Hey Reader,

Something is shifting in design right now: craft is coming back and so is the need to be able to explain why you made the call you made.

In today's email:

• ✅ Practical resources for the AI era: Designing with Claude, why wireframes still matter, how Uber automated design specs, plus a few tools worth bookmarking.
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• 🧠 The return of craft: Why “clean” isn’t a differentiator anymore, the difference between assembled vs. authored work, and why decision confidence is what makes designers feel essential.

​ 🎥 New: Why Your Stakeholders Don’t Trust Your Design Decisions (And How to Fix It) I just uploaded a new video on stakeholder trust. Most pushback isn’t about your design, it’s about the story around the decision. In the video, I share a simple framework to make your rationale, tradeoffs, and impact legible to stakeholders. ▶️ Watch here​

Design gems of the week

• ​Designing with Claude (Steve Schoger): A workflow tutorial of how to use Claude as a design partner (so much design tips!) A great watch if you're trying to make AI feel useful in your design work.
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• ​The Art of Thinking in Gray (Medium): A reminder that wireframes still matter in the AI era: they’re the fastest way to clarify structure, prioritize what matters, and design with more intention.
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• ​How Uber Built an Agentic System to Automate Design Specs in Minutes: A BTS look at how Uber’s design systems team uses AI agents to generate accurate, up-to-date component specs.
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• ​Notioly: A pack of Notion-style illustrations (500+ and growing) that are fully vector and editable for websites, decks, apps and more. Fresh designs are delivered every month!
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• ​Greyscaler: If you're working on UI colours (or just trying to clean up your neutrals), this generates full grayscale tokens with easy export.
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• ​Curate, edit, decide: design leadership in the age of AI (Medium): A great read on AI-era design leadership: your leverage isn’t producing more screens, it’s thoughtful curation and making clear decisions when the space is ambiguous.
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• ​Figma x Claude Code: A video replay of workflows where Claude Code can work with Figma MCP.
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• ​Deep Checks: If you’re looking for deep tech roles, Deep Checks is a reverse job board aimed at connecting candidates with teams.​
  

Open design roles worth a look

• ​Design Evangelist (Apple)
• ​Product Designer (Moment HQ)
• ​Senior Product Designer, AI (GitLab)
• ​Design Engineer (Ramp)
• ​Staff Research Operations Lead (Superbet)

A MESSAGE FROM FRAMER New in Framer: Shaders A lot of influence comes down to visibility: having a clear POV, a crisp write-up, and a link you can send after the meeting. Framer makes it easy to publish a polished page fast and they just shipped Shaders, so you can add subtle motion and richer visual effects. ​Get 25% off for 3 months with code FEMKE25​ Publish with Framer →

The return of craft

Something is shifting in design right now.
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After years of clean, minimal, interchangeable interfaces — designers are starting to care about visual craft again. Distinct typography. Considered colour. Work that feels like someone made it, not something that generated it.
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It makes sense. When AI can produce a generic UI in seconds, "clean" stops being a differentiator. The response, almost instinctively, has been to go more human. More distinct. More yours.
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But I think we're only halfway there.
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Visual craft is making a comeback for the right reasons. What I don't see talked about as much is the deeper version of that same instinct — decision confidence. The ability to not just make work that looks authored, but to explain why it is.
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​Assembly vs. authorship​
There's a difference between assembled work and authored work.
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Assembled work shows you what was built and how. It follows the process, produces the output, documents the steps. It's table stakes.
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Authored work goes further. It shows you what was built, how — and why. Why this solution over the alternatives. What was traded off. What the designer had conviction about and why they landed there.
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Plenty of designers can assemble. Fewer can author.
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And yes — I've defaulted to assembly myself. It's easier to show what you made than to articulate the thinking behind it.
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​Why this matters now​
Tools can generate the what faster than ever. A reasonable layout, a clean component, a functional flow — that bar keeps getting lower.
The question used to be: what can we build? AI has made that question almost irrelevant. We can build anything.
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The question now is: should we build it?
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That's a judgment call. And judgment doesn't get generated — it gets developed. Through experience, through mistakes, through understanding users well enough to know when the right answer is to do less.
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The decision to simplify a flow because users won't read that third step. The call to cut a feature because it solves the wrong problem. The conviction to push back on a brief because the brief is wrong.
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That's yours. And it's becoming the thing that separates designers who feel interchangeable from designers who feel essential.
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Visual craft gets you noticed. Decision confidence is what makes you irreplaceable.
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​One thing worth trying​
​Go back to your last project. Pick one screen. Ask: what was the hardest decision here, and why did I land where I did?​
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If that's hard to answer, that's your starting point.
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The work that stays with me isn't always the most polished. It's the work where I can feel a designer's thinking behind every choice.
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That's authorship.
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When you look at your work — does it show the what, or does it show the why?

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