As designers, many of us got into the profession because we had other creative passions. Perhaps we grew up drawing, or painting, or were into music or performing arts. Then the daunting reality of making a living set in, and we started asking: what careers let you actually get paid for being creative?

In high school, I loved illustration, and thought I might end up going to art school. But I ended up at a liberal arts school that wasn't known for its art program. I also loved making and building things. So the product design major seemed like a blend between art and engineering that I could embrace. I struggled through many of the engineering requirements, and despite surviving four years of advanced math, I still need to lean on ChatGPT to assist me when my daughter asks for help with her homework.

I’m sure many of you wrestled with similar challenges (though it’s not unlikely that you’re better at math than me!). Like me, you might be curious how some of the best known artists out there made their art while supporting themselves.

This week we published our interview with , author of Making Art While Making A Living, a book that uses the lives of artists, writers, and composers to ask the same question many of us been challenged with: how do you maintain a creative life while still paying the bills?

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Mason Currey: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

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Meet Crafted, the evolution of UserTesting’s Human Insight Summit — designed for teams who intentionally build with customer insight at the center. In Seattle, Eli Woolery will host AI & Design Thinking, a hands-on workshop exploring how generative AI can sharpen (not replace) your creative process.

Secure your spot at events.usertesting.com/crafted with code DesignBetter100 for $100 off workshops.

May 28th: Seattle, September 17th: London

Get tickets

The double life

One of the most surprising findings in Mason’s research is how many canonical artists had parallel professional lives that had nothing to do with their art. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. William Carlos Williams was a family physician. Franz Kafka spent his days at an insurance office, writing letters and diary entries that dramatically overstated his misery — even as he was, by most measures, actually getting writing done.

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Crafting intelligent interfaces with AI

On Tuesday, May 12, we’re sitting down with Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred, authors of Sentient Design, for a live AMA you won’t want to miss.

If you haven’t heard of Sentient Design yet, it’s one of the most thought-provoking books to come out of the AI design conversation. Josh and Veronika explore what it means …

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At several points in his life, Eli imagined what it would take to become a full-time artist — a photographer or illustrator free from client work. What he didn’t realize was that he already had an example of a different path right in front of him: his father, a practicing physician whose published poetry earned recognition from luminaries like John Ashbery.

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Mason Currey’s most recent book explores these alternate paths. He’s the author of Daily Rituals, the beloved book that catalogued the working habits of nearly 200 artists, writers, and composers. His new book, Making Art and Making a Living, goes deeper — into the financial realities, the schemes, the compromises, and the surprising strategies that creatives have used to keep their work alive across centuries.

What he found is both humbling and strangely reassuring. Virginia Woolf had inherited investments. Kafka had insurance. Chantal Akerman had a cash register she skimmed from. John Cage had Italian game show winnings. And yet, running through all of it is the same question that Mason has been asking about his own life since the day he sat down to write a novel and couldn’t: How am I going to pay for this?

In this conversation, Mason walks us through the four funding models his book explores — family money, day jobs, patronage, and schemes — and what the lives of creatives from Kafka to Murakami can teach us about building a practice that actually lasts.

Bio

Mason Currey is the author of the Daily Rituals books, featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day working lives of more than 300 brilliant minds.

His latest book, Making Art and Making a Living, was published by Celadon Books on March 31, 2026.

Currey lives in Los Angeles and writes Subtle Maneuvers, a twice-monthly newsletter on the creative process.

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Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show.

And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

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Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

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If you lead a design team, you’ve probably felt this: your designers are talented, curious, driven, and quietly starving for growth. The day-to-day leaves little room for the kind of learning that actually builds craft and keeps people engaged. And when designers stop growing, they quit.

That’s the problem we built Design Better for Teams to solve.

It brings everything Design Better has — nearly a decade of interviews, our books, The Roundup and The Brief newsletters, monthly live AMAs — directly into your team’s Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace.

Your team can search our entire archive with /db search, ask questions and get answers with /db ask, and get a weekly digest dropped into any channel you choose. New episodes, videos and newsletters show up automatically. No extra tools to log in to.

Everyone in your team will get a Design Better premium account too with all of this:

✔ 4 ad-free episodes per month (free subscribers get 2)
✔ The Roundup — weekly insights synthesized from 168+ interviews
✔ The Brief — monthly design deep dive
✔ Full ebook library (9 books)
✔ The Toolkit (software and courses, $1,000+ value)
✔ Monthly live AMAs with smart design leaders

Plus, the first 5 teams who sign up will also get a free lunch and learn Zoom call with Aarron and Eli.

