Quality Requires Visual Design https://elijahpotter.dev/articles/quality-requires-visual-design  Here's the secret to Harper's design system: it hasn't really existed until now. Each of the integrations, from the Chrome extension, to the website, and even the Obsidian plugin, had their own design system and appearance. Mostly, this was because I didn't care enough about it when first crafting these projects. Things have changed, so I'm going to take my time and do a good job in an attempt to service these user complaints. https://stacker.news/items/1288409

‘Pictures unite!’: how pop music fell in love with socialist infographics https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/nov/19/otto-neurath-isotypes-infographics-album-covers-wien-museum-vienna   > When Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath invented the visual language of Isotypes, it was to democratise education. As a new exhibition shows, it ended up influencing pop art, graphic design and electronic musicians from Kraftwerk to OMD   When Otto Neurath died in Oxford some 80 years ago, far away from his native Vienna, he was still finding his feet in exile. Like many a Jewish refugee, the economist, philosopher and sociologist had been interned as a suspected enemy alien on the Isle of Man, along with his third wife and close collaborator Marie Reidemeister, having chanced a last-minute life-saving escape from their interim hideout in the Netherlands across the Channel in a rickety boat in 1940. Thanks to Neurath’s pioneering use of pictorial statistics – or “Isotypes” as Reidemeister called them, an acronym for “International System of Typographic Picture Education” – he left behind an enormous legacy in the arts and social sciences: it is the language through which we decode and analyse the modern world. But his lasting relevance would have been hard to predict at the time of his death at the age of 63. Neurath demanded his images ‘show the most important thing about the object at first glance’ At that point, his Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics had had relatively little impact in the UK (beyond providing strikingly simplified imagery to the public information shorts of leftist film-maker Paul Rotha). Neurath’s “visual autobiography” had been shelved by his publishers, who probably failed to follow the ambitious arc of its title, “From Hieroglyphics to Isotype”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp_Du6uO9V4 https://stacker.news/items/1288408

David Kelley's Brief But Spectacular take on creativity and design https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/david-kelleys-brief-but-spectacular-take-on-creativity-and-design  > For decades, David Kelley has helped people unlock their creativity. A pioneer of design, he founded the Stanford d.school as a place for creative, cross-disciplinary problem solving. He reflects on the journey that shaped his belief that everyone has the capacity to be creative and his Brief But Spectacular take on creativity and design. _Amna Nawaz, PBS:_ For decades, David Kelley has helped people to unlock their creativity. A pioneer of design, he founded Stanford's d.school as a place for cross-disciplinary problem-solving. In tonight's Brief But Spectacular, he reflects on the journey that shaped his belief that everyone has the capacity to be creative. _David Kelley, Stanford University:_ I met Steve Jobs soon after I started IDEO in 1978. He didn't have an internal design group, and so he was using people from the outside. He liked what he saw and we ended up doing 53 projects for Apple after that. The most impactful project that I think we ever did for Apple was the computer mouse. It's one of those great things where to see something adopted that quickly was really gratifying as a designer. These are things I designed. So this is the chassis for the Apple III computer. This is the Palm V. It's a personal digital assistant before your time. My mom's spatula, I don't know why that's memorable. I grew up in Barberton, Ohio, the Rust Belt of the country. As a kid, I was always tinkering. You know my grandfather was a machinist, and if you needed a part for the washing machine, you made a new one. When I first arrived at Stanford, I really didn't have any knowledge of what design was. Design was in the engineering school, but it was very human-centered, so that was a better fit for me. I was much better at going out and trying to understand what was meaningful for people. Twenty years ago, I was diagnosed with throat cancer, and it really hit me hard, but I really had the epiphany that I wanted to do something that was meaningful in the world. And as I started teaching, I realized that my purpose in life was figuring out how to help people gain confidence in their creative ability. Many people assume they're not creative. Time and time again, they say, a teacher told me I wasn't creative or that's not a very good drawing of a horse or whatever it is. We don't have to teach creativity. Once we remove the blocks, they can then feel themselves as being a creative person. Witnessing somebody realizing they're creative for the first time is just a complete joy. You can just see them come out of the shop and beaming that I can weld. Like, what's next? I couldn't get that anywhere else, I think, other than being an educator. The way the d.school idea came to me basically was, I was in a bunch of meetings in those days about multidisciplinary. Early prototypes for the d.school were just some of us getting together from different departments and teaching a class together. The way of thinking and working together in a radically collaborative way results in really life-changing, world-changing kind of ideas. The d.school is really focused on helping people gain a new mind-set, designing in a way that's human-centered. What's different about design today, I think, is, we used to be at the kids table and now I think we're at the adult table, that we're getting to work on the most interesting problems. Design is just one of the disciplines, along with business and technology, we can actually contribute to making solutions that are meaningful and fit with people. My name is David Kelley, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on creativity and design. https://stacker.news/items/1288402

