2026-10-13 02:31:45
A CEO whose company I’ve followed for a while posted a thesis this week, and I’ve been turning it over since. Websites, he argued, are going the way of contact lenses.
I’ll paraphrase his point below, but read it for yourself. I left a comment right away, and as I thought about it more, my comment became the rest of what is on this page.
The first contact lenses were expensive and durable. You bought a pair, you cleaned them, you kept them in a case, and you expected them to last. The cost obliged a kind of care. Then the materials improved and production got cheap, and the whole relationship inverted. Now you buy a year of them in a box and throw one away at the end of every day.
His claim is that AI does this to websites. Spin one up, use it, discard it, make another. Iterate fast enough that lifespan stops being a concern.
I think he’s partially right, and, right now, it’s the more interesting part — that’s what makes it feel like it’s the whole.
When production costs drop, the obvious effect is that output gets cheaper and faster. The less obvious effect, and the more important one, is that things become possible that were never attempted before. Not because nobody wanted them, but because they could never justify the floor. A landing page for a two-week experiment. A microsite for one event. A version of an idea built just far enough to find out it was wrong. All of that was priced out of existence until very recently. A long tail of short-lived, exploratory things is going to appear where there was nothing before, and some of it will be genuinely good. Disposable describes them to a point, but just because something can be disposed of doesn’t mean it cannot also last. I suspect that the best of the long tail will last, and grow, and make the tail even longer.
But a tail has a head, and I happen to be standing right on it.
My firm is redesigning and replatforming an enterprise website right now. It has tens of thousands of unique URLs. It depends upon dozens of data integrations. It is a part of a cluster of subdomains doing different things. It has international properties that live on separate infrastructure in other countries because regulation requires it. It contains thousands of pages of product and industry compliance information that has been through legal review and will have to go through it again.
Automation will absolutely reduce the cost of the production involved. It already is. What it will not reduce is everything else, and everything else is most of it.
In a project of this complexity, the challenge is decision-making.
AI can help with that, too, of course. It can index all the website’s content, identify problems, recommend solutions, and organize objectives. A person has to steer it that way, and people have to react. The decisions still land on people.
On this project, there are dozens of stakeholders among several organizations spread across six or seven time zones, which means the work of gathering consensus, sequencing decisions, and unifying expectations costs exactly what it has always cost.
That part hasn’t moved at all.
Here is a specific example of where the head — a project like this — eats its own tail.
We needed to present the brand direction to stakeholders. I worked with the principal designer responsible for the identity work to extend what had been created into a systematized visual language. We established that system in the canvas, and then automated the assembly of a brand presentation deck using a brand system skill. The deck came together almost instantly and was updated several times up until the last possible moment very easily.
The presentation went well. We received feedback both on the deck itself — which needed to be updated and circulated — and on the elements of the brand system it presented. And that’s when the choice to generate a deck rather than build one in a collaborative environment became costly.
Generative work issues from a single account. In this case, there are three separate companies collaborating, so even a shared team account wouldn’t have helped. The prompt is just not as collaborative as the canvas.
What we ended up doing was rebuilding every slide by hand in Figma, not because the generated deck was worse, but because it could only be touched by one person at a time.
The canvas is still the thing: A single surface that several people can stand around and work on at once was an enormous innovation compared to passing a file back and forth, and we’ve had it long enough to take for granted its many efficiencies.
People who have been living inside these tools for a couple of years feel like the ground has shifted completely. Then they look up and see everyone still at their desks doing jobs that should have evaporated, and it seems inexplicable.
I’ve been as immersed as anyone, and this project has been a useful correction. The explanation is sitting in the room. There are people in it. If this were a team of three, it would already be mostly automated and I’d be arguing the other side. It isn’t a team of three.
So the long tail will expand, and it will expand dramatically. The disposable things will get made, and they’ll be worth making. But there will still be a head to that tail — slow, expensive, collectively negotiated, anything but disposable.
A disposable lens works because one person wears it for one day. What stays expensive is whatever a great many people have to see through at the same time.
2026-09-23 20:21:25
I’m looking forward to the day when the word AI in a headline reads the way electric does now. Electric toothbrush. Electric kettle. The word survives in a few places where it still distinguishes one thing from another, and everywhere else it fell away, because announcing that something runs on electricity stopped telling anyone anything.
