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Design is all around us. The work of a designer influences your life every day in big and small ways, even if you don't notice. It genuinely feels good to interact with objects and experiences that are designed thoughtfully. Good design nourishes the soul.
SUBGRID is for the design curious. It’s my on-going catalog of curated signals of product design and craft. Of things and ideas discovered from around the web, and from designers, writers and makers all across this little blue dot in the universe we call home.
Composed with care, SUBGRID will show up in your inbox once a week, most weeks of the year.
I know making room for another weekly newsletter when our inboxes overflow with content and marketing emails ("one final reminder") isn’t a small ask. It was already hard to keep up with signals and noise coming at us from group chats, social media and news apps in the pre-AI era! And now, in our present day deluge of AI-generated 'slop', finding signals amidst noise has become the work worthy of a Quidditch Seeker. But, an epiphany of sorts hit me a few weeks ago: you can do more with less things you know. The art of collecting knowledge and ideas deserves to be balanced with thinking more about the stuff you collect. And about three weeks after that field note to myself, I’m starting a design newsletter. There is irony there, but also curious co-incidence.
Nonetheless, as we touched on the topic of AI-generated 'slop', I feel it’s important to mention here for the records that SUBGRID is human-written and human-curated (I am the human.. can't believe I have to say this stuff now).
Also, SUBGRID will always be free. If you like it, please share it with your friends who appreciate good design. I like hearing from readers. Don’t hesitate to hit reply if you ever want to share your thoughts. I read every email.
Sound good? Let’s get right into this week’s issue.
–Siddharth
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Julian Bleecker revisits The Anti-Aesthetic
"The AI makes it easy to generate something that looks good, but that ease can obscure the deeper questions about why the image matters at all." – writes Julian Bleecker of Near Future Laboratory in an astute and concise essay, Against the Smooth. Every industry right now is trying to make sense of generative AI and determine to what extent it might change the craft. This timely piece makes me wonder about intentionality in approaching work. Maybe all of this is an opportunity for us to really understand why we are doing what we are doing. Julian offers a refreshing, nuanced take, weaving in some of our collective perceptions around AI in this era, and hinting at a need now and in the future for deeper, almost spiritual work around what we create. May I add that Julian writes a brilliant newsletter around design futures which I've treasured in my inbox weekly for years now. I highly recommend checking it out.
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Design's influence on political campaigns
One of the most striking aspects of the political campaign of the new mayor-elect of New York City was the design of his brand. Berlin-based designer Johannes Ippen breaks it down for us succinctly on his typographically delightful blog. What fascinated me about the Mamdani brand was the melding of aesthetics from a bygone era with a vibe appealing to the modern Gen Z voter. Energetic and beautiful, yet raw. Read more in the essay with tons of visual artifacts from the campaign. And if you love a past meets modern vibe, be sure to check out the rest of this week's newsletter.
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Jason Fried on design driving behaviour
Jason Fried looks at a seemingly small detail of a real product (a German watch in this case) with a lens of designer and writes about the substantial influence it has on user behaviour. Note that I have often re-quoted Jason Fried's opinions on business and products, in so much that my very first essay on my blog some 16 years ago was inspired by I'm pretty sure something he wrote in either Getting Real or 37 Signals' (makers of Basecamp and HEY) now-archived Signal vs. Noise blog.
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The distinction of search vs. AI chats
"When I want to search, I just want to search. And when I want to talk to AI, I want to talk to AI." – blogger John Gruber on the recent product design pattern of mixing search and chatting with an LLM in his twice-a-week conversation with Stratechery writer Ben Thompson. I, for one, have been using ChatGPT Atlas for a few weeks now as a secondary browser (my primary is Safari) and I echo Gruber's sentiments. When you open a new tab in Atlas and start typing, it defaults to "Ask ChatGPT" unless you explicitly type in a link. To Google something, you have to press command (⌘) + return, which is sorta annoying. This feels like a product decision optimizing for engagement more than a design decision optimizing for convenience. After all, OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) and Google compete head-on these days as ChatGPT aspires to replace pretty much everything. While that podcast episode is behind a Dithering / Stratechery paywall (highly recommend for honest expert takes on tech – I've been a paid subscriber for a few years now), Gruber wrote about Group Chats in ChatGPT as well as ChatGPT Atlas recently.
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Accessibility in emerging product categories
Léonie Watson writes candidly in Accessibility and the Agentic Web: "We humans love convenience and we dislike effort." Léonie, a W3C board member and also a co-chair of the W3C Web Applications Working Group, highlights the opportunities for designing more accessible interfaces on AI-driven product surfaces and how they could make shopping more convenient. Unfortunately, accessibility still tends to be treated as an afterthought by a lot of mainstream product design (it's not just ALT tags) but nascent platforms being built from the bottom up provide a good opportunity to build better foundations. It's a cautiously optimistic take on AI agent use cases at the intersection of accessibility and product design.
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Bauhaus Clock by Atilla is a beautiful screensaver for Mac. Yes, screensaver – you read that right. Screensavers have been a lost art, but for many millennials, including myself, they invoke a certain nostalgia of simpler times. Bauhaus Clock makes your screen(s) a little a lot more beautiful to glance at from a distance. |
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Paperlike's iPad Screen Protector is less screen protector, more design accessory. It’s a simple addition to your iPad that makes the screen feel more like paper. Installing screen protectors is a real hassle and skill in so much so that many would rather prefer to get an Apple Store employee to do it. Paperlike seems to lower this barrier with their “Butterfly” installation mechanism. |
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Vestaboard Note is a beautiful, compact messaging display for your office, small business, coffee shop or home. It's the modern equivalent of the 'split-flap' displays one might see at airports if they're teleported back to the 1960s. That old-fashioned meets modernity is one of my favourite product categories and this one captures that longing well. |
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Freeform is a minimal digital whiteboarding app by Apple you might have overlooked. It's a canvas I use to organize my design thinking visually, especially the "why" parts around a project, after the sketching phase and before the Figma phase. Lately, I've used it to collate feedback from users and put some order to the chaos of ideas. While there are other nice team-oriented tools out there, Freeform works wonderfully for solo use cases as a lightweight canvas. It's free and probably already on your Mac or iPad. |
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Design for the Corporate World: Creativity on the Line, 1950-1975
WIM DE WIT
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Exhibited at Stanford by curator Wim de Wit, the contents of this book walk through the design aesthetic of America's corporations from the mid-century.
It also reminds me of Ben Stiller's Apple TV+ show Severance, with its heavy Dieter Rams / Braun influence carefully curated in the show's sets.
This year, I finally managed to snag an old paperback of this coffee table-ready book from somewhere in the Welsh countryside.
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Meredith Hattam
I discovered Meredith's work through her stunning brand identity work for The New Yorker. Based in Berlin, Meredith is a design generalist who runs studio A Present Force. Some of the best design work I've lately seen are from female-founded studios and A Present Force is a solid example. It's identity and visual design work that is so emotionally moving you want to be immersed in it for hours. Be sure to check out some of her work when you have a few moments.
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This week, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the movie Toy Story, The Steve Jobs Archive published a never-before-seen interview of Steve Jobs about Pixar's early days after the success of Toy Story. Jobs speaks with clarity, among a handful of topics, about the differences in cultures and economics of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Toy Story captured hearts around the world, including little me, as a talking Buzz Lightyear became my favourite childhood toy.
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~ That's it for this week's edition. To infinity and beyond. ~
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Siddharth S. Jha
Product Designer & Builder
I'm a product designer-builder based in Ontario, Canada. I like building thoughtful interfaces that make people feel good. You can visit my website to learn more about me.
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