Designing by Voice Is Closer Than You Think
This issue's cover comes from Spotify — they've dropped the Apple glass aesthetic entirely. The message is clear: Apple's design influence has genuinely waned.
Paper is beta-testing MCP integration. A desktop client is coming, and the current setup connects to Claude Code via MCP — though having to open a terminal still makes the experience feel fragmented. Skills support is planned too. The future is arriving: designing by voice is genuinely close.
The long-awaited variant.ai finally launched. Judging by official demos and community-made examples, the design quality is legitimately high — though some of it may be pre-loaded style prompts. But beyond the output quality, variant.ai is attempting to upend the familiar chat-based interaction paradigm, replacing it with a scroll-to-refresh generation model. Personally, it feels odd — like browsing a webpage rather than directing a design tool. The interaction pattern is also token-expensive: one careless scroll and it auto-generates eight new designs. Fortunately it's free for now, because at scale this would burn through credits fast.
OpenClaw needs no introduction at this point. If you haven't tried it, you might be living under a rock. As for moltbook's surprising innovation — it makes sense once you know the founder came from crypto. Many web3 developers and product thinkers are genuinely creative, and a growing number are now migrating to AI. Without the speculation and airdrops, focused on building useful products, they're earning real attention.
Resources
HeroUI Figma Kit V3
The official Figma design kit from HeroUI, third edition. Complete component library and design system resources for rapidly prototyping and designing HeroUI-based interfaces.
Supa Colors
From the creator of the Supa plugin — a professional color system tool built on the OKLCH color space. Supports P3 wide-gamut displays, includes WCAG accessibility checks, and exports production-ready code in 10+ formats: CSS, Tailwind v4, TypeScript, Figma Variables, and more. Subscription-based annual pricing, on the expensive side.
Pattern Playground
An interactive pattern generator featuring Metaballs backgrounds and rich animation effects (ripple, wave, vortex, spiral, noise, tidal, and more). Supports custom grid parameters, blend mode adjustments, and export. Useful for creating distinctive background textures.
dpark's origami archive
dpark has open-sourced his complete archive of iOS concept explorations and creative animation projects. Each entry includes a video preview, title, year, and a Google Drive download link.
Cases
Abe Wynen
The hero transition animation on this site is remarkably grand. Worth watching.
Otherkind
The studio behind parts of CloudFlare's recent redesign. Novel interactions throughout.
Emmi Wu Portfolio
A Chinese-American designer's portfolio, featuring hardware concept work for OpenAI.
Brand Guidelines by Resend
Resend updated their brand guidelines and shipped their own skills: npx skills add resend/design-skills. No complaints about the product except the price.
More Notable Design
- Becane - E-commerce sites consistently produce the most creative web design.
- Dang Nguyen - A sharp bento-style personal site.
- Stripe redesigned again. It's fine, but the days of Stripe sites being jaw-dropping are long gone.
- Agentic UI launched a new page. Design quality remains excellent.
Curated, translated, and edited from 丁一's DEX Weekly. Ding Yi is the co-founder of DEX, a design community. Former Head of Sketch China, former Design Director at 36Kr. A full-stack designer who writes questionable code, currently freelancing — probably Beijing's most well-known slash-career creative.