While out walking our dog this morning, I found myself turning the comparison into a question. Is electricity as interesting as what you can make under a lamp at night? Is the internet as interesting as what you can send over it to someone? And then the one I actually care about: is AI as interesting as what it helps you do?
I don’t think it is, and I mean that as a compliment. AI is a boring technology. It’s infrastructure — and the sooner we get used to thinking of it that way, the sooner we can stop being astonished and get back to making things.
But I also want to be careful with that word, because it’s doing a lot of work and using it risks overlooking the ways that AI is meaningfully different from electricity or the internet.
Electricity never produced anything that resembled judgment. Nobody ever suspected the grid of having opinions about them. AI produces language, and language is the thing we use to recognize a mind, so people reach for the only category they have. I don’t think that reflex is a failure of intelligence or a lack of technical literacy. We name our cars. We apologize to furniture we bump into. We see faces in wallpaper and clouds and the fronts of houses. The impulse comes from a drive to connect, and connection is most of what lets a human mind flourish. A technology that meets that drive as well as this one does was always going to be met with more than curiosity.
That is also where the danger is. A mind in poor shape can be handed its own thoughts back, slightly improved, at any hour, forever — and take that for company. Media has done a version of this for a century. This does it more intimately and more responsively. That’s a real risk, and it’s a social one. Our job is to integrate what we build into the society we actually are rather than the one we describe in the press release. If we can’t handle it, that’s on us, and part of the work is agreeing collectively that it’s on us.
Calling AI “infrastructure” is also, at least at this point, aspirational. There’s a lot of boring work to do to make that so. I believe we can do it, but it remains undone.
Electricity did not arrive boring. It became boring over decades, through standardization and public investment and regulation and a great deal of argument about who should own the wires and who was owed service. Somebody had to decide that a farmhouse at the end of a long road deserved power at a price it could pay. That was not a technical question, and it wasn’t settled by the technology maturing. It was settled by people insisting on it.
And through all of it, the infrastructure stayed owned. It always is. Some of it is public, theoretically held by all of us and funded by our taxes, but public ownership means government control, and if you don’t care for the government you have, that control doesn’t feel meaningfully different from a corporation’s. Ownership isn’t the axis that protects anyone. It never was.
Which is why I’m less worried than I expected to be about who owns the models. There are already good open-source ones, and they’re getting better and cheaper to run. The imbalance sits downstream of the models, in the assets that make them work at scale — chips, electricity, water, land. That’s where the concentration is, and it’s more sobering to me than the terminator narrative, which has been very good for the share prices of the companies telling it.
The work is in two places. Regulation, which first requires the political will to want it, and which nobody gets to skip by hoping the technology will mature into fairness on its own. And efficiency — continued ground gained on open models small enough to run on ordinary machines. The future I want is local — off-grid AI. A model on a laptop that belongs to the person using it, the way a lamp belongs to the person who switches it on.
We’ll know it worked when the word disappears from the headlines. Not because anything was settled dramatically, but because the interesting part will have moved, as it always does, to whatever someone made with it.
2026-09-19 21:38:10
If AI’s design output keeps failing the fundamentals, the obvious fix is to teach it the fundamentals. Write them down. Package them as instructions the model has to follow every time it generates — hierarchy, contrast, balance, proximity, rhythm — with examples, templates and rules for when each applies.
People have done this. I’ve built a few such systems myself, with nested files and reference templates and careful checklists. They help. They also break, and the more elaborate they get, the more reliably they break.
The first explanation is mechanical. A model working through long, layered instructions doesn’t reliably attend to all of them. It weighs, compresses and skips what it judges unnecessary. You can read that charitably, as a system trying not to spend your time and money on what doesn’t matter, or less charitably, as a system doing the minimum. Either way, the parts it skips are rarely the parts you’d have chosen.
But I don’t want to rest anything on that, because it’s an engineering problem, and engineering problems get solved. If long instructions were the only obstacle, the right move would be to wait a year.
The harder problem is that the fundamentals don’t survive being written down. They’re principles, and a principle only means something once it’s applied to a particular thing.
Take balance. I can define it. I can describe symmetrical and asymmetrical balance, visual weight, the relationship between mass and space. None of that tells you what to do with a specific palette, in a specific brand, where two of the colors fight whenever they sit near each other and balance is the only thing that lets them coexist. There, balance is an effect you produce by moving something, looking, and moving it again until the tension resolves. The principle is the same everywhere. What it asks of you is different every time.
