Your craft matters more now than ever

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

Design craft is knowledge plus practiced ability
XPeng plans to sell flying cars next summer
Typemates’ Rosco Jr covers 200+ Latin-script languages
And 7 more

Most Interesting

The redesign of Pan Am, KLM, Lufthansa, United and Swissair

Logo Histories on twelve airline identities, 1918 to 1989: the jet age pushed Pan Am, KLM and Swissair to modernize their marks for global consistency.

Design + Development

Blossom Carousel

is a lightweight carousel library built on native browser scrolling, with physical mouse dragging added on top. You set it up with CSS scroll-snap and scroll-driven animations. It ships framework wrappers and loads nothing on touch devices.

Rosco Jr

is a Typemates typeface with Latin support for more than 200 languages, from Spanish and Swahili to Indigenous and minority languages. Handy for multilingual brand and editorial work that needs that kind of coverage.

Design is a search problem

Matt Ström-Awn says design is a search problem, and computer science algorithms like depth-first search explain how designers explore options, from sprawling grids of variants to tight iteration on a few artboards.

Tech + Innovation

Fable 5.2 and Jagged AGI

Ethan Mollick put Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.2 through coding, hardware hacking, and launching a business. His verdict: it’s ‘Jagged AGI,’ expert-level at a lot of computer work, with uneven gaps that go beyond simple errors and hallucinations.

China’s flying-car plans take off

XPeng plans to start selling flying cars in China next summer. The Guardian covers how they work, who they’re for, and the rules and infrastructure the market still has to sort out.

How Product Hunt almost died

Ryan Hoover on how slowing growth, failed expansions, weak revenue, and a tough fundraising market pushed Product Hunt toward acquisition, and what he learned from the near-collapse.

Work + Mindset

Sean Goedecke on working with designers

Engineer Sean Goedecke says designers sit culturally apart from engineers and PMs, and that distance helps. Teams with more than one designer often get stuck in endless redesign loops. He’s also skeptical of design systems.

Otherwise you’re just a machine

A design leader says the skills underneath matter more now that AI makes polished output easy. Drawing on hiring and critique, they define craft as knowledge plus practiced ability. Clear thinking beats a well-built prototype that solves the wrong problem.

There’s no better name for design systems

Karolina Szczur says design systems have a translation problem, and a new name won’t fix it. Pitch yours as a product, methodology, or infrastructure depending on who’s in the room, and funding and adoption get easier.

Matt Downey is a designer who has spent over two decades building digital businesses, now Head of Design at Atlas UP. He publishes Digital Native, the weekly hype filter for designers in the AI era.