Disney Signs Deal with OpenAI to Allow Sora to Generate AI Videos Featuring its Characters (3 minute read)
Disney signed a three-year partnership with OpenAI and invested $1 billion, allowing Sora and ChatGPT Images to generate content featuring over 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. Users can create videos and images using iconic characters like Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader, though talent likenesses and voices are excluded from the agreement. Despite previously suing Midjourney and sending cease-and-desist letters to Character.AI over IP violations, Disney will become a major OpenAI customer to build new products.
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Instagram Supercharges Creation and Feed Control with new Edits App Features and “Your Algorithm” (2 minute read)
Instagram's Edits app now includes pre-built templates, storyboards, advanced text tools, and an iPhone lock screen widget for instant camera access and quick content capture. The platform is introducing "Your Algorithm" in the US, allowing users to view and modify the topics Instagram uses to curate their Reels feed by adding or removing interests. These updates aim to streamline content creation for creators while giving regular users more control over their algorithmic feeds, with similar Explore page features planned.
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State of Product Design: An Honest Conversation About the Profession (6 minute read)
A study of 340 product designers found widespread overload and burnout driven by chaotic management, constant multitasking, unclear expectations, and poor cross-team communication. Career growth was often blocked despite designers taking responsibility for their own development. While most aren't afraid of AI and see it as a helpful companion, job searches are getting significantly longer, feedback is scarce, education feels disconnected from real work, and the profession's challenges are increasingly seen as systemic rather than individual.
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The Timing Problem in Design Systems (4 minute read)
Design systems often stall when perfectionism overtakes practicality, as teams polish components endlessly while product teams build their own solutions rather than wait. The most critical elements—accessibility, semantic structure, token consistency, stable APIs, and sensible defaults—can't be compromised, but everything else is a judgment call that shouldn't delay shipping. Components gain adoption by arriving when teams need them at 80% completeness, then improving through real-world use rather than theoretical perfection.
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Design Tokens that AI can Actually Read (11 minute read)
Most design tokens lack the context AI needs, leading tools like Claude to misuse primitives rather than semantic tokens. Making tokens AI-readable requires three elements: semantic naming that conveys intent rather than appearance, descriptions explaining when to use each token, and relationships showing which tokens connect or pair together. Teams can start by adding descriptions to their top 10 most-used tokens, or by creating companion files that provide usage guidelines without restructuring existing token systems.
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Pomelli (Website)
Pomelli is an experimental AI-powered marketing tool from Google Labs and DeepMind that helps small businesses create on-brand social media posts, ads, and campaign visuals automatically by analyzing their website.
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Are you designing for the user's values — or your own? (6 minute read)
As technology becomes more pervasive, the designer's role is shifting from crafting interfaces to shaping ethical guardrails for how people interact with machines. Empathy and traditional UX methods don't capture user values, so designers often unknowingly impose their own. Explicit ethical frameworks and evaluation tools are needed to surface value trade-offs—such as inclusion, autonomy, transparency, privacy, and well-being—and ensure products consciously align with users' values rather than the team's assumptions.
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Google is building an experimental new browser and a new kind of web app (6 minute read)
Google's Disco is a new AI-powered browser that uses Gemini to turn searches into “GenTabs”—interactive, task-specific mini apps built from both AI suggestions and the web pages users open themselves. Launched in Google Labs, Disco explores a more collaborative, web-forward model where browsing, research, and on-the-fly app creation merge. Google is still unsure whether GenTabs should be temporary, shareable, or evolve into a broader product.
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Designing Effective Dashboards UX with Action Dots (7 minute read)
Action dots are visual indicators that help dashboard users immediately identify which metrics need attention by categorizing values into five threshold states. Unlike traditional dashboard indicators, which often create false positives or bury problems, action dots appear only when metrics fall outside the neutral zone, making critical issues instantly visible while letting non-urgent data fade into the background. This approach addresses common dashboard failures, such as information overload and unclear action priorities, by focusing attention on what genuinely requires user intervention.
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