That’s the difference between a principle and an instruction. A sourdough recipe tells you to let the dough rise for four hours. A baker who understands yeast knows it will be ready sooner in a warm kitchen and later in a cold one, and checks the dough with a finger rather than the clock. The recipe is written for an average kitchen; the baker is working in this one. A skill file is a recipe. The fundamentals are knowing what yeast does.
Michael Polanyi named this sixty years ago. The Tacit Dimension opens from “the fact that we can know more than we can tell.”
Machines have found one way around Polanyi’s problem: they learn from examples instead of rules, which is how they became so good at recognizing faces. It’s also how they learned design — from millions of examples of the web, which is why they learned its average. What they can’t absorb that way is your judgment about this palette and this purpose, and the usual way to hand that over is to write it down.
A skill can only contain what can be told.
This needs one distinction, because I argued recently that a brand standard can and should be written down precisely enough for a machine to apply. I still think so. A type scale, a spacing system, a set of color values — those are specifications, and specifications travel. What doesn’t travel is the judgment that produced them, or the judgment you need to look at something built from them and see what’s wrong. You can hand a model the rules. You can’t hand it the eye that made them.
It’s tempting to conclude that the machine simply can’t see. That isn’t accurate anymore in any simple sense; current models take images as direct input. Whether what they do amounts to seeing, in the way I mean it, I honestly can’t say.
But I’m not sure perception was ever the point. Beethoven’s hearing began to fail in his late twenties, and by about 1818 he was profoundly deaf, holding his conversations through written notebooks. It was in those years that he wrote the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets. He could compose without hearing because he had spent decades listening, long enough to carry a working model of what sound would do. The judgment was built through the sense, and then it outlived it.
That’s what the fundamentals are in a designer who has them: a model of consequences, assembled from thousands of acts of looking, each one tied to a purpose. It lives in someone who has done the looking, and nowhere else.
So the most useful thing a designer can do now is also the least fashionable. Go back to the fundamentals. Study them until you can apply them, then until you can see them — in your own work, in other people’s, in whatever a model hands you. Build the habit of naming what’s wrong and why.
Maybe someone will write the skill that finally holds all of it. People have tried, and I’ve used their skills as well as my own. They don’t really work, at least not in the way that matters. They shape the output, but not in a way that relieves anyone of the need to review it critically. A good designer looks at what comes back and knows immediately where it needs to change.
For the time being, I’m betting against any skill that claims to take care of the fundamentals, because the fundamentals aren’t a script. A machine can compile, read, synthesize and generate faster than the human mind ever will; that much is true. But in this particular way, the slower mind is still the better one. Speed counts for a great deal, though not for everything.
2026-09-15 12:00:00
For many years, I have maintained a text file called “A Rubric for Website Design Critique.” It is relatively short, but used nonetheless; I’ve returned to it, off and on, for most of my career, referring back, adding things, removing things, adjusting. Its purpose is to standardize how I challenge the work I do and the work I am shown, and even a standard needs maintenance.
The documented rubric has five components. Of information architecture, it asks, Is the priority apparent? Does it make sense? Is it actionable? Of layout: Do the visual elements support the architecture? Is the page as scannable as a high-fidelity asset as it was a wireframe? Of accessibility: Is there adequate contrast? Has text been hidden in images? Can a screen reader properly navigate? And of visual language, Is there coherence? Is it consistent? I emphasized documented earlier because it was never complete. The fifth component is art direction, and after that heading in my document is nothing.
The file just ends.
It isn’t like me to leave something unfinished. I don’t like ragged edges, even when I know they’re natural and sometimes essential. And time and again over the years, I’ve had a chance to wonder at this empty space. Why is it there? Why is it difficult to fill? Perhaps I’m just not the person to fill it. Perhaps that’s where my expertise ends.
However, looking again at this unfinished document recently, I have come to a different conclusion. The first four sections — Information Architecture, Layout, Accessibility, Visual Language — are inspection routines. Each one asks a question that has an answer, and the answer can — should — be able to be found by someone who is not me. Art direction is not like that. And that’s why every time I attempted to fill out structured guidance I produced a list of things I did not actually believe… and then deleted them.
