• Complex Systems Visualizer

"Mental models, patterns, and frameworks on thinking clearly, building well, and living with intention. Distilled from hundreds of books, podcasts, videos, and years of paying close attention."

• Ideas by Noah Zender

• Riding the Leopard
• AI Canvas
• React Explained in Five Visual Metaphors, Maggie Appleton
• maggieappleton.com/v3 repo
• This is Design At The Most AI-Installed Company: Diego Zaks

• Illustrating the Gemini App
• Hermes Agent

• Interfaces — the design engineering magazine, Jakub Krehel

• On rendering the sky, sunsets, and planets, Maxime Heckel

• Roster — open directory of top designers
• Alan Trotter
• Contra Labs
• Brand Biographies — documenting the stories behind iconic brands, the people who crafted them, and the products they shaped, Jade Franson
• Design infrastructure, Ryan Miyoshi

• Design Tells of AI Slop

• Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era, Max Schoening — Lenny's Podcast
  • Agency is not evenly distributed; agency = understanding that the world is malleable
  • Matters less whether designers ship production code → more so understanding the material we're working with
  • Brett Victor: stop drawing dead fish
  • Max recommends designers + PMs avoid GUIs for coding with AI — mixed thoughts on this; using both terminal and GUI (Claude Code) feels right
  • Terminal → helps build a more accurate mental model for non-engineers

Rafa notes

• Frustration ignites creativity
• Moments that make people feel things: building tension, telling stories

Let your agent spin up a lab: set up benchmarks, run tests, and iterate until a solution is found.

• Give your agents a laboratory, Brian Lovin (Mar 10, 2026)

• Design Systems Surf — reference best-in-class design systems
• Agent Elements — open source collection of chat & agent UI
• Loading UI — curated spinners, loaders, and animations, @bzagrodzki
• Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies, Andy Matuschak — MIT HCI Seminar (Mar 3, 2026)