SUBGRID

ISSUE 002

Every week I read maybe a dozen or so articles about how people are thinking of generative AI in their work and domains. Lately, they've been increasingly more so about design. I was reading a piece last week by a designer named Steve Vassallo (now a venture capitalist running Foundation Capital). As I was reading it, I found all the bits relevant to what could be said about design & generative AI today. Except, that piece was written some two years ago. What does that say about where we are today?

Yes, there have been lots and lots of incremental advances in the last two years in technology, but we find ourselves, across cultures and time zones, dealing with the same questions about our work and what's to come. Benedict Evans frequently voices this in his essays and podcasts (with Toni Cowan-Brown) on where technology and products are headed next.

In any tech cycle, there is a dichotomy. There is the real stuff and then there's hype. They exist very close to each other. They both can come from the same inventor, entrepreneur, expert or company. Amidst the much ado about the 'AI bubble' at the moment (just search 'AI bubble' or ask your GPT of choice), the onus is on us to cautiously separate the BS from the signal. "Superintelligence" is a BS word. Anthropic's latest model outperforming humans on engineering interview questions is real data.

Living in this era and making sense of everything that's going on is a balancing act. I don't want SUBGRID to become an AI newsletter. This is a newsletter about design. Every week while writing the issues, I struggle with this balancing act of how many opinions about AI to include. I try to keep it to a minimum. But, feel free to let me know if it ever gets too much.
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On to this week's issue.

–Siddharth

WORDS & VIEWS

​Typography's impact on Penguin's success​

"The best typography is deeply concerned with a text's ability to permeate the mind of the reader. Typography sits there as a kind of gauze between two minds." – says Charles Nix, creative director at Monotype in a conversation with Creative Boom about publishing icon Penguin and the role typography played in its success.

​Design isn't just for designers​

“56% of non-designers said they engage a lot or a great deal in at least one design-centric task” – report by design tool maker Figma on blurring of roles in the work realm. It suggests that the workers up & down the traditional org stack are increasingly touching what used to be the exclusive domain of designers. This results in more voices in the design process – frustrating if you don’t have the right workflow or tools to manage all that input, but likely helps you design better, more-informed products. How to interpret "craft still matters": have a point-of-view in your designs and do not let AI decide that.

​A typeface inspired by the city​

"In reducing everything to its bare essentials, somehow character emerged, and it’s what inspired me to design Fran Sans." – writes Emily Sneddon about designing a font inspired by displays inside San Francisco's Muni Light Rail Vehicles. It's fascinating how a figment of inspiration from the city set Emily, a designer, on a journey of finding out why something is designed the way it is designed. Emily talks about how the work of other typographers from different eras influenced ideas that led to the creation of this font. With Fran Sans, Emily preserves an element of a city that's constantly evolving through time and technology and etches it forever in typographic history. Inspiring stuff. See this week's Designer of Note.

​The current 'state-of-the-art' in AI-driven frontends​

AI tools still suck at design. But how much of that is the prompt? Anthropic (maker of Claude) provided some examples of how to get Claude to generate better design outputs, highlighting the importance of steerability in LLMs. To be honest, I find that these prompts create better polish outcomes, not necessarily better design outcomes. Nonetheless, still useful if you're using AI to rapidly prototype many concepts but don't want them to look cookie-cutter. On a personal note, in the last few weeks, Claude has become my go-to daily chatbot. After months of testing Claude Code in real-world product building scenarios, I migrated to Claude entirely a month ago from ChatGPT. Turns out AI / LLM memory isn't such a moat as it is made out to be.

PRODUCT DISCOVERIES

​iA Writer: Hands-down the most zen distraction-free writing tool in the world. The beauty and simplicity is in the details. I’ve used iA Writer for a long time and it gets better with every update. Whether used for daily notes, writing essays, planning a book or writing a script, iA Writer is a tool that gets out of the way and lets you focus on the writing. A recent update called Authorship that lets you demarcate whether a piece of text is written by you or AI is of great relevance today. All done locally, no servers involved so privacy is preserved by design. Much respect for a product that has lasted for 15 years in the App Store and continues to be in the top charts. And in 2025, iA Writer was a finalist for the coveted Apple Design Awards in the Interaction category.

​Sunday Silence Coffee: Sourced from small farmers and co-ops around the world, Sunday Silence is eco-friendly coffee roasted in Nova Scotia, Canada. By no means am I a coffee connoisseur, but this is some of the best coffee I've ever had. And initially the hues on the packaging was what caught my eye at a little farmer's market here in Ontario. "Moments of solitude and reflection have always been connected to great coffee" – the mission statement of Sunday Silence. And I couldn't agree more.

​Are.na: Built upon the ideas of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, Arena is a Pinterest for designers, but orders of magnitudes calmer. (Ted Nelson was a computer science philosopher who coined the term hypertext, a concept that's key to how the world wide web works.) Arena can be endlessly inspiring. It's like tapping into the creative visual subconscious of thinkers around the world, completely devoid of social media dynamics of likes. You can still follow users and 'Connect' ideas. Since there are no ads, you get 200 free blocks (which is plenty for me), after which you have to go premium (remember, if you don't pay for a product, you are the product). Arena publishes their self-sustainability metrics and as a small independent team, it's heartening to see that they have over 18,000 paid subscribers (~50% of all monthly active members, which is very impressive).

​Cargo: Cargo is a site builder for designers and artists. It's minimal website design software that just works. The templates are beautifully lighweight, many of them monochrome, giving emphasis to the type and media. You are free to customize as much as you want. In fact, my portfolio ran on a modified Cargo template for a good few years till I went all custom HTML/CSS over an Xmas break. I'm not sure if Cargo is indie or venture-funded, but it is another great example of sustainable software for the indies that's built with care.

THIS WEEK'S BOOK

DESIGNER OF NOTE

​Emily Sneddon​

Emily Sneddon is a designer based in Sydney, Australia. While I discovered Emily through her typographic work on Fran Sans as written earlier, her work has touched product surfaces of familiar brands like Figma, Intercom, YouTube and Disney. Throughout her portfolio, there is a pattern of bringing things down to the bare essentials, which I find refreshing. Emily is a designer who can take concepts and inspirations from anywhere and everywhere and bring them to life in new, living forms.

ARTIFACT FROM THE PAST

~ That's it for this week's edition. We're all made of star stuff. ~

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