Pentagram design Mozilla's new internet-savvy editorial platform Nothing Personal (2 minute read)
Mozilla's new editorial platform, Nothing Personal, promotes a “post-naive internet,” championing community-driven, countercultural optimism against ads, subscriptions, and AI slop. Designed by Pentagram, its bold, deliberately awkward visual identity uses Mozilla's typographic DNA, lo-fi/hi-fi web vernacular, and provocative layering to celebrate human presence online while critiquing modern internet culture.
|
macOS 26.2 adds new ‘Edge Light' feature for better video calls (2 minute read)
macOS Tahoe 26.2 adds Edge Light, a smart virtual ring light that brightens your face in low-light video calls by lighting the edges of your display. Powered by the Neural Engine and Image Signal Processor for adaptive, unobtrusive lighting, it works across all conferencing apps on Apple Silicon Macs (with automatic activation on 2024+ models) and even with Studio Display and external cameras.
|
|
Designers most wary of “soulless” AI creativity (5 minute read)
AI adoption among creatives is accelerating rapidly, with over 90% using it and nearly half using it daily, yet designers are the most sceptical, reporting lower daily use, greater fears about lost originality, and more frustration with how AI affects the value of their craft. UK creatives are adopting AI more slowly and feel the most pressure to justify human creativity. Many creatives use AI in client work without disclosure due to fears of lower fees, highlighting an industry struggling to balance efficiency, ethics, and the preservation of genuine creative thinking.
|
How to Stay Relevant as a UX Designer in 2026 (7 minute read)
A design team paused to reflect on AI's impact and mapped their entire process to identify tasks worth revisiting, skills to develop, and activities that could be automated. They discovered five critical shifts: deepening behavioral research, strengthening business and marketing partnerships, leveraging AI prototyping tools to move beyond static wireframes, embracing systems thinking as interfaces simplify into chat-based interactions, and developing capabilities in data literacy, business fluency, prototyping, service design, and engineering. The team aims to transform from creating static screens to functional prototypes, from UI focus to system-level thinking, and from passive collaboration to active business partnership in the AI era.
|
Use Cases: The Ideal Bridge Between Requirements and Design? (17 minute read)
Ivar Jacobson introduced use cases in the 1980s as a method for describing system requirements from an external perspective, focusing on interactions between actors and the system rather than its internal workings. Use cases consist of two parts: diagrams that provide an overview of actors and their associated use cases, and narratives that detail the interaction sequence, including the basic flow, alternative flows, and pre- and post-conditions. The appropriate level of detail in use cases should match the project stage, avoiding premature design decisions early on while maintaining enough structure to guide development effectively.
|
|
Lifelike Video Avatars (Website)
Grow with an AI Confidant that looks and sounds like you. Use it in real-time conversations that engage users, drive conversions, and onboard employees effortlessly.
|
|
How Ashfall Studio moved Aptos beyond typical crypto aesthetics (5 minute read)
Ashfall refined Aptos' existing wave logo and rebuilt its entire brand system—typography, color, motion, layout, site architecture, and illustration—to shift the company from cliché Web3 aesthetics to a warmer, credible institutional identity, all under tight timelines and complex constraints, culminating in a unified design that proved its strength at Aptos' 2025 New York launch.
|
Should You Give Up on Freelancing? (7 minute read)
Freelancers struggling after three years shouldn't necessarily quit, as this timeframe is often too short to establish a sustainable business, and difficulties may signal a need to pivot rather than abandon self-employment entirely. Experts recommend reducing financial pressure through part-time employment, diversifying income streams beyond client work, and adopting a business owner's mindset focused on networking and strategic positioning. The decision ultimately depends on whether the creative individual still feels passionate about independence despite the challenges, with success often requiring patience, flexibility, and a willingness to adjust approaches while maintaining core professional values.
|
State Pattern: The Key to Seamless and Predictable User Experiences (12 minute read)
The State Pattern is a design approach that enables applications to alter their behavior based on internal state changes, ensuring predictable and consistent user experiences through organized state transitions rather than complex conditional logic. By implementing separate state classes that encapsulate specific behaviors and manage transitions between states, such as loading, success, or error, developers create interfaces that respond smoothly and reliably to user actions. When designers and developers collaborate around state awareness, mapping out transitions and behaviors early in development, they build cohesive digital products that feel intuitive and trustworthy to users.
|
|
|
Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards!
|
|
Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag!
|
|
|
|
|
Track your referrals here.
|
|
Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰
If your company is interested in reaching an audience of design professionals and decision makers, you may want to advertise with us.
Want to work at TLDR? 💼
Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them!
If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email!
Thanks for reading,
Jae Lee, Matej Latin & Ralph Brinker
|
|
|
|