Hey Reader

The conversation I keep having with designers right now isn't about whether AI changes things - everyone agrees it does. It's about what we actually do with it. The tools are moving fast, but the real question is whether we're using them to sharpen our craft or just to ship faster.
​

In today's email:

• The role is already different - here's the data: A major 2026 research report on how design teams are rebuilding around AI, plus a first-person account from a Datadog designer on what building with AI looks like day-to-day.
• Teaching your AI tools to have taste: Three tools for preventing AI-generated UI from looking AI-generated - from syncing your aesthetic as a skill file, to blocking the five most common AI design tells.
• Craft references for the actual work: A design engineering magazine, a UI motion library, and interviews with the people who bridge design and code.

​ 📺 How to use Claude to write a designer performance review that shows impact – my latest video to help you prep next review cycle. Watch the video to grab the link to get a free SKILL.md file you can use in Claude.

Design gems of the week

Breaking our gems this week down into 3 categories that reflect the discourse I'm seeing online right now in the design community

The role is already different - here's the data

• ​AI in Design Report 2026: 900+ designers across 60 countries surveyed, plus 25+ interviews with practitioners and leaders. Covers toolstack changes, craft in the age of infinite output, and how design orgs are restructuring.
  ​
• ​The New Shape of Product Design: A designer at Datadog documents what a year of AI-powered work actually looks like - designing in code with Claude Code, shipping multiple PRs a day, building feedback digest agents, and navigating the genuine weight of constant change.

Teaching your AI tools to have taste

• ​Taste: Build a personal portfolio of UI you love, then sync your aesthetic as a live skill file into Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex. Instead of re-explaining your design sensibility every session, your AI tools just read it.
  ​
• ​Hallmark: An agent skill that teaches Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex to avoid the five most common AI design tells - the purple gradient hero, Inter as display font, centred-everything layouts, icon tile feature cards, and the generic AI nav.
  ​
• ​getdesign.md: A collection of DESIGN.md files - design system analyses for brands like Airbnb, Linear, Figma, Notion, Stripe, and more. Useful if you're setting up AI-assisted UI work and want a solid starting point for brand-consistent output without reinventing the wheel.

Craft references for the actual work

• ​Interfaces: A monthly design engineering magazine built around interactive demos, source code, and a curated resource library. Covers animation, typography, layout and the craft of building interfaces that feel great. Worth subscribing if you care about the details that separate good from great.
  ​
• ​Transitions.dev: A curated library of ready-to-use UI transitions for web apps - card resizes, modal open/close, page navigation, error shake, icon swaps, and more. Each one is animated and interactive so you can feel the timing before implementing it.
  ​
• ​ui.land: A digital library of interviews with designers and engineers at the intersection of craft and code - good if you want to go deeper on design engineering as a discipline and hear from people who think obsessively about quality.
  ​
• ​AI Workshop: You know how to design but want to cross the bridge into AI. Grab access to a free prompt starter kit to create beautiful graphics, and use FEMKEFRIENDS for 10% off the self paced PRO version.

Open design roles worth a look

• ​Senior Product Designer, Customer Insights - Mural
• ​Senior Experience Designer - Autodesk, Toronto
• ​Senior Product Designer, AI Manager Experience - Ada, Remote (Canada/USA)
• ​Head of Product Design, Growth - Canva, Sydney

A MESSAGE FROM FRAMER Can AI actually read your website? As part of my website rebuild, I ran the site through Framer’s FREE AEO Scanner to see how AI tools understand it. It scans any URL in a few seconds, gives you a score, and shows what might be hurting your visibility in AI search. If you have a personal site, portfolio, or company website, it’s worth running the scan just to see what’s currently invisible. ​→ Scan your site​

​
What actually changes when you make Staff Designer

Most designers chase the Staff title without knowing what actually changes.

It's not that you do better design work. It's not that you ship bigger features or manage more complexity. Those things might happen — but they're not the shift.

The shift is this: your design decisions have to become legible to people who weren't in the room.

At Senior, you can rely on context. Your PM knows the tradeoffs you made. Your engineering partner watched the explorations. The people who need to trust your work mostly have enough background to follow you.

At Staff, that changes. You're working across more teams, more stakeholders, more business context — and most of the people evaluating your decisions don't have that shared history. They're not going to sit through your Figma file. They need to understand why this is the right call, fast, in a format that travels without you.

That's not a design skill. It's a communication skill. A strategic framing skill. And almost no designer practices it deliberately.

They solve the right problem but can't explain why it was the right problem to solve.

They make a defensible tradeoff but can't articulate it in a way that holds up in a leadership review.

They have influence inside their pod but it doesn't extend outward.

If this resonates, the gap usually isn't what you think it is.

There's a related pattern I see at review time. A designer sits down to document their impact and goes blank — not because they didn't do the work, but because they never captured it as they went. So they spend days trying to reconstruct six months from memory, and the things they forget? Those are the things that don't get recognised.

Making your thinking legible isn't just about real-time communication. It's a habit — one that compounds.

I built a free Claude Skill called the Self-Reflection Performance Coach to help with exactly this. You drop in an artifact — meeting notes, a Slack thread, a project brief — and it structures it into a polished entry using the SBI framework (Situation, Behavior, Impact), mapped to your actual review competencies. Log entries as you go, and by review time you have a full evidence bank instead of a blank doc.

I just published a video walking through how to use it.

→ Watch the video + download the free Claude Skill​

If the Senior to Staff conversation is one you're actively in — this is a good place to start.

Oh and if that kind of topic interests you, you may also enjoy our next live event happening on June 10th. Register below.

🎟️ Get your ticket to our next live event with Coriyon Arrington to learn how to get involved earlier, bring strategic context into the room, and play a bigger role in shaping what gets built — not just designing it.

Have a topic you'd like me to write about? Reply to this email and let me know! I read every reply.