And it’s way cheaper than sending everyone to a conference separately where 60% of the talks are irrelevant to your team’s goals.

It’s designed for design leaders who want their teams learning together, not just individually. A shared vocabulary. A shared source of inspiration.

Learn more about Design Better for Teams

If you manage a design team, or know someone who does, check it out at designbetter.team.

Happy to answer questions. Just reply.

— Aarron & Eli

We recently had behavioral economist Etinosa Agbonlahor on Design Better, and partway through the interview, we made the mistake of asking her to critique our own membership page live on air. The feedback was a little uncomfortable (in the best way). 🥹

Etinosa spent over a decade at Fidelity and Commonwealth Bank studying how people make financial decisions before building Decision Alpha, a consultancy that helps companies turn pricing into a growth lever. Her framework for pricing draws on behavioral economics, the field that sits at the intersection of psychology and economic decision-making. The principles she laid out for us are a treasure trove for anyone designing a pricing page.

Some of what she described in our interview connects to a broader body of research worth knowing. Two names that come up repeatedly in this space are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose Prospect Theory established that humans don’t evaluate prices in absolute terms. We evaluate them relative to reference points, and we’re far more sensitive to losses than to equivalent gains. Their work earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. If you’ve never read Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman’s accessible summary of a career’s worth of this research, it belongs on your shelf .

Here’s what Etinosa taught us, with some of that broader research woven in where it adds context.

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Etinosa Agbonlahor: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

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The core insight: nobody evaluates a price in isolation

Kahneman and Tversky’s reference-point theory is the engine behind almost every principle below. People don’t look at a price and ask “is this reasonable in absolute terms?” They ask: reasonable compared to what?

A $10,000 raise feels great until you learn everyone else got $20,000. A $27 bucket of popcorn seems moderate the moment it’s sitting next to the $35 one. Your job as a designer is to control what reference point the customer encounters first — because that context shapes everything that follows.

1. Don’t make “yes or no” the question. Make it “which one.”

When you present a single price, you’re asking your visitor to make a binary decision: pay up or leave. The moment you introduce tiers, you reframe the decision entirely. Now they’re choosing how to work with you, not whether to.

This connects to a phenomenon Kahneman and Tversky described called the disjunction effect — people under uncertainty tend toward inaction, even when action would benefit them. A single price creates that uncertainty. Multiple options create movement: the visitor is now deciding between things, not deciding whether to decide.

Etinosa put it directly: “It’s going to change the decision from a yes or no to which one.”

Design principle: Even if your product has one primary tier, consider what you’re putting around it. A free tier below, an enterprise option above — both shift the visitor from hesitating to choosing.

2. Use the decoy to make your target tier feel inevitable

The decoy effect — also called the asymmetric dominance effect — was first formally studied by researcher Joel Huber at Duke in the early 1980s, and it’s one of the most durable findings in behavioral economics. Introduce a third option that’s deliberately unattractive, and it makes one of the other options look dramatically more reasonable by comparison.

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For product teams at startups and established tech giants alike, finding the right pricing and value proposition often feels more like alchemy than science. It’s a high-stakes game of guesswork involving the complex psychology, shifting values, and ingrained behaviors of your customers. While it can take years of trial and error to dial in, our guest today is here to help us decode the pricing formula and understand the behavioral drivers that make a product indispensable.

Etinosa Agbonlahor is a behavioral economist and founder of Decision Alpha, a consultancy that helps businesses understand the psychology behind how people make financial decisions. She’s worked with organizations like Fidelity and Commonwealth Bank of Australia studying how people save, spend, and invest — and she’s turned those insights toward one of the trickiest challenges any business faces: pricing.

In this episode, Etinosa walks us through the cognitive shortcuts that shape how customers perceive value — from anchoring and the decoy effect to the surprising power of round numbers. She explains why pricing should be a conversation that starts early in product development, not an afterthought tacked on at launch. And she offers practical guidance for freelancers and studio owners who struggle with that uncomfortable moment of telling a client what they charge.

We even put her to work live on the show, walking through the Design Better membership page to diagnose what’s working and what we could improve. Her advice was immediate, specific, and — honestly — a little humbling.

Whether you’re designing a SaaS pricing page or figuring out how to raise your freelance rates without apologizing, this one’s packed with insights you can use right away.

