Dots can work across your connected apps and take control of your computer, and they look like a green bean with diamond eyes. The visual language says harmless. The capability says authority.
Newsference clusters the day's AI news into stories and sums it up in a single index. The scraping was easy. Getting one number from 0 to 100 to feel true took most of the design work.
When Vanilla stopped working on macOS 27, I built Tiidy, a menu bar manager, in five days. The best design decisions in it were things I took out, and the one idea I kept: the app should decide when an icon matters, not you.
YouTube keeps resetting my playback speed, so I built Paace, a small Chrome extension that puts it back. The interesting part is the one decision inside it: what a one-off change should mean.
For most of my career, developers finished my designs and every page came back slightly wrong. AI moved the handoff: on websites I ship the code myself, and on apps I own the components in Storybook.
A realistic month inside a one-day-a-week product design retainer: what gets delivered, what it costs you in coordination, where the capacity limit sits, and when to buy something else instead.
My walking pad, my Apple Watch, my phone and Apple Health were all in the same room and refused to talk to each other. So I built Waalk. The parts existed. The experience didn't.
Most designers spend an hour understanding the problem, start solving it in their heads, then discover the client expected $2,000 for $20,000 worth of work. Money isn't the awkward part. It's the filter.
Apple's dual-screen iPhone lets the person being photographed fix their own pose and the person beside you join the call. For the first time, a phone was designed for the people who aren't holding it.
Tesla removed the steering wheel, the pedals and the mirrors, then added a physical Stop button between the dome lights. That one button is a masterclass in what simplification actually means.
164 countries voted to move away from the Mercator map. The US voted no, arguing the UN should focus on real problems instead of the interface. That argument has been losing product meetings for years.
I bought a walking pad and I'm using it more than any fitness habit I've ever attempted. Not because I got disciplined. Because it's under my desk. There's a product design lesson in that.
Calendly's rebrand used Midjourney and Figma Make and still feels completely human. The difference isn't the tools. It's months of killed work, hand-edited letterforms, and someone with the authority to say no.
Sound-isolating speech masks are now a real product, built so you can prompt AI in an open office. It looks insane. It also exposes the real design problem: the room, not the interface.
The government that spent $96 million on a weather website nobody wants just announced a world-first Office of AI. The PM says the real issues are not technical. He's right. That's the problem.
Australia is spending $56.1 million to finally kill the orange arrival card. Two earlier attempts failed with the same technology. The difference this time is a design decision: where the thing lives.
Most of the products I design now have AI in them. Here's what AI product design actually involves, how it differs from regular product design, and when to bring a designer for AI products into your team.
I repositioned from freelance UX/UI designer to product design consultant. Then I wondered if Google would stop showing me to the people searching for one.
The interface I'm proudest of runs a dispatch desk. It isn't beautiful, and you'll never see it in a portfolio. It was designed for the ten-thousandth hour, not the first five minutes, and the best operational design disappears completely.
Tables for layout, fonts that only worked if you had them installed, a loading bar over a screaming modem. Thirty years on, design has died three times. Each time the tool changed, the job didn't.
The agency model slices your day into billable fragments and calls it efficient. I give one client one full day, and nothing else touches it. Here's why a sliced day never solves the real problem and a full one does.
Apple just demoed a new Siri. It demoed the same one in 2024, ran it in iPhone 16 ads, and never shipped it. Building it was never the hard part. Having someone with the authority to say not yet was the hard part.
I tried to cancel my son's gym membership months ago. They're still charging me. The cancel button isn't missing. It's withheld. That's a dark pattern, and it burns the one thing you don't get back.
When you're fully booked, good leads go cold. I built Handballo to fix the referral problem most freelancers pretend doesn't exist.
The tools got infinitely capable and the output got eerily uniform. Taste is the only competitive advantage left in product design, and it's still human.
A step-by-step breakdown of how I approach UX design for small businesses, from discovery through to handoff, and why getting the process right matters more than the tools.
A logo without strategy is just a drawing. Here's why investing in brand strategy first leads to a stronger visual identity and better business outcomes.
If your SaaS product is a thin layer over a workflow, AI eats you. If it encodes years of decisions about how an industry actually operates, AI can't touch you. Depth was always the moat.
Four AI trading bots. Four markets. Six weeks. The bot with the most intelligence generated 48 trade signals and executed zero. The dumb one returned 17%. Overthinking is expensive.
The AI industry is spending $2.5 trillion on infrastructure and models. But real users still can't figure out what to type, don't trust the output, and abandon the product in a week. The hard part was never the model.
Comparing the pros and cons of working with a freelance designer versus a design agency, and how to decide which is the better fit for your project.
Figma shipped more AI features than any design tool in history. The stock keeps falling. The market is asking a harder question: do these features create value, or just cost?
Apple launched the MacBook Neo, a budget laptop from a premium brand. Scaling down without breaking what made it good is one of the hardest design problems there is.
Atlassian laid off 1,600 employees to fund its AI strategy while selling collaboration tools built on the assumption that humans do the work. The contradiction runs deeper than the headlines.
Wall Street wiped $2 trillion from SaaS valuations. But this isn't just a tech correction. It's AI exposing a decades-old design failure: most SaaS products digitised the workflow instead of solving the problem.
Sora hit a million downloads in five days. Six months later, OpenAI killed it. The lesson isn't about video generation. It's about what happens when you design for the first session instead of the tenth.
Australia spent $64 million on a bus ticketing app that didn't work on launch day. The problem wasn't technology. It was a design problem disguised as a tech problem.
Australia's age verification law forced adults to hand over biometric data to access legal content. On day one, Pornhub blocked all Australians and VPN downloads spiked. That's not a side effect. It's a design failure.
Australia told AI labs to bake 'Australian values' into their products or face regulation. But values aren't a product spec. If you can't build against it, it's a wish, and the labs know it.
After 30 years of handing off Figma files and waiting, I shipped my first app with no dev team. AI didn't replace designers. It removed the bottleneck between ideas and products.
After 30 years of designing apps for other people, I built and shipped my own using Claude Code. No prior coding experience required. Here's what happened.
The Anthologie team I worked with won a Good Design Award. That's unusual, because the work that actually changes how decisions get made rarely looks impressive in a screenshot.
I ran a design subscription for a year. Clients loved the idea of unlimited design. Here's why it failed and what works better.
The secret to a full calendar as a freelance designer isn't better craft. It's better business. Here's what actually keeps clients coming back.
Consumer apps get the portfolios. Business apps get the impact. Here's why complex operational software is harder to design, pays better, and keeps getting more interesting.
Most founders hire a designer when the product looks bad. That's too late and it's the wrong problem. Complex SaaS products don't fail because of aesthetics. They fail because nobody designed the system.
For most of my career I worked on discrete projects. It took me too long to realise that model is bad for the work, and why retainer engagements changed everything.
A product that has lost its purpose can still have a viable business model. Here's what the Yellow Pages teaches us about legacy features, dead weight, and knowing when to retire.
👋 Hello, I live in sunny Perth, Western Australia.
If you've got a project in mind, email me a bit about it and I'll reply within a day. If it makes sense to talk after that, we can book a short chat or grab a coffee in Perth.