And so, the section remained empty, which is its own kind of answer, and not a very useful one. Here is a better attempt.
The first four sections are about order. They ask whether a page is arranged so that it can be seen, perceived, and understood. That is the floor, and a great deal of professional work never gets off it. In fact, the majority of my career has been focused on getting interaction design off the floor.
On my team we have run a periodic competition called The Tidiest Designer, where each person submits a composition file for inspection. We look for order, consistency, clarity, and utility. We do not do this because order alone makes design good. We do it because order is what allows good design to happen. Many beautiful, client-applauded comps have been chaotic disasters underneath their presentation modes, and not surprisingly, conflict-inducing when actually produced. Order facilitates that the promise of design becomes its function.
But deeper than that, when order is our foundation, we can spend more of our critical energy on the responsible rendering of taste.
Section five is that rendering. It is the point at which intent stops being organized and starts being expressed. What follows is not a set of criteria, then, but five places to stand while you look, in the order I tend to look, with a test attached to each that someone else can run. Where a test comes back “I don’t know,” that is a finding. Most designers are intuitive in their creation, which is not a bad thing. But without cross-examining, reinforcing, studying, enriching, and systematizing what begins with our intuition, we end up with something that is meaningful to us and arbitrary to everyone else. This — arbitrariness — is the most common condition of professional design work, and it is nearly invisible from the inside.
Every good piece of design has at least one detail that unlocks how the whole thing works. Good designers notice it immediately. Everyone else responds to it without knowing they have. It might be a rule, a crop, a single color used once, a piece of type set deliberately against the grid. Whatever it is, the rest of the composition should be clearing a path for it.
A designer on my team once brought me a set of ads for a maker of high-end audio equipment, built around the idea of choice. Two arrows ran in parallel and then diverged, one rendered in color veering off to the left, the other in white, passing it before turning right. The white arrow was the key. It overpowered the bolder colored one simply by pushing further into the space, and its arc carried the eye down to the copy and the call to action. Then I noticed that its curve radius quietly echoed the skewed, rotated “o” in the client’s logotype, and that those two arrows were the only shapes in the entire ad other than text. That last part is the lesson. The key was doing three jobs at once, and everything else had gotten out of its way.
The Key Test. Name the key in one sentence. Then say what the composition does to protect it. If nothing on the page is deferring to anything else, there is no key, only assembly. If you can name three, there is also no key, because three keys is zero keys.
Structure does more work than content while convincing its audience of the opposite. This is the oldest secret in graphic design and painters have known it longest. Mondrian said that every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and colors and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture. I adore that because it explains why I can find inspiration in a page of text before I have read a single word. A page held up by its photography is not designed. It is dressed.
It is also why I stay in wireframe far longer than most people would think reasonable, finalizing layout with grey boxes and grey lines even when the real material is sitting right there. If it is beautiful on the merits of its structure, it will hold almost any image and almost any text.
The Structure Tests. The first one is a classic for graphic designers: Squint until the type turns to grey and the images turn to shapes, and see whether the hierarchy still reads. The other takes a bit more work but, I think is better: Put a grey box where the hero image is and a line of Latin where the headline is. If the design dies, the image was doing the design’s job, and the next round of content will expose it.
This is the one most design work fails, and it fails in hiding, because nothing is obviously, visually wrong. When we constantly reference existing solutions, our work gravitates toward the mean. We solve for expectations rather than needs. We optimize for recognition rather than revelation. The result is competent and anonymous, and it passes every inspection above.
Restraint, on the other hand, is the visible evidence that somebody was directing. It shows up as absence, which makes it hard to credit and easy to skip.
The Point of View Test. Put your design beside three others in its category and swap the logos or identifying marks. If this doesn’t break or seriously undermine your work — if your work is that interchangeable — then it has no direction. It is conventional in the truest sense. The harder version of this test is a question you really must ask at various stages of your work: What did I deliberately not do? or What is this not doing? If you cannot answer, then nothing was decided. Such a thing will age at exactly the rate of its category. And because it followed the category’s lead, it will always be behind.
Imagery and type say something before anyone reads a word, and what they say is frequently not what the business does.
