Nobody claps for good

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

Ten Inter alternatives, ranked by x-height
Good design gets called obvious in hindsight
AI fails blandly, humans fail interestingly
And 9 more

Most Interesting

Is design dead in the age of AI?

When a finishing partner said the letterforms in the Meraki typeface weren’t drawn correctly, the designer kept the quirks anyway. AI fails blandly. Human designers fail in ways that become the whole point.

Design + Development

Any icon can morph into any other

Now any stroke icon can morph into any other one. Morphicons solves the optimal shape alignment in closed form, works in React, Vue, Svelte, React Native and Astro, and ships at 6.5 KB gzipped with zero runtime dependencies.

How to Make Your Design System Agent-Ready

If you don’t want your AI agent to choke on your design.md, stop putting your entire design system into one file.

Inter alternatives: how to choose a UI font

Fewer than one in three neo-grotesks pass the two tests that matter: cap-centered vertical metrics and an x-height around 75% of cap height. Here they are, listed with numbers.

Onboarding is the first impression

Microsoft watched sales managers try a new agent for the first time. They learned a ton. Now the team now argues for a baseline draft first, then ask for context.

Tech + Innovation

Ordinary Abundance

Everything in a normal apartment was once a miracle. A scroll through the rooms pairs each object with the awe it first caused.

Which Design Systems Are Actually Ready for Agents

Design systems are quietly splitting into ones built for agents and ones that aren’t. This audit checks each library file by file: MCP servers, llms.txt, skills, AGENTS.md, and more.

Silicon Valley keeps misreading its own sci-fi

Tech founders take the aesthetics of the sci-fi they love and drop the warnings. Snow Crash was satire. Palantir is named after seeing-stones that corrupt everyone who uses them.

Work + Mindset

Make It Work vs. Make It Good

“Make it work” is the first 90% of the work, Jim Nielsen writes, and “make it good” is the other 90%. Working is a binary question. Good is subjective, so nobody claps for it.

Don’t paste the AI, please.

The person asking the question has the same chatbot you do. They asked for your take, so read the draft and write your own three sentences.

The Phone Detox Essay, Minus the Sermon

One author’s obligatory one month without social media on my phone Substack essay (contrarian edition). Spoiler: it didn’t change her life.

Rest in motion

The work is never a finite list you can finish. It’s a stream. Nate Soares argues that treating rest as the reward at the end means you take damage every time a new task lands.