In Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship Dan Cohen finishes with a summary that hits exactly where I am landing on using AI in design. Emphasis mine:

This is the professorial equivalent of the cognitive decline that we worry about with our students who have been using AI for years — and what atrophies in the seminar room will surely atrophy on the page as well. The solution seems clear: if you would like, use AI for the parts of scholarly work where it excels and check all automated output, while retaining human seniority in orchestrating and expressing the meaning of your research.

For me, as I explore how to use these new tools in my work, this is where I am landing. I do all the design thinking, the layouts, and interactions but the AI does the building. What would take me maybe a week or more to build a prototype to test a design, takes Claude an hour or two, and as a result my work is richer.

Design for me has never stopped in the design software. When I worked for myself as both designer and developer, design would continue as I built. I would move back and forth between Sketch and code, my problem was that sometimes I was aware a better solution was out there, I just couldn’t build it. When I moved to an in-house design team that symbiosis of design and dev was lost. The design software we used to prototype would influence my design thinking, I didn’t always know how to do something, or it would take too long to build so I couldn’t explore it.

In contrast, the workflow now emerging for me is much closer to what it used to be when I was self-employed, the difference now is that I am less constrained by my own technical ability. I am able to push designs further and see how they work in the browser, my work has become both quicker and deeper.

Atlas looks like an interesting app for collecting an inspiration library. Along time ago I used Yojimbo and a now long gone app (whose name escapes me) specifically for collecting screenshots as my inspiration library. I often wondered how I could return to that practice of collecting things for inspiration, perhaps this might be it.

Went to see The Odyssey last night. Definitely an experience and worth seeing on the big screen. 🎥

I’ve been trying to watch Foundation Season 3 but I can’t get in to it. Such a shame as the first season was very good, seems to have been in decline ever since. 📺

It’s finally a bearable temperature outside, a cool 23 degrees. It’s still 30 in my flat though…

Very sad to hear Om Malik has died. I never spoke to Om, never expected to meet him, although I would’ve enjoyed to sit and have a conversation. His blog is one of my favourites, I have enjoyed it for many years and his recent writing has been very inspiring to me. My condolences to his family and friends.

I like the look of Lettera a new markdown writer app thingy from the folks behind Bear. I joined the beta and so far it seems very polished and working well. Some features are on the way but the skeleton is there. I opened my Obsidian vault and it seems to be working fine.

A fantastic look at the design of Japen Rail. The Japanese rail system fascinates me, it is what railways should be. Sadly, and to my dismay, the British railways are horrendous and terribly run. It is always cheaper to drive than it is to go by train which is immensely frustrating.

An interesting look at the revised Liquid Glass icons in MacOS Golden Gate.

On first glance I think the revised versions are clearer and solve some of the fuzziness of the first iterations in Tahoe. Some of those shape edges could do with some refinement in my opinion but generally a step forward in usability. I think the only icon shown here that could be a step back is the iPhone mirroring one, where the completely clear front icon goes a little too far.

I’m looking for a consumer tech news site that’s like The Verge but not The Verge… any recommendations?

It’s that time of year again when we have the conversation about “The Fold” on the internet… repeat after me… There. Is. No. Fold.

How this is still a thing in 2026 is beyond me.

An interesting piece from Om about Anthropic, Dario Amodei, and their Mythos model. It is a thought provoking look at the actions of Dario and the meaning of the name and it’s etymology. I recently switched from using Claude/Cowork/Code to OpenAI’s Codex/ChatGPT after reading a number of posts from Manton that made me look at OpenAI from a different angle.

I'm slowly building out a new "professional" site which will become a portfolio and possibly have some kind of design based blog. You can find it here.

Here comes the rain… do do dooo dah… here comes the hail…

This is the best take I’ve read on the Ferrari Luce.

There are bloggers who I admire a great deal. I have been reading or following them in some form for years. They manage to post interesting things day after day, their posts are well written and thoughtful. They are the ones who, in my mind, make blogging cool.

They inspire me.

When I read their posts, they make me want to post. They make me want to write. They make me wish I had interesting things to share. Yet, there is a barrier I create for myself. I don’t feel like I can do it. My days are full of my day job, I do a lot of thinking in the day, but it is specific to the work. I would share some of it if I could, but I can’t because what I’m starting work on now won’t be visible to the public until 2028 at the earliest.

How I get around this is a constant challenge that I do not know an answer to at the moment. It is frustrating.

It’s been such a busy week that sitting in a quiet café on a Saturday morning reading my book and I keep feeling myself nodding off. I think it’s a combination of the ambiance in here, the busyness of my week, and the poor sleep I’ve had thanks to the heat at the start of the week.

Gosh, I’m really struggling to focus this afternoon. It may have been a short week thanks to the bank holiday on Monday but it’s felt longer than a normal one thanks to the heat. It’s cooler today, but I think my brain is cooked.

Managed to successfully dismantle and clean my tower fan after realising it was barely blowing anything. Nothing like a heatwave to successfully spur a man in to action, it’s blowing like a gale now. 🥳

Figtree is a lovely sans-serif I've just come across. Definitely going to be using it on the personal project I'm working on right now.

At what point did it become acceptable to bring food from another place to a café and sit down to eat it? That’s just disrespectful.

Reading government documents about careers education really is very dry. Interesting, but hard going, a bit like reading some of the old classics.

A disastrous performance from Forest last night. Villa played well and deserved the result, but I’m sad that our European adventure is over. Hopefully it won’t be another 30 years before we’re back in the competition.

The new Google Fitbit Air looks exactly like the kind of fitness tracker I would like. Except it's not made by Apple.

I finished my notebook yesterday, now I’m in that awkward couple of weeks where I need to carry the finished one and the new one because there is thinking across both I still need access too. The plus side is new notebook day!