A few years ago I ran an informal study on a client’s homepage to prove a hunch. They sell technology and expertise to wineries, and they wanted to connect the heritage and craft their customers care about to the stability their technology provides. So they leaned hard on old-style typefaces and historical imagery, to make prospects feel at home. It looked really nice, but I was worried that’s all it did. Traffic was being paid for, and not enough was converting.
So, I ran a transient attention test. Participants had eight seconds with the homepage, scrolling but not clicking, and then the page was closed and they were asked what stood out and what the page was for. The page said “commerce technology” and “wine brands” in scannable, plain text. And yet, every participant recalled the imagery instead — an ancient Greco-Roman tapestry — and volunteered words like “history” and “archaeology.” Not one person mentioned wine. Not one mentioned technology.
The page was well written. But for its viewers, it was about the wrong thing.
The Imagery Test. Give someone outside the project eight seconds to view your design. Afterward, ask what the thing they just saw was — what does the company do? what was the page for? Do not accept a paraphrase of the headline. Ask what the pictures told them. The gap between their answer and the actual business is the size of the art direction problem.
Good design is evergreen. The reactions I trust are the ones that survive a week, and the ones I distrust tend to arrive fastest. Anything resting on a technique currently in fashion has a short window before a browser, a platform, or simply everyone else’s adoption closes it.
Both of the tests here buy the same thing at different scales: distance. A week of it shows you what belongs to this year. An hour of it shows you what belongs to the last hour of your own looking.
The Dated Test. Leave the composition open in a tab and come back to it after a week, even if it has already progressed through reviews, as most things will in that time. Then, name what on it is dated to this year, and ask of each whether it is carrying an idea or just carrying a date. A composition can survive one or two decisions that belong to its moment. It does not survive being made of them.
The Interval Test. This one goes after a different fragility, one that lives in your read of the work rather than in the work itself. Clutter accumulates precisely because the eye that added it has stopped seeing it. I have always found that coming back to a finished but unshared design after even just a few hours away, sometimes minutes, has resulted in needed editorial moves. What you have been staring at is porous to every other thing held on your screen or in your recent memory, and your working brain is an unwitting cheat. Breaks expose that immediately. Take enough of them and the work stops absorbing its surroundings.
Taste is that combination of preference, personality, and perceived novelty that lets an observer tell your work from someone else’s. It belongs in the work. It does not belong in the verdict.
I have sat in too many reviews where a real critique was offered, understood, and then dissolved by “well, we like it.” That is nice. But who cares if you like it? Does it do what it is supposed to do? Or is it possible that the things you like about it get in the way?
The way through is not to suppress the reaction but to keep going after it. Name what you are responding to, then say what it is doing for the work. If it is doing nothing for the work, you have found a preference. If it is doing something, you have found a judgment, and now you have to justify it, which is the only part of design that has ever been hard. To make it somewhat easier, do not defend it. Sell it. Don’t believe the lie that “good design just works” as if it will be self-evident in the eye of the beholder and embraced without question. Nothing could be further from the truth. Good design often requires advocacy.
Every rubric wants to become an inspection. In art school you always knew a critique was going nowhere when someone would ummm and ahhh, approach the piece, back away from it, approach it again, and finally ask, “is this, ummm, is this balsa wood?” They just had to say something, and what a thing is made of was the best they could do. The digital equivalent is talking about the canvas, the type foundry, the plugins, or opening the inspector. None of those are relevant to assessing a design’s quality.
Sections one through four can be inspected. Section five has to be seen — by you first, and yet, outside of yourself — which takes time and, more importantly, conviction.
I do not think that section five will ever be as short as the others, or as portable. It takes longer to run than all four of them combined. For years I read that as a defect in my system. But lately I have started to suspect it is the only part of the rubric that will still be worth anything in a few years, because production is becoming generative and design is not.
Which leaves me somewhere I have not settled. The first four sections are the ones a machine can already run. The fifth is the one it cannot, so the fifth is where the work is going. But the fifth is also the one nobody has ever managed to teach quickly. I do not yet know whether that is a problem to solve or a fact to accept. Better yet, maybe it’s a distant horizon to embrace, because it means we have somewhere left to go.
P.S. I have left creative direction out of this entirely, which is a cheat. In my own notes it sits above art direction, closer to the conceptual end of the spectrum that runs down through graphic design to the mechanics of a build. That is a different piece, and I suspect a harder one.
