YouTube Turns 20 and Unveils a New Global Marketing Identity (3 minute read)
YouTube is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a new global marketing identity designed in-house to unify its expanding ecosystem across Shorts, Music, TV, Premium, and Kids. The refresh centers on making the brand feel "alive" through a reactive, dynamic system that responds to real content and culture, featuring a new custom typeface, bespoke illustrations, and motion behaviors. Rather than reinventing the platform, the identity evolves familiar elements like the red-white-black palette and UI cues to feel more expressive while maintaining consistency across global markets.
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Netflix is rolling out a live voting feature (1 minute read)
Netflix is introducing a live voting feature that lets viewers interact with livestreamed programming in real time, launching with the debut of its talent show Star Search on January 20. Viewers can vote using a TV remote or the Netflix app through multiple-choice selections or five-star ratings, with votes counted instantly and limited to the live broadcast window. The rollout builds on earlier tests and signals Netflix's continued push to merge live content with interactive, cross-device experiences.
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With Apple Creator Studio, are Mac icons getting worse? (3 minute read)
Apple's increasingly minimal Mac icons, especially the new Apple Creator Studio set, are being widely criticized as confusing and meaningless, with many arguing they've lost clarity as they moved from skeuomorphism to abstraction. The author disagrees, saying icons rarely make sense without prior knowledge anyway, and that what really matters is visual distinctiveness—something the new, colorful ACS icons do well while also looking more aesthetically pleasing.
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AI Model Collapse in Design Tools: Why Your Background Remover is Getting Worse (8 minute read)
When machine learning systems are trained on AI-generated content, quality deteriorates within 5 training cycles, leading to worse outputs over time. As a result, background removers, image generators, and writing assistants now produce inconsistent results, homogenized outputs, and increased artifacts. Designers must implement multi-stage quality checks, version-pin reliable tools, maintain human-curated reference libraries, and build manual fallbacks since AI outputs can no longer be trusted by default.
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Focus on quality interactions rather than volume (2 minute read)
An introverted senior designer in Jakarta struggles to communicate and delegate to a younger Gen Z team, worrying about causing stress and feeling blocked by age and interest gaps. The advice: understand and share your own communication preferences, ask your manager to help reset inclusive team communication norms, lean on written channels and structured agendas, and focus on quality, thoughtful interactions rather than forced small talk.
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FontSniff (Website)
With FontSniff, you can instantly upload any image and let its AI-powered engine identify the font with remarkable precision.
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Introducing Taste 1.0: A Model for Designers (12 minute read)
Taste 1.0 is a design system model consisting of structured markdown files that encode organizational design decisions, token rules, and component conventions to guide AI-generated outputs. The approach shifts the focus from selecting better AI models to building intelligent routing systems that leverage specialized agents and shared knowledge graphs, with task-specific guidelines to maintain consistency. Organizations should start with core foundation files that define tokens, patterns, and governance rules, then route design tasks to appropriate specialists while validating outputs against documented standards.
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Design in Code, Get Praise (3 minute read)
A designer working on a large government case-working system redesign demonstrated new flows to product managers using an HTML prototype built with the GOV.UK Prototype Kit instead of Figma. The interactive, browser-based prototype allowed stakeholders to experience the end-to-end user journey, including transitions, loading states, and error handling, which static design tools can't effectively demonstrate. Product managers praised the functional prototype for helping them better understand the designs and for providing clearer guidance to developers than traditional design presentations.
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Beyond chat: 8 core user intents driving AI interaction (15 minute read)
Most AI products still default to chat, but this breaks down for real work. Instead, teams should design around clear user intents and match each to the right UI, not bolt chat onto everything. The article defines eight core intents (Learn, Create, Delegate, Oversee, Monitor, Find, Play, and Connect) plus “meta-intent” behavior sliders, arguing that great AI products are purpose-built for these workflows, with transparent, safe, and reversible design.
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