My curated weekly newsletter is out. This week: why AI output isn't design, AI fatigue in engineering, and skills for accessibility programs. Also: amazing illustrations about human psychy, a distraction-free writing tool, and 43 years of Apple Macs dataviz. 👉🏻 stephaniewalter.design/blog/pixels-...

So basically Adobe automatically renewed my yearly subscription. Their "your subscription will be automatically renewed" email notification ended up in my spams, so, of course I missed the deadline. LOVELY. I really need to put reminders in calendars, clearly emails can't be trusted.

One perk of having zero memory is that I would order cool stickers and art online from illustrators I love, forget I ordered, get the parcel and then it's kind of a nice surprise gift to myself, so yeaahy 😁

We’re recruiting a Senior User Researcher at Public Health Wales. This is an opportunity to help embed user research as a core part of how we design and deliver healthcare services, not an afterthought. Reach out if you'd like to know more about the role www.healthjobsuk.com/job/UK/Cardi...

Sometimes, you stumble upon someone’s work that deeply resonates with you: the style, the content, the imagery, the themes. That’s what happened when I discovered Chrissy's work.

So, if you have an education stipend, please do use it to support your favourite dev educators! If you’d like to support my work, you can pick up a copy of my latest course. The full price will be US$649, but it’s on sale until Tuesday for US$389.

THIS, yeees, this, this is why you want to book training with humans. Because, of the exchange, the back and forth, the "oh I didn't even know I had that question, but this conversation now lead to it". Also, this is why I love training: people bring all sorts of questions I never thought about 💛

10 UI Patterns That Won't Survive the AI Shift, according to Taras Bakusevych. Some interesting examples of how AI can help with UI patterns around complex data handling, filling content, finding things, and customization of the content targeted toward a specific user. uxdesign.cc/10-ui-patter...

“Somewhere between the happy path and edge cases, we forgot to design against harmful actors.” Yup, that’s it, and it’s scary, the way the social platforms are designed today rewards toxic behavior. There’s still things designers could do, but, honestly, who is going to listen to us at this point?

Nice cool: Photo Palettes, a collection of color palettes inspired by beautiful pictures. photopalettes.com/

Am I the only one who feels like the Duffer Brothers took Vi's character design, gave her some of Jinx's tinkering personality and voilà, Nikki Baxter, from the new Stranger Things anime?!

154 Macs Since 1983: a really cool timeline dataviz showing 43 years of Apple’s designs, from Macintoshes, to PowerBooks, iMacs, Macbooks and beyond.

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it. An interesting article by Siddhant Khare, listing the many reasons engineers feel burnt out when using AI: context switching, constant review of generated code, nondeterminism stress, and FOMO from not being able to keep up with all the tools.

Design isn’t the pretty pixels output. It is the slow, messy work of understanding context, constraints, and real needs. And then shaping a solution that actually fits. AI can fake the form, not the thinking. Output isn’t design (5min) linear.app/now/output-i...

Tool of the week: if you are tired of cluttered text editors with 150 options you don't need, you are going to love Blank Page. It's a very simple (this is positive), distraction free, text editor in the browser, write, share, enjoy. blank.page/ (by René Galindo and Mo Boudra)

Little reminder that access for disabled people brought us a lot of innovations and technologies that benefit everyone: electric tooth brush, ramps, text to speech and voice assistants, Velcro, audio books, touch-less and automatic doors, subtitles and captions, etc. Great video by Jenni Pettican

As a Jira user, I want an AI chatbot that gives me wacky prompt examples, so that I can bring an even bigger mess to our backlog. Yeah, this is, exhausting.

Le nouveau formulaire MDPH, une violence de plus. Disparition de l’expression libre, langage déshumanisant, droits omis… Selon @lesdevalideuses.bsky.social, ces changements risquent d'effacer les besoins des personnes handicapées : a42.fr/formulaire-m... #a11y #handicap

My curated weekly newsletter is out. This week: why UX strategy is an often skipped yet most needed in projects and AI tools replacing craft with convenience. Also: a fun cat that blocks you from doom scrolling and beautiful inspiration. 👉🏻 stephaniewalter.design/blog/pixels-...

Some Friday fun: designers, what's the wackiest request you ever got about colors? I'll go first: new project, new identity, an external consultant requested that the project uses her consulting company's brand colors, because "I already have 250 slides and don't want to have to redesign them".

drawing, and history is working. Any ideas for a good name?

Here comes a little gem for typography and unicode lovers: Charcuterie is a visual explorer for Unicode. Browse the character set, discover related glyphs, and learn more about the scripts, symbols, and shapes that make up the standard. charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#1F7A0

Magic GIF Exporter is a Figma plugin that lets you select any set of frames and export them as a polished animated GIF MP4, or WebM video in seconds. I can totally see this used for some small fun animations, yeah. www.figma.com/community/pl...

Apparently I can either bring my mouse, or my headset, my brain won't remember to pick both when going into the office. Meh. I am the only one incapable of working with a trackpage (expect the macbook ones)? I'm trying, really, but I feel so slow with the thinkpad one. It's going to be a long day.