Bio

Etinosa Agbonlahor is a behavioral economist and CEO of Decision Alpha, a behavioral firm that helps businesses understand what customers value and turn that into clearer pricing and growth.

Passionate about helping people reduce financial stress and live healthier financial lives, Etinosa brings over a decade of experience working across the U.S., Australia, Africa, and the U.K.

She has shaped financial wellbeing, engagement, and customer behavior strategies for global financial institutions, private businesses, and venture-backed startups.

Her work has been featured in MarketWatch, Morningstar, and other leading platforms, highlighting her focus on how behavior drives healthier financial outcomes.

Etinosa is the author of How to Talk to Your Parents About Money, a guide to navigating complex financial conversations.

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You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

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Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

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Link correction*: join us here for the AMA: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/181419?utm_source=live-stream-share-button
(*we had some tech errors w/ Substack)

Few design leaders are as articulate about process, craft, and the art of being effective inside large organizations as Bob Baxley — and that kind of clarity doesn’t come from reading books. It comes from 35 years leading design at Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo!, and Thoughtspot.

Join us for a live AMA with Bob on Tuesday, April 28 at 9AM PT / 12PM ET / 5PM GMT. This AMA is available to paid subscribers. Upgrade now to join live — and unlock every past recording in the archive.

Beyond your questions, we’ll be asking Bob about the design culture he helped shape at Apple, what the leadership transition there means for the company’s design future, and what he thinks design teams need most right now.

Subscribe to join the Bob Baxley AMA

About Bob Baxley

Bob Baxley is a designer, writer, and advisor who lives and works in Silicon Valley. During a 35 year career that includes Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo!, and others, Bob has led teams and built products used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Blending the principles of humanist philosophy with the craft of software design, he believes we have a moral obligation to create products that demonstrate a deep understanding, empathy, and concern for our audience…all the people out there on the other side of the glass.

In recent years, Bob has advised dozens of startups and mentored hundreds of designers and design leaders. With a perspective that intersects a liberal arts education with a deep background and understanding of computing and design, he regularly appears on leading tech podcasts and industry events around the world — asking difficult questions and nudging conversations into unexpected places.

Yes, I’m a Stranger Things nerd. As I mentioned in our recent interview with Stranger Things writer Paul Dichter, I watched the series myself, and then with my daughter when she was old enough, and most recently with my son. If you need any further evidence, just check out the birthday card my son created for my 50th birthday this year, which features a demogorgon and mind flayer, two of the shows iconic creatures.

And if you can get past our nerd factor, Aarron and I learned quite a few things from our interview with Paul, that apply not only to film and television writing, but to the collaborative efforts of any design or creative team out there.

Meet Crafted, the evolution of UserTesting’s Human Insight Summit — designed for teams who intentionally build with customer insight at the center. In Seattle, Eli Woolery will host AI & Design Thinking, a hands-on workshop exploring how generative AI can sharpen (not replace) your creative process.

Secure your spot at events.usertesting.com/crafted with code DesignBetter100 for $100 off workshops.

May 28th: Seattle, September 17th: London

Get tickets

Every Creative Team Needs Its Skeptics

Paul spent a decade in a small, tight-knit writers’ room — rarely more than six people around a table, in rented houses, with whiteboards and snacks. What strikes him most, looking back, is how clearly different roles emerged, and how essential each one was.

“I think inevitably in this process, you do end up feeling like you’ve got different camps — and one camp is the people that you have to convince, the skeptics. And another camp is the enthusiasts who want to make everything work. I’m definitely an enthusiast. Someone has an amazing idea and you just become obsessed with it... And then you have kind of the big-picture, macro, vision-of-the-whole-board brain, which is able to look at that and be that “Kill Your Darlings” fearless voice of, yes, it is an amazing idea, an amazing character, an amazing moment, but it doesn’t belong here because it slows the story down too much.”

This maps almost exactly onto how strong design teams function. The enthusiast generates energy and possibility. The skeptic prevents the team from falling in love with their own ideas. The big-picture thinker holds the vision steady when the details get chaotic. The mistake many creative teams make is trying to homogenize these roles — to turn everyone into a collaborator who agreeably builds on every idea. The Stranger Things room worked, Paul suggests, because the tension between these roles was embraced rather than managed away.