₿uilder Vancouver https://bitcoinbuildervan.com  ₿uilder is a monthly meetup focused on discussing product, design, and AI tools for individuals building on bitcoin. Everyone is welcome, whether you're an experienced product manager or designer, just starting out, or simply curious to learn. ₿uilder Vancouver runs a mix of events to bring the local Bitcoin and open-source community together. Expect Socratic Seminars — discussion-led deep dives into ideas — Vibe coding Hackathons for hands-on collaborative building, plus regular networking nights, workshops, and lightning talks. Events are inclusive and geared toward all skill levels: whether you’re prototyping a project, sharpening your skills, or simply looking to meet other builders, there’s a place for you. Check individual event pages for dates, locations, and RSVP details. https://stacker.news/items/1287727

What Good Execution Looks Like https://yusufaytas.com/what-good-execution-looks-like  The other day I was talking with one of my directs. We ended up discussing something we’ve both learned over the years. When execution works, the environment is quiet. Not slow. Not passive. Quiet. Execution happens. People work together. Nothing feels heavy. You sort of question if there’s management in all this or their very existence. That’s a good thing. Maybe, one of the best signals of good management. On the flip side, you can immediately tell when the management isn’t good. Projects stall or never finish. You will see extra approvals appear. Processes get thicker. People start checking in more than they need to. Updates become defensive. The number of meetings increases. All of this is a reaction to a simple problem. The management can’t execute the work. Hence, people try to do it themselves.  Great execution always looks easier from the outside than it actually is. That’s because the real work sits inside the system. The clarity, the direction, the ownership, the rhythm. They compound. People move without friction. Decisions are easy. Problems surface early and get resolved early. Nothing feels heavy. Poor execution does the opposite. It makes everything loud. Chaos becomes visible. Management becomes reactive and highly visible. Processes thicken. People compensate for gaps the system should handle. The organization ends up spending more energy managing itself than delivering anything meaningful. It feels like everything is bloated. Sustainable engineering cultures don’t depend on pressure, urgency, or oversight. They’re built on clarity, trust, and stability. They make it easy for people to do the right thing without fighting the environment around them. When that foundation exists, execution doesn’t need to be forced. It just happens. The best-executing teams don’t need shepherding. They need guardrails, direction, and space. Give them that, and the quiet will tell you everything you need to know. https://stacker.news/items/1287726

The Folded World https://zehfernandes.com/posts/the-folded-world     That is the heartbeat of contemporary AI. Data folded into a dense internal landscape where words cluster into something that behaves like understanding. The models are creating meaning, yet their pathways remain opaque. When they hallucinate, they are not simply wrong; they expose the edges of an internal world whose logic we cannot fully trace. The artworks explore that fault line. Classical paintings, early computer interfaces, neon vector grids, and digital remnants sit side by side, compressed into a single surface much like features in a neural layer. The small coded labels scattered across the images resemble confidence scores, quiet indicators of the hidden mathematics. Each collage becomes a graphic expression of the model’s internal turbulence. Layer sits above layer, and underneath we glimpse not a complete scene but fragments of training data and partial connections, the visual equivalent of a model synthesizing meaning from incompatible sources. Are we witnessing the big bang of meaning for machines? [Go to the generator](https://zehfernandes.com/projects/folded-world/tool)       https://stacker.news/items/1287723

Best Free Fonts https://bestfreefonts.com  # Truly free fonts for your designs Best Free Fonts is a curated selection of 214 free fonts. Including serif, sans serif, script and monospace. The site links to original designer's source files and website and make this project authentic and clean catalog. https://stacker.news/items/1286995

State Of Product Design in 2025 https://sopd.design  The tech industry is under pressure: mass layoffs, the rise of AI, and economic uncertainty are reshaping how we work. But what does this mean for designers? We surveyed 340 product designers and spoke with 10 more in interviews to uncover their challenges and expectations. This research shows that product design is not just a craft or a career—it’s a complex system. Personal motivation often runs into structural barriers, and professional awareness alone isn’t enough for growth. One clear takeaway: the problems designers face are systemic. They appear across regions, company sizes, and team structures—and they can’t be solved overnight or by individual effort alone. Real change takes work on multiple levels: designers improving how they navigate their environment; leaders investing in healthier team dynamics; and the broader community creating space for open, honest conversations. We may not solve everything at once, but we can keep moving—toward a more sustainable, more mature profession. https://stacker.news/items/1286992

Logo API - Instant Company Logos for Developers https://www.logo.dev  > Logo.dev is the comprehensive logo API that lets you enrich any domain with its logo, eliminate manual logo management, and boost user trust with professional branding.  https://stacker.news/items/1286984

Let designers think https://uxdesign.cc/let-designers-think-82721f458b73  A while back, I captured this provocation on LinkedIn by Darren Hood, which got me thinking. What does it take to “Let Designers think”? Thinking is the value we bring. Let's discuss more ways to carve out “thinking” time. The comment was then punctuated by Pavel Samsonov, who touched on the difference between corporate decision-making via “design thinking” and “thinking like a designer.” Unfortunately, there remains a gap between “design thinking” as designers practice it and how companies implement “design thinking.” But regardless, there is still an impulse among design practitioners to “think”. Let’s quickly review how we got here. **Design Thinking refresher** Design Thinking is the process (popularized by IDEO and the Stanford D-school) for how designers move through a problem-solving process. Empathy > Define > Ideate > Prototype > Test is the shorthand for the types of things “designers think” about as they produce solutions.  ... https://stacker.news/items/1286228