Today's beautiful inspiration: Camila Nogueira is an illustrator artist and muralist from Porto, with a colorful bright neon style. I really love the vibe of those beautiful surreal worlds. camilaillustration.pt/

Worried you spend too much time on social media? I got a solution for you: how about a giant orange cat that hijacks your screen and forces you to take a break from different social media websites? Yup, that’s a fun little Chrome plugin. chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cat-g...

One of the most skipped steps in UX projects, but also one of the most needed: defining your UX strategy. It's usually a short document that explains where you are now, what a good experience looks like (where you want to be) and how the team plans to get there.

AI doesn’t kill craft. Craft in our design job is structure, hierarchy, clear communication. The danger: AI tools push designers (and non designers) into building products super fast by skipping these important iterations. Accepting the first output as done.

Latest craft news: I have a soft spot for neon colors, so last month I bought some pink neon yarn. I finally found a cute crochet project for it: a little Sakura wind chime, with a fun bell to make some noise. And yes, the neon pink is as bright as in the picture (maybe even brighter). Love it.

Today's song on repeat, I think I found the "neurodivergent people struggle with social interactions" anthem. Lyrics: genius.com/Ehle-me-prob... Song www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8GT...

This is my kind of pen testing 😁 I discovered Faber-Castell has acrylic markers and was curious. @lalunemauve.fr told me that the best way to test opacity is a white marker on black background. I admit I'm surprised, the Faber coverage is higher than my Posca for paper.

Some Friday coding sessions. I don't really have a favorite color, since it depends on what this color is used for. But I might have a soft spot for purple when it comes to dev environment and office decor. I still haven't repainted the horrible toilet paper pink wall though 🫣

In the mood for some retro gaming design? Title Scream brings type and pixel art inspiration from 8/16bit games title screens (warning: moving repeating gifs that might trigger seizure/ motion sickness) Created by Cameron Askin titlescream.cameronaskin.com/

The Accessibility Problem Isn't Design. It's Engineering. Chris Gibbons argues that designers can document all the accessible components they want; in most companies, full stack developers don’t know how to actually implement them.

Tired of accessibility pushbacks like “We have no disabled users”? Yeah, me too. Here’s how to reframe them. This article is a text version of my axe-con 2026 talk (organised by @deque.com) Full article: stephaniewalter.design/blog/9-acces...

How to make emojis and icons screen reader accessible? Emojis are picture characters, with a name that gets read by screen readers. This can lead to issues when the name doesn't convey your intended meaning.

Train Jazz is what happens when you mix jazz and train enthusiasm: a jazz combo played in real time by every active NYC subway train. It’s fun and strange at the same time. www.trainjazz.com/

Take my job, AI! On embracing being replaced by AI... wait, what?! Jeff Zych is tired of the current state of product design where designers are powerless middlemen between PMs, engineers and business with zero power. Yeah, I can relate with that part, I’m also feeling burnt out from this.

Monday procrastination and fun demo: Robin Payot recreated the ocean part of Zeldan the Wind Waker using Three.js. I am very bad at this, but it's both fun and impressive. wind-waker-threejs.com/

My curated weekly newsletter is out: a wireframing with ASCII text tool, removing before adding as design principle and how AI speeds up code but not projects. Also: a beautiful river-inspired font, some Wikipedia rabbit hole and 3D printed pumping heart bag. 👉🏻 stephaniewalter.design/blog/pixels-...

Current ear-worm. Also, the video is quite nicely done:

Welcome to "I want to publish an article", but - 1st I need to finish the workshop description linked to this article and add it to the workshop page - also, the slides have a new version of the rainbow of disability sticker, so I need to update the ones in the shop. So, here we go, sticker time!

Friday inspiration: the visit Amazonia website is beautiful (but has a lot of motion) www.visiteamazonia.com.br/en/ They also used part of the river curves to create a font, Igaratipo (it's hard to read but fun) www.visiteamazonia.com.br/en/ I love that the logo also uses this font.

Time for another round of "Accessibility, colors and contrast checkers" news. If you've heard or read "just use APCA to check your mockup color contrasts, it's what WCAG3 will require", please read this by @aardrian.bsky.social

Our brain loves and rewards novelty, in the form of dopamine. Old tasks don't bring any. This is why we tend to avoid older tasks we need to do, and "productively procrastinate" on new tasks.

Am I the only one noticing a trend of "rediscovering the wheel via the AI prism?" This week alone, I read three things that made me pause. First: an article about how you need to define a data model before asking AI to generate Figma screens. Otherwise AI gets things wrong.

I'm absolutely fascinated by this tool that lets you build wireframes using text elements, ASCII art style. I've seen wireframes in excel, powerpoint, on paper, but this is a first. Still, it's actually quite efficient and exportable. Love it! wiretext.app/

Very niche, but, if you need to find and replace, text, in a Figma mockup, specifically in a frame or a section, I got a plugin for you: www.figma.com/community/pl...

Remove before you add should be a design principle! I absolutely agree here. Our brain is wired to add things, since we associate progress with accumulation. But everything button, feature, line of content we add on the screen, brings hidden costs: more decisions for users, more things to maintain.

Did I migrate my site code to remove Sass? Nope. Do I have a very nice Visual Studio Code theme that is now also versioned on my github to be used on other computers? Maybe... It's based on vscodethemes.com/e/SamRC.nigh... but the dark was too dark (yeah, I swear this makes sense)