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Design Systems Are Consuming the World (And That's Fine)
Whatever your relationship with design systems, here's the uncomfortable truth: they've gone from a nice organisational bonus to an absolute necessity. And if your team is still building products without one, you're essentially assembling IKEA furniture without the instructions. Except the instructions are also in Swedish. And someone's already lost three of the screws.
Read ArticleThe UX of Video Games: What Product Designers Should Be Stealing
Product designers love to talk about onboarding flows, progressive disclosure, feedback loops, and user engagement. We attend conferences about it. We read books about it. We create elaborate Figma files documenting it. And yet, video games have been doing all of this, often brilliantly, since before most of us had email addresses. The games industry has been running the world's largest UX experiment for over forty years, and most product designers are barely paying attention.
Read ArticleRaising the Dead: Bringing a long-fallen platform back to life
A gaming platform that cost between £4,000 and £12,000 a month to host fell under its own weight. Years later, I started again from scratch as vgdb.co, with AI assistance and a radically simpler approach that costs about £50 a month. This is a resurrection story.
Read ArticleThe AI Gutenberg moment: When everyone becomes a digital creator
AI is doing to software what the printing press did to scribes. Creation is becoming cheap, fast and accessible to everyone. The challenge isn't building products any more: it's making ones that aren't bland, copyable or forgettable.
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