MICROSOFT DESIGN
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Trust is set before setup ends
Dhaka and Sikdar watched sales reps meet an AI agent for the first time and distill five onboarding principles — deliver the aha before asking for configuration.
Field Notes · Tactic
Craft & detail
The small moves and tuning passes that separate good from generic.
28 entries
FAST COMPANY
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Design has died before; it molts
Fuller files the AI panic in a 70-year lineage of design deaths — with AWS and Anthropic design leaders on the great blurring, and Figma literally staging the funeral.
NUBANK
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The bank opened its sketchbook
Nubank threw open its studio: 400 seats, a brand refresh, case tracks, and Eismann closing. Design culture as a public event, at 135-million-customer scale.
SLACK DESIGN
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Adequate became free; loved didn't
Fernandez turns Butterfield's 2013 promise into a working framework — utility, usability, feel — with named failure modes and a gut-check: are we proud to ship this?
PROOF OF CONCEPT
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Taste is a training regimen
Hoang rejects taste-as-gift and lays out four deliberate practice areas — eye, hand, aesthetics, rhetoric — for training design judgment like a discipline.
BEN CALLAHAN
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The conversation system teams skip
Callahan splits product quality in two: the design system sets the floor, and how product teams use it sets the ceiling.
UX COLLECTIVE
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Provenance becomes the signal
Paschal traces the rise of creative provenance, as trust wears thin and people start wanting to know who actually made the thing.
TECH.EU
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
A word processor that defends the draft
Jon Steinback's Marker leaves stealth with a $13M seed and a thesis: AI should write with you, never for you.
FIGMA
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Taste Is Care, Not a Gift
Figma's chief design officer reframes taste as care, not gift, and names three things she screens for when hiring.
FIGMA
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Designing agents people can trust
Sheta Chatterjee walks through the design calls behind Gemini Enterprise: a shared AI inbox, team project spaces, and keeping people in control.
IT'S NICE THAT
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Designers should write about design
Elizabeth Goodspeed argues writing is another way to work through the same questions your design already circles, and well worth the effort.
JAMIESON ROTHWELL
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Shipping binaries, not just mockups
After three decades built around the handoff, Jamieson Rothwell now ships working software and treats those build choices as design decisions.
THE FOUNTAIN INSTITUTE
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
How senior design hiring changed
Jeff Humble gathers a hiring playbook where every tip is from this year, aimed at senior designers rethinking their career strategy.
ALPHA BYTES
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Why Taste Becomes the Moat
As AI flattens production, the author argues cultivated taste and a clear point of view become a designer's real edge.
VIOLETTA BONENKAMP
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Design as Executable Knowledge
A founder argues the real shift is encoding brand rules and taste into reusable files non-designers can run.
DESIGN WITH AI
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Five Habits for Designing With AI
Notes from ÌníOlúwa Abíódún's talk on shipping AI agents: scope sharply, write to think, then explore rough prototypes.
BUILDING NUBANK
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Simplicity at scale is strategy
Five lessons from serving 127 million customers, where hiding complexity is a deliberate architectural and cultural decision, not polish.
GITHUB
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Accessibility as an operating system
GitHub's five-year accessibility program turns outward, with audit data, design tooling, and AI agents making inclusion operational rather than aspirational.
MEDIUM
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The Senior Path Isn't Linear
A short, honest reflection on stalls, rebuilds, and why recalibration, not uninterrupted success, is what separates senior designers.
DESIGN SYSTEMS COLLECTIVE
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Fully Machine-Readable Design Systems
AI reads your design system differently; structured metadata beats prose documentation. · Foundations should be always-on; components served on demand through an MCP.
DESIGN SYSTEMS COLLECTIVE
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Your System Can't Explain Itself. That's the Problem.
Most design systems are a shared palette and a Confluence page nobody trusts. · A real system enforces its contracts; agents expose every gap you papered over.
THE GITHUB BLOG
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
An Accessibility Agent That Knows Its Limits
GitHub's accessibility agent reviewed 3,535 PRs at a 68% fix rate. The sharper lesson is what they taught it not to touch.
DESIGN SYSTEMS COLLECTIVE
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Agents Don't Read Your Documentation
Agents read structure and naming, not docs or goodwill. The informal contract that held design systems together becomes a hard boundary.
MICROSOFT DESIGN
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The system is the handoff
Microsoft consolidated Copilot into four surfaces tied together by a 'Throw and Catch' pattern. The pattern, not the components, is the system.
GITHUB (ENGINEERING & DESIGN)
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
When 'feels instant' is the spec
Most performance work chases tail latency. GitHub Issues reframed it around distribution shape, then named 4.7% server/cache divergence as the price of feeling instant.
MICROSOFT DESIGN
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Paper that had to earn its geometry
Microsoft spent years replacing plastic packaging with paper. The commitment was easy; getting every millimeter to behave was the actual work.
RAUNO FREIBERG
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The minimap that became a blur
Rauno tried to solve 'scroll back' with a minimap. The minimap caused jank, the jank needed a blur, and the blur almost worked.
LINEAR
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
An offsite without a Miro board
Linear took designers and engineers to Athens and shipped a working build by Friday. The trust that made the loop close, not the offsite, is what's worth lifting.