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Both Aarron and I are official Stranger Things nerds. We watched the show ourselves when they came out, and again when our kids were old enough. As children of the 80s, the way it captured that particular feeling of freedom — biking with friends through the neighborhood, the movies and music of the era — struck exactly the right balance of nostalgia: present enough to feel real, but never forced. For that, much of the credit goes to the writers. So, we were thrilled to get a chance to talk to one of the head writers for Stranger Things, Paul Dichter.

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We’d always wondered what actually happens in a writers’ room for a show like this. Heated debates? Storyboards and character maps to keep a sprawling plot straight? As we learned in this interview: yes to all of it. And in many ways, the writers’ room isn’t so different from the design studio — a place where creative ideas collide and combine, and when it’s working well, produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

Paul wrote co-wrote key episodes in every season of Stranger Things, including Season 4, Episode 4: “Chapter Four: Dear Billy.”

Paul discusses the dynamics of the Stranger Things writers’ room, describing the diverse roles—from enthusiasts to skeptics—that drive creative teams. He explores the discipline of restraint in using 80s nostalgia and the balance between following systemic logic and knowing when to break the rules for a great idea.

There’s also a lot here about how story structure maps onto design work — the idea that every scene needs an engine, that meaningful change has to register at every level, and that the best creative decisions often come not from defending what you already know, but from sitting with a note you hate long enough to find what’s really underneath it.

Bio

Paul Dichter is a television writer and producer best known for his decade-long tenure on Stranger Things. He joined the show in its first season as a writer's assistant — with no agent, no credits, and a background waiting tables — and rose to co-executive producer by the series finale. Over five seasons, he became a central creative voice in the writers' room, co-writing some of the show's most pivotal episodes. He also served as the liaison between the creative team and the show's expansive licensing universe, overseeing the canon across comics, novels, and other extensions of the Stranger Things world.

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. Get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show.

And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

Upgrade to paid

Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show:

Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: contact@thecuriositydepartment.com

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Anthropic dropped Claude Design on Friday April 17 with the same low-key confidence they seem to reserve for every launch: a short news post, a Friday rollout, and a modest caveat that this is a “research preview.” Within hours, Figma’s stock dipped about seven percent. Spoiler alert, we don’t think Claude Design is a Figma killer (yet). But we can see how it could carve off marketshare later this year as it improves.

We’ve spent the last few days pushing the tool around, feeding it brand assets, watching it stumble over responsive design, and generally trying to figure out whether this is a meaningful shift in how design tools work. What follows is a first-pass field report: what Claude Design is, where it clicks, where it struggles, and—most importantly for our readers—how to get started if you want to form your own opinion.

Browser-only—and a hungry usage meter

Claude Design lives inside claude.ai in the browser. There’s no desktop client, no mobile app, no CLI integration (not that this would make much sense). Access is live for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, rolling out gradually. Free-tier users are out of luck for now. (Anthropic’s announcement has the full eligibility list.)

The more interesting operational quirk: Claude Design is metered on its own allowance, separate from the rest of your Claude usage. In our experiments redesigning a personal website home page (yes, just one page), that allowance burns down alarmingly fast. We hit the wall on a typical Pro session and got this friendly little error for our trouble:

We aren’t alone: PCWorld got locked out after roughly half an hour of active design work on a Pro plan. Anthropic is softening the landing with a one-time starter credit—the docs peg it at roughly twenty typical prompts, expiring mid-July—but the real economics of using this tool at scale are still a little mysterious.

If you want to actually evaluate Claude Design, carve out focused sessions and budget for the cool-down periods. We’d love to see Anthropic publish per-prompt token costs more transparently, because right now the budgeting is vibes-based.

We suspect design as an AI task is far more compute expensive, which is probably why Anthropic’s limitations are so tight.

What we’re most excited about: bring your own design system

If there’s a single reason to pay attention to Claude Design, this is it. Every other “AI turns prompts into screens” tool we’ve tried produces the same flavor of generic, gradient-heavy Tailwind-ish output. Claude Design’s bet is that the interesting problem isn’t generating pixels—it’s generating pixels that look like your product.

We’ve already heard how UX researchers, engineers, and other design adjacent disciplines are using AI to generate prototypes and UIs. For these roles, having an AI tool loaded with the company design system will be a huge unlock.

