Sonnet told me I was lying when I said that gpt-5 was a model that actually existed. It kept changing the code back to 4o and flatly refused to accept its existence.
Cancelled my Anthropic subscription this week after about 18 months of membership. Usage limits have dropped drastically (or token usage have increased) to the point where it's unusable.
Codex + Z.ai combined is the same price, has far higher usage limits and just as good.
I was confused when I first heard about 'Design Thinking' as a thing because as a designer it sounded just like the standard design process that I already knew inside-out and backwards.
After a while I realised a few things about it:
1. Yes it is the standard design process, but with a fancy title.
2. It's been given a fancy title as that helps sell books and launch consulting careers
3. It's actually useful as it gets clients and stakeholders involved in the design process. They start thinking about the problems they want to solve and who they want to solve them for - and more importantly have a personal stake in the outcomes. Moves the conversation from 'I want this' to 'here's the problem'.
I've run design thinking workshops with everyone from primary school children to CEOs and they've all loved it.
Hey I’m a designer and I love UI frameworks. Why design and build something from scratch if someone’s already doing it for you?
Unless there’s a very specific business case that requires a custom UI it’s not worth the hassle. I want to be delivering value for the business and for users, not maintaining a UI library.
One place I worked at had built an entire responsive CSS framework, which was hard to use and took a lot of maintenance. I threw it all out for Bootstrap (as was the style at the time). Some of the senior devs were upset I’d killed their baby, but everyone else was able to move so much faster.
The last time I heard this from a designer, the designs we got constantly violated the UI framework in ways that required deep customization.
I'd love to have a designer that started with a style guide and then actually stuck with it. Writing CSS isn't hard, and sticking with a known set of rules makes it even easier. But then this one component needs a slightly different font size that doesn't match up to any of the established typography rules, and this other spot needs unique padding, and and and I end up having to waste so much time looking for these little surprises.
Yeah it’s easy to do. Is why I prefer to design in the browser than using Figma. Drawing boxes on an artboard does not translate well to components or systems.
First things I stress to devs I’m working with are, here are the rules for breakpoints, type sizes, colours, spacing etc. If the designs don’t match the rules, go with the rules, not the designs. If things don’t look right let’s talk about it.
Graphic, formerly iDraw, is one of my favourite vector design tools, but it's been abandoned since being dropped by Autodesk in 2018.
At one point it had genuine potential to be a viable lightweight Illustrator alternative, similar to Pixelmator vs Photoshop. Autodesk's purchase and sale killed all that momentum and it's not been updated since.
The iOS and iPad apps are still the excellent vector tools even in their current half-broken state.
I'd love to discover who currently owns it and what their plans are - it's a great app and I hate to see it rot.
The barbers I went to recently were playing a channel on the TV which was an endless series of clips panning through ultra-nostalgic French Riviera-style scenery, accompanied by mellow guitar music. Seemed fine at first glance but like all AI stuff it got weirder the closer you looked - boats on land, outdoor dining areas underwater, giant lanterns larger than houses, mangled looking food, that sort of thing.
Someone had clearly just set up a few prompts and let the AI get on with it, creating probably hundreds of channels of this stuff.
It’s pretty easy. I’ve written a fairly detailed guide to help Claude write in my tone of voice. It also coaxes it to avoid the obvious AI tells such as ‘It’s not X it’s Y’ sentences, American English and overuse of emojis and em dashes.
It’s really useful for taking my first drafts and cleaning them up ready for a final polish.
https://ember.dev ’s deeper pages (not the blog, but the “resumelike” project pages) was written by claude with guidance and a substantial corpus of my own writing and i still couldn’t squash out all the GPTisms in the generation passes. probably net waste of time, for me, for writing.
Love how Microsoft decided that a desktop UI was the right approach for a handheld OS. Then when the iPhone showed that it wasn’t, they overcorrected and put a tablet UI on their desktop OS. Geniuses.
Yes. Windows 8 was completely ridiculous. And the worst part was they doubled down for about a year. At that point businesses started stopping upgrade plans and they had to cave in with 8.1.
For some reason they thought the tablet would be the next major computing form factor rather than the niche it has become and they were afraid losing it all to Apple. Kinda can imagine that but I never understood why the desktop had to suffer for it.
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