate, the system hasn’t done its job either.” www.antonsten.com/articles/the...
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Berlin, we’re starting a meetup for designers who enjoy exploring the AI tools space, come hang out! luma.com/ai-cafe-berlin
"Every touchpoint a product has with a customer, in whatever context it appears, is something a designer needs to consciously shape, because if we don’t, it will simply be shaped by default." designplusai.com/p/invisible-... #ProductDesign
"Avoid too many defined product teams. Companies tend to create these teams to simplify organization for leadership, but it ultimately creates artificial quality and culture silos." www.figma.com/blog/karri-s... #ProductDesign
“There’s a difference between writing production code and understanding what code does. Between configuring a build pipeline and recognizing when technical debt is accumulating in ways that will limit future design possibilities.” www.doc.cc/articles/cra... #ProductDesign
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oh hey they’re finally repeating the torment nexus experiment as a reality show
Netflix has announced a new reality series titled ‘THE NEW STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT’. The series follows 30 participants who enter a real prison and are randomly assigned as guards or prisoners. They must see if they conform to the roles or if morality wins.
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The hyperfocus on the individualistic mode of productivity is leaving workers depressed, because it turns out that interacting with other humans was what made the work meaningful — to an identity-forming degree that we are now struggling to replace. productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/sense-maki...
What the suite does is clear the mechanical failures off the table, so the person reviewing the work spends their attention on the judgement calls instead of hunting for hardcoded colours. It narrows what a human has to look at. It doesn't remove the human. blog.murphytrueman.com/design-syste...
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“Typefaces and colors, they're interesting and all, but you know, it only goes so far… How does it all add up to something that again lets you participate in the larger world of things…” — Michael Bierut www.dailydesigner.net/quotes/0099
Many design languages define typography, color, spacing, shadows, illustrations, and icons, but say little about how to represent the concepts at the center of the product. A design language teaches teams what to shape toward. yeseniaperezcruz.substack.com/p/a-design-l...
The AI result is not going to 10x me. But it’s pattern matching and searching across a mess, which I’m not great at and don’t enjoy. More important: it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now. brentfitzgerald.com/posts/the-hu...
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Replying to @braak.bsky.social
Anyway sorry to get all Buddhist on here but AIs cannot be conscious because the key aspects of consciousness aren't reasoning or logic, they're desire and suffering. "Can this do reasoning?" is just the Fascism-adjacent hierarchical thinking that rates how good people are based on their SATs.
When code becomes a design material, the friction of execution is eased dramatically. But in product design, we need to ensure that reduced friction doesn’t translate to a lack of thoughtful strategy. design.google/library/code...
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In walled prototypes, content is often fixed, and interactions move users between predefined screens. While this works for simple flows, it becomes harder to represent how interfaces behave when content needs to update dynamically based on user interaction. blog.mozilla.org/ux/2026/08/l...
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Many tech billionaires who grew up on science fiction are intent on building dystopian technology, @galbeckerman.bsky.social argues. He writes about a new book by Jill Lepore that explores how they took the wrong lessons from their favorite novels:
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The best teammates didn’t just make work more enjoyable. They made the people around them more effective. The people everyone wants on their team tend to do something more valuable: they improve how the team functions. levelupwithethanevans.substack.com/p/how-to-bec...