Here’s the flow, briefly, to setting up your design system in Claude Design:

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We’re all familiar with the tropes around innovation and how it starts. You just need a garage in Silicon Valley, a few geniuses and visionaries, maybe some good snacks. Our guests today help us debunk that myth.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw wrote a book called Innovation-ish, and that little “-ish” is doing a lot of work. Rich Braden is a design strategist who’s taught innovation at Stanford and advised companies around the world. Tessa Forshaw is a cognitive scientist whose lab studies the psychology of creativity — why we lose it, and how we get it back.

In this conversation, we talk about why most innovation doesn’t have to be a moonshot — and why chasing moonshots might actually be holding your team back. We dig into the neuroscience of what Tessa calls “innovation hesitation,” the tiny amygdala response that makes us reach for certainty instead of possibility.

Bios

Tessa Forshaw

As a co-founder of the Next Level Lab at Harvard University, Tessa specializes in using cognitive science to develop creative and innovative potential in the workforce. She draws upon her academic research as a cognitive scientist and extensive background as a former designer at IDEO CoLAb and Accenture to turn the cognitive processes involved in design, creativity and innovation into practical insights that can be applied in the flow of work. These insights are also the foundations of what she teaches as a design educator at Stanford University and now Harvard University. Recognized for her impactful design projects, Tessa is the recipient of multiple design awards: a Fast Company Design Award for General Excellence, two Core77 Industrial Design Magazine Design Awards, and the Australian American Chamber of Commerce Innovation Awards.

Rich Braden

Rich Braden is the founder of People Rocket LLC, a strategic innovation firm based in San Francisco. With over 15 years of academic experience, Rich is a recognized thought leader in design thinking, leadership, and innovation. He is a design educator at renowned institutions including Harvard University, Stanford University, and London Business School, helping shape future leaders. As CEO of People Rocket, he works with clients such as Airbnb, Google, the United Nations, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Red Cross to drive strategic innovation and responsible AI solutions. Rich holds degrees in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. New premium benefit: get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

Upgrade to paid

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

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A few months ago, I was on a flight to San Diego, to visit my parents. It was my dad’s birthday in a few days, and mine shortly after. He was in hospice, so I knew it was probably the last birthday I’d be celebrating with him.

I had a small book with me: Mundo Mendo, Book One. It’s the creation of Luis Mendo, who publishes a book each year which is a collection of the “best stories published on Mundo Mendo…carefully revised and adapted for the printed page.”

After paging through the little illustrated vignettes that Luis wrote and illustrated, I began to fall in love with his warm, human illustrations, and uplifting stories. It felt like wisdom coming from a friend who had taken a different creative path than I did. I took notes in the book on post-its with a fountain pen from my dad, which left ink imprints that made the book feel even more personal.

I’ve long been a fan of Japanese culture, ever since falling in love with the book Musashi when I was a pre-teen. So I was naturally curious about Luis’s journey, as a Spanish-born designer and creative director who burned out in Amsterdam, took a sabbatical in Tokyo, and never came back. After watching his own father’s health degraded by a stressful job, he decided to give up his career as a designer and art director, and focus on illustration full time.

Fourteen years later, his illustrations can be found on books, websites, magazines, advertising and clothing worldwide. He draws on an iPad Pro in a country whose language he still speaks only “in a very elementary way,” and is building a membership platform* that he runs on his own server because he doesn’t want to be “the ham between two breads” on Instagram.

His book, which he printed standing at the foot of a press personally adjusting the cyan and the magenta, is a small, sturdy object designed to be carried in a jacket pocket. You can lick it, he notes (though, you may not want to!).

Here are five ideas from the conversation that stayed with us.

*Design Better subscribers can get 20% off a membership to Mundo Mendo, which includes a book every year: dbtr.co/mundomendo

Meet Crafted, the evolution of UserTesting’s Human Insight Summit — designed for teams who intentionally build with customer insight at the center. In Seattle, Eli Woolery will host AI & Design Thinking, a hands-on workshop exploring how generative AI can sharpen (not replace) your creative process.

Secure your spot at events.usertesting.com/crafted with code DesignBetter100 for $100 off workshops.

May 28th: Seattle, September 17th: London

Get tickets

The Most Extensive Research on Embedded UI/UX

Embedded design — UX/UI for appliances, cars, and other physical products — is a real challenge with the tool stack web and mobile designers use.

Qt — pronounced “cute” — surveyed over 400 UX/UI designers working in the embedded design to learn how the tools and processes are falling short.

If you work in embedded design, or you’re just curious what that world looks like, download their research for free.

Download free embedded design report

LLMs Are Just a Calculator

There’s a lot of anxiety in creative communities about AI. Luis has a different frame.

“I realized that this thing is just a glorified calculator. It’s nothing else. And I think we should stop saying AI. We should say LLMs. The AI, artificial intelligence still doesn’t exist. What you have is LLMs — they are language learning models and they are just trying to guess things and connecting things with each other.”

He uses LLMs for things he describes as “taking my time from drawing, taking my time from writing poetry, taking my time from smelling the flowers” — like automating the spreadsheet that logs book orders. For grammar checks in English, a language he writes in fluently but didn’t grow up speaking. For translation between Spanish, Dutch, and Japanese.

He was struck by something he’d heard recently: give the same prompt to five LLMs and you get more or less the same answer. Give the same sentence to five filmmakers and you get five different movies. That gap is where human creativity lives, he argues, and it’s not closing anytime soon.

Shokunin: Do It Well, or Don’t Do It

The Japanese concept of shokunin doesn’t have a clean English equivalent. It’s often translated as “artisan” or “craftsman,” but the word carries something more — a refusal to cut corners that isn’t about perfectionism, so much as about the intrinsic meaning of doing something well.

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Hi everyone!

Bobby Hughes and recently created a new workshop offering, aimed at Design Researchers who are looking to expand their skillset. The first workshop sold out and went really well, so we’re running another two-day workshop on April 24th and May 1st.

We’re limiting the event to 20 tickets, and are giving early discounts to Design Better premium members (see links at bottom).

These discounted tickets will likely sell fast, so if you miss them, you can also register here (workshop hosted via Maven):

Register for workshop

Here’s a testimonial from one of our participants:

“My biggest takeaway was how to better influence stakeholders, shifting from delivering large, dense reports to sharing smaller, digestible “snacks” of insight. It’s a simple idea, but it completely reframed how I think about communicating research.

The course also introduced new AI tools and, more importantly, new ways to use them. The hands-on exercises made it easy to explore and apply what we were learning in real time.

I’d recommend this course especially for researchers newer to AI, but even experienced practitioners will likely pick up a few valuable techniques.” —Marlon V., Senior UX Designer

Workshop Description

AI x Influence for Design Researchers

A hands-on workshop for design researchers who want their insights to go further.

You’ve done the interviews. You’ve found the patterns and written the report. And then... a stakeholder skims it, a designer misinterprets it, and six months later someone suggests research you already did.

The problem isn’t your research. It’s that insight alone doesn’t move people — stories do. Visuals do. Things people can hold onto, share, and remember do.

This workshop teaches you how to make your research stick.

Learn AI tools to transform your findings into artifacts that travel — crisp one-pagers, sharp visuals, narratives that make stakeholders feel what your customers feel. No design background required. No waiting on someone else to realize your vision.

Gain practical skills across three areas:

Discover communication techniques that keep your work visible — Turn findings into clear, compelling updates and narratives that stakeholders actually read, remember, and reference in decisions.

Gain confidence creating visual assets — Build simple, effective visuals that bring emotion to your work and make insights easier to understand and harder to ignore — without needing a designer to do it for you.

Expand visual storytelling skills — Develop storyboards and scenarios with consistent characters and contexts so stakeholders and designers can envision what customers need — as you see it, and on your timeline.

This isn’t about dumbing down your research. It’s about giving it the reach it deserves.

Tools we’ll use: ChatGPT, NotebookLM, Gemini, ImageFX

Discounted Tickets for Design Better Premium Members

We have a limited number of discounted tickets for our premium members, which are first come, first served:

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Luis Mendo is a Spanish-born illustrator based in Nagano, Japan, and his work is unmistakably, irreducibly human. His drawings are populated by bespectacled bird-like figures — part alter ego, part philosophical sparring partner — rendered with the kind of warmth and specificity that no prompt can summon.

There’s a hand behind every line, and you feel it. That’s not an accident. It’s a philosophy. Because as we talk about in the show, as non-human intelligence becomes cheaper, the human touch—and real, earned, interpersonal trust—will become the rarest currency (to paraphrase Anu Atluru’s quote below).

Luis’ path is anything but direct. After two decades as a successful art director and editorial designer in Amsterdam — building magazines, running teams, living inside meetings and inboxes — he took a sabbatical in Tokyo and never really came back. Not because the work dried up, but because he found something better: a life built around drawing, shaped by Japanese craftsmanship culture, and grounded in the shokunin ethic that says if you’re going to do a thing, you do it properly, all the way, no shortcuts.

