{"id":8629,"date":"2026-07-07T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/?p=8629"},"modified":"2026-07-07T10:17:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T17:17:30","slug":"weekly-design-links-07-07-26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/weekly-design-links-07-07-26\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Design Links \u2013 07\/07\/26"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As we enter the 2nd half of the year, I’m starting to feel the pressure to get some things done. As usual, I’ve got 53 projects in motion. A few have seen the light of day; most have not. There are so many that have been abandoned, lost, grown bored of, got close and gave up, forgot about, hated, loved then hated, data sickened, and twenty-some other excuses about why I didn’t reach some kind of conclusion. Some people believe that if you don’t share what you make with an audience, it’s not complete. I don’t subscribe to this. I try a lot of things. I’m interested in even more. Time isn’t on my side. Once in a blue moon, the stars align, and I get something worthwhile out the door. Often, that’s it. No fanfare, no virality, no celebration. And almost always, no financial gain. I like making stuff. It’s nice when people notice, but I’ll probably never do it for that reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Industrial Design<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Zebra Blinds: A Low-Maintenance, Easier-to-Manufacture Alternative to Venetian Blinds<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The design is meant to offer the flexibility of Venetian blinds, without the manufacturing complexity, maintenance requirements and cleaning hassle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Web Design\/UX\/Design Systems<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Catt’s Corner: \u200adesign leadership<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In each episode, Catt Small sits down with a super-senior designer (or a person in their support network) and asks them to get real about what they’re navigating: influence without authority, shipping big ideas, protecting their energy, making the business case for design, and adapting to a field that keeps shifting under all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Splitting Atoms & Splitting Hairs<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Atomic design got us from thinking about pages to thinking about components, but we don’t need to keep carrying the periodic table around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Design Systems Are No Longer Optional<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that AI is generating most of your UI your design system is no longer a consistency tool it’s now the main source of truth a model can generate against. Whether that stays accurate is now a more consequential question than it used to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Legibility of Effort<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until recently, \u201csomeone cared enough to write this\u201d was an ok heuristic. Plenty of writing on the internet was bad, but you could convince me that you cared about something just by writing it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7 questions we had going into Config Leadership Collective<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We showed up to Leadership Collective hoping to learn how leaders are guiding their teams through change, what expertise means now, and how they’re keeping quality high as the pace picks up. Here’s what we heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The state of the creative industry 2026: what our survey tells us about pay, burnout and AI<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our wide-ranging survey lays bare a profession that’s exhausted, anxious about its future, and using AI tools it doesn’t trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The organizational cost of low taste<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When taste is weak, organizations don\u2019t fail in strategy. They fail in decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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An Artist Turning Digital Culture Into Something That Feels Like Future Archaeology<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kleinian is a contemporary artist and designer who frames digital culture as a form of future archaeology; his own concise phrase for it is \u201cModern archaeology.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Architecture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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MOLD architects sinks five stone retreats into the rocky slopes of serifos island<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 270-square-meter project organizes accommodation through a porous grid of rooms, courtyards, pools, and planted areas. Its low horizontal profile responds to the exposed hillside, where shade and shelter are as important as the sea view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tools<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Apple\u2019s iOS and iPadOS 27 UI kit for Figma<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apple\u2019s iOS and iPadOS 27 UI kit for Figma helps you quickly and easily create highly accurate iPhone and iPad design comps and user flows. The kit contains components for all common controls and views, design templates, text styles, color styles, and materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Halftone in the Browser<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t print a gradient. You print dots, and their size carries the tone. The slider shows what changing frequency costs you. Brighter pixels produce larger dots: luminance maps directly to radius.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Random<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Alpine1 Turns Minecraft Into A Space For City Design, Airport Planning, And Serious Creative Construction<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alpine1 is a Vancouver-based Minecraft city creator, YouTube educator, and architectural engineering student whose work sits at the meeting point of building culture, planning logic, and digital creativity. He focuses especially on cities, airports, and urban environments, bringing a real architectural mindset into Minecraft rather than treating it as pure fantasy construction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we enter the 2nd half of the year, I’m starting to feel the pressure to get some things done. As usual, I’ve got 53 projects in motion. A few have seen the light of day; most have not. There are so many that have been abandoned, lost, grown bored of, got close and gave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8633,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[16,9,88,14,74,69,49,21,20,29,19,30],"class_list":["post-8629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-links","tag-architecture","tag-art","tag-design-systems","tag-industrial-design","tag-random","tag-sculpture","tag-tools","tag-ui","tag-ux","tag-video-games","tag-web-design","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/config-leadership-collective.jpg?fit=1600%2C900&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8645,"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629\/revisions\/8645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnfreeborn.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}