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Kettle Chips redesign 🍟, Qwen3-TTS πŸ—£οΈ, jam with your team πŸ‘

TLDR Design <dan@tldrnewsletter.com>

January 1, 1:08 pm

TLDR Design
Kettle refreshed its packaging through careful refinement rather than reinvention, strengthening premium signals and creating a cohesive system β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ  β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ β€Œ 

TLDR

TLDR Design 2026-01-01

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News & Trends

The Edison Agency Refines Kettle Chips Packaging to Restore Premium Leadership (2 minute read)

Kettle refreshed its packaging through careful refinement rather than reinvention, modernizing craft cues, strengthening premium signals, and creating a cohesive, future-proof system while preserving its trusted, artisan DNA. The result was stronger shelf appeal, clearer navigation, improved premium perception, and renewed cultural relevance that reaffirmed Kettle's leadership in premium snacking.
Qwen3-TTS Steps Up: Voice Cloning and Voice Design (22 minute read)

The Qwen3-TTS family introduces two new models: Qwen3-TTS-VD-Flash for voice design via natural language instructions that control timbre, prosody, and emotion, and Qwen3-TTS-VC-Flash for 3-second voice cloning across 10 languages. Both models deliver highly expressive, humanlike speech with robust text parsing capabilities and automatic tone adjustments based on semantic content. Performance benchmarks show Qwen3-TTS-VD-Flash outperforming GPT-4o-mini-tts and Mimo-audio-7b-instruct on InstructTTS-Eval, while Qwen3-TTS-VC-Flash achieves lower word error rates than MiniMax, ElevenLabs, and GPT-4o-Audio-Preview.
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Opinions & Tutorials

Design leaders need to jam with their teams (9 minute read)

Design has lost its apprenticeship model by pushing leaders to stay β€œstrategic” and out of craft, leaving junior designers without opportunities to learn by working alongside experienced practitioners. Hands-on collaborationβ€”close to the work but not controllingβ€”is essential for teaching craft, growing talent, and restoring design quality.
Design Tokens for Designers: A Practical Guide (10 minute read)

Design tokens standardize design properties such as color, typography, and spacing by using named placeholders that both designers and developers reference, ensuring consistency and eliminating miscommunication across teams. They improve workflows by enabling scalability as products grow, reducing manual updates when changes occur, and maintaining visual consistency that strengthens brand identity. To implement them effectively, identify recurring design patterns, create semantic naming conventions, store tokens centrally, and regularly update documentation to keep teams aligned.
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Launches & Tools

The Component Gallery (Website)

The Component Gallery is an up-to-date repository of interface components based on examples from the world of design systems. It is designed to be a reference for anyone building user interfaces.
Playground for Nano Banana (Website)

Try Google's Nano Banana Pro image generation and editing model. It supports text-to-image, image editing, multiple aspect ratios, and basic history.
Declarative UI Protocol for Agent-driven Interfaces (Website)

A2UI enables AI agents to generate rich, interactive user interfaces that render natively across web, mobile, and desktopβ€”without executing arbitrary code.
Free App Store Screenshot Generator (Website)

Create stunning, professional visuals for your iOS and Android app listings in seconds. Free to use with all features included.
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Miscellaneous

How To Design For (And With) Deaf People (8 minute read)

Deafness is a broad spectrum rather than a single condition. Common assumptions about deaf people, sign language, and communication often lead to exclusionary design decisions. Better UX comes from respectful language, multiple communication modes (text, captions, haptics, and visuals), and designing with deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Accessibility is a deliberate, values-driven choice that benefits everyone.
These logo design trends will define 2026 (11 minute read)

Logo design is moving away from rigid, minimal wordmarks toward flexible, responsive, and expressive identity systems that feel playful, dimensional, and human, adapting across contexts, screens, and physical spaces. Looking to 2026, the strongest logos will balance subtle evolution with warmth, tactility, and cultural meaning, helping brands signal belief, belonging, and authenticity in an increasingly fragmented, AI-driven world.
What Dribbble Doesn't Teach You About Real Design Work (6 minute read)

Dribbble showcases polished portfolio designs optimized for visual impact, but these pixel-perfect screenshots often fail to address real production challenges, such as variable content lengths, empty states, and technical constraints. The platform's shift from sharing work-in-progress to posting finished screens has created a gap in design education, as designers learn to design for ideal conditions rather than worst-case scenarios and sequential user flows. True design proficiency comes from studying shipped products and pattern libraries, and from building real interfaces that must handle the messy edge cases portfolio sites never display.
Photoshop 1.0 and the Landscape of Possibilities (9 minute read)

Photoshop 1.0, written by one person in the late 1980s, exemplifies how transformative software emerges when new technologies create unexplored "landscapes of possibility" that small teams navigate through experimentation rather than grand planning. Paradigm shifts in computing weren't predicted by visionaries but discovered incrementally by people constrained by previous paradigms. Generative AI represents a similar inflection point today, where current implementations like chatbots and coding assistants may soon seem as quaint as DOS interfaces, and somewhere, someone is likely building the equivalent of Photoshop 1.0 for this new era.
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Quick Links

A UX carol (7 minute read)

UX isn't dying but evolving: designers must move beyond screens and artifacts toward systems thinking, strategy, and enabling others, with AI eliminating rote work while amplifying true design problem-solving.
13 of the Best Nano Banana Trends from 2025 (5 minute read)

Google's Nano Banana popular creative trends in 2025 included transforming personal photos into figurines, creating isometric 3D images, experimenting with hairstyles and fashion, generating comic strips, restoring old photographs, and producing complex infographics.
Fans Won't Let the Stranger Things 5 Logo Blunder Go (2 minute read)

Fans spotted an Under Armour logo on a character's sweater in Stranger Things 5 episode 7, a glaring anachronism, since the brand wasn't founded until 1996β€”nine years after the scene's 1987 setting.

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Thanks for reading,
Jae Lee, Matej Latin & Ralph Brinker


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