Today Luis publishes his work through a membership site he built himself, on his own terms, on a platform he controls. He’s obsessed with making things worth keeping — including a beautifully crafted physical book he sweated every detail of, right down to standing at the press to get the colors right.

In a moment when so many of us are asking what creativity even means when machines can approximate it on demand, Luis has an answer: make things that carry your presence. Make things that could only come from you.

You can explore his work and join his community at mundomendo.com. Also, Luis has a special offer for Design Better listeners: get 20% off a membership to his site by visiting the link dbtr.co/mundomendo.

Join Mundo Mendo, get a book!

Bio

Luis Mendo is an artist and author based in Japan.

Luis studied graphic design in Spain and The Netherlands. After working as an editorial designer and creative director for 20 years in Amsterdam, Luis moved to Tokyo and changed his career to drawing. His illustrations can be found on books, websites, magazines, advertising and clothing worldwide.

His artworks have been shown in art galleries in Spain, France, Japan, South Korea and the USA.

Preferred subjects include sensory-driven stories, city/urban life, interiors, objects, animals and people in context. Also travel, narratives, feelings and human interactions. Luis’s illustration signature is to make mundane things look special and make visible the invisible. He can’t avoid impregnating positivism to everything he draws.

He was the Creative Director and co-founder of creative residency Almost Perfect together with his wife Yuka, from 2018 to 2025.

In 2024 Luis launched Mundo Mendo, a membership program where he shares art, stories and thoughts that subsequently and annually become printed books

In the newsletter called The Illustrated, Luis shares and promotes his favorite illustration talent.

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. Get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show.

And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

Upgrade to paid

Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show:

Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

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How AI Is F*ing Up the Creative Process — and What We Can Do About It

Claude Code and Claude Cowork have become the darlings of the tech world, and the mood across design and research teams right now is something close to giddiness. AI is turning many of us into unicorn designers — suddenly fluent across disciplines we’d spent years staying in our lanes about. Researchers are prototyping. Designers are shipping. PMs are vibe-coding their way to working demos before the designer has finished the brief.

But trouble is brewing underneath it.

We posted an observation recently on LinkedIn about the cracks we were beginning to see in the creative process, and the responses flooded in — from design leaders at Microsoft, CVS, Meta, Salesforce, JPMorgan Chase, and teams across the industry. What came back wasn’t just validation. It was recognition. People are watching the same things break and haven’t quite had the language for it yet.

Here are five breakpoints we’re all about to hit — and some early thinking on what to do about them.

Join the conversation

We want to hear how your creative process is changing your team’s workflow. Jump into our chat thread on Substack.

The Most Extensive Research on Embedded UI/UX

Embedded design — UX/UI for appliances, cars, and other physical products — is a real challenge with the tool stack web and mobile designers use.

Qt — pronounced “cute” — surveyed over 400 UX/UI designers working in the embedded design to learn how the tools and processes are falling short.

If you work in embedded design, or you’re just curious what that world looks like, download their research for free.

Download free embedded design report

We’re excited to be part of Crafted, UserTesting’s conference for people who build products, design experiences, and do research.

May 28th: Seattle, September 17th: London

Get tickets

1. Our tools aren’t built for collaboration — and teams are starting to feel it

The AI tools we have are exquisitely good at making individuals faster. They are not built to help teams think together. The result is that everyone is accelerating in their own direction, and collaboration is quietly eroding.

Jess Holbrook, who leads UX research across Microsoft’s Copilot, Bing, and Edge products, gave this a name that stuck: massive parallel play.

It’s not just that the work is happening separately. The tool stacks have fragmented too. Every person on the team is running different models, different prompts, different workflows — with no shared interface between any of it. The outputs can’t easily be handed off, reviewed, or built upon by someone else.

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Today we have two guests from two different companies who have one shared conviction: AI works best when it amplifies people, not replaces them. Today we’re joined by Rachana Rele, VP of Product Design for AI-native products at Adobe, and David Shim, co-founder and CEO of Read AI. Together, they’re building very different products — but they share a vision of AI that removes the drudgery from creative work and makes room for the thinking that actually matters.

