Summarize

Handmade Design & AI-Augmented Creativity

In today's newsletter, I've got a lot of great content for you, including:

• How to animate interactions like Disney
• Every AI brand is selling you the same five personalities
• Why your docs might be invisible to AI agents
• And 7 more

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Most Interesting

Handmade Designs: the New Trust Signal

Users burnt out on AI are turning to handmade aesthetics, uneven lines, organic shapes, textures, as proof a brand is real. NN/g breaks down what handmade actually looks like, why it works, and how to do it without faking it.

Read more →

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Design + Development

Squash and Stretch

Josh W. Comeau breaks down Disney's squash-and-stretch principle for web animations. See how to build bouncy SVG interactions with CSS and Motion, using actual code examples.

Aesthetics of AI

A Color Bright studied 23 AI brands and found 14 visual trends: organic gradients, digital impressionism, and five brand archetypes ranging from Likeable Leaders to Utopian Dreamers. Apris Apris is a serif typeface with concave serifs and flared stems, drawn from 19th-century Latines. Six weights plus italics, built for both print and screen.

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Tech + Innovation

Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO)

Addy Osmani on structuring docs so AI coding agents can actually find and use them, via llms.txt,

skill.md

, and token-aware organization.

Introducing Firefly AI Assistant

Adobe's new Firefly AI Assistant handles multi-step creative work across Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, and Lightroom. Describe what you want built, and it executes the task while keeping you in control of the output.

Delphitools

Browser-based design utilities, background removal, color palettes, barcodes, that work without logins or tracking. Everything runs locally, no date gets collected.

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Work + Mindset

Reluctantly Influential: Inside Lenny Rachitsky's Demandingly Chill Life

First Round Review profiles Lenny Rachitsky, who built a massive audience without the typical influencer playbook, staying deliberately hands-off about growth, product, and audience capture.

Org Design in the Age of AI

AI eliminates the middle layers that route information between roles. FD argues this flattens sequential workflows into parallel squads, breaks departments into capabilities, and makes learning speed your only competitive moat.

We Become What We Behold

Your attention span isn't what it was. This article examines how algorithmic feeds physically alter how your brain processes information, and what designers are actually optimizing for.