In this conversation, we dig into some ideas that could genuinely change how you think about your work. David talks about this concept of “storage of intelligence” — the idea that your knowledge, your meeting history, your working style could all be captured and made available as a kind of digital twin that keeps working even when you’re not in the room. And Rachana shares how Adobe is thinking about AI not as a one-shot creative output machine, but as a collaborative partner that helps teams break out of their own blind spots.

We also push them on the harder questions — the job anxiety that’s real right now in tech, the surveillance concerns that come with recording your work life, and where they each personally draw the line.

Bios

David Shim is Co-Founder and CEO of Read AI, an AI productivity platform focused on helping knowledge workers leverage the power of AI to improve how they collaborate, communicate, and get work done. The platform provides meeting insights, search, chat, and proactive recommendations for millions of professionals, integrating seamlessly with the tools teams already use. Read AI is pioneering the concept of the Digital Twin—AI that serves as a true extension of you, built on deep contextual understanding of how you work.

Today, Read AI is trusted by teams at 90% of the Fortune 500 and in the past year, was recognized as a Top 10 AI Vendor for Enterprises by Brex, a Top 50 AI App by a16z and Mercury, and named one of Inc.’s Top 16 Companies to Watch

Before founding Read AI, David served as CEO of Foursquare and previously founded Placed, which was acquired by Snap in 2017. In 2025, he was named CEO of the Year by Geekwire.

Rachana Rele

Rachana has spent 20+ years at the intersection of technology and human experience — figuring out not just what to build, but why it matters. At Adobe, she shapes the direction of new products, nurtures ideas from zero to something real, and helps early-stage businesses find their footing and grow.

She’s also a perpetual student — currently finishing an MBA at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, with an M.Eng. in HCI from Clemson and a B.E. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Mumbai.

About Read AI

Read AI started as a meeting notetaker, but it’s grown into something closer to a team intelligence layer. It captures what happens in your meetings and connects that context to the tools your team already lives in — Notion, Jira, Confluence, Slack, Teams, and more — so institutional knowledge stops disappearing into calendar invites.

The newest piece is Ada, an AI executive assistant that lives in your email. CC ada@read.ai on a thread and Ada handles scheduling, surfaces relevant context from past meetings, and follows up on action items — checking with you before sending anything substantive. No new app, no onboarding for external collaborators. It’s particularly useful for design and product teams juggling multiple projects and time zones, where coordination overhead tends to quietly eat the day.

A few recent milestones worth noting: Ada is now live for all 5M+ users (the largest digital twin deployment to date), and Read AI just launched an MCP server and open API — meaning your meeting data can now flow directly into Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, and other tools your team uses to do the actual work.

Get Started for Free with Read AI

As designers, we know better than anyone that great work requires great collaborators. And finding collaborators you can actually trust? That’s the hard part.

We used Upwork to find a designer for a book layout project — and what started as a single hire turned into a real working relationship. When he delivered something exceptional, we were even able to send a bonus directly through the platform. That matters to us. We believe in paying people well for great work.

If you’ve been skeptical of freelance platforms — and honestly, some have a reputation for undervaluing designers — Upwork is different. You can browse full profiles and portfolios, review past client feedback, and hire with confidence before any money changes hands. It’s a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across 125+ categories, from book layout to brand identity to motion design.

Contracts and payments are handled in one place, which cuts out a lot of the administrative friction. And if you want access to the top 1% of talent, Business Plus uses AI-powered shortlisting to match you with the right person in under 6 hours.

For the designers in our audience: Upwork works both ways. It’s a smart way to fill income gaps between jobs, pick up extra work when you need it, or build a reliable pipeline of freelance projects — all on your own terms and at your own rates.

It’s free to sign up and posting a job takes just a few minutes.

👉 Post your job for free at Upwork.com

The Most Extensive Research on Embedded UI/UX Designers

The gap between what designers intend and what actually ships can be wide, especially in embedded design — the interfaces in your car, your medical devices, your appliances. The screens most people never think about, but interact with constantly.

Qt — pronounced “cute” — surveyed over 400 UX/UI designers working in the embedded design space across six industries worldwide, and the finding that stuck with me: 6 in 10 said they want a different design tool. Why? Because the tools they’re using were built for the web and mobile, not for hardware with specific screens and real constraints. So they compensate with code, workarounds, custom fixes. And somewhere in all of that, the original design intent gets lost. It gets stripped down until what reaches the device barely resembles what was designed.

That’s a product experience problem, and it’s more widespread than most people realize.

If you work in embedded design, or you’re just curious what that world looks like, Qt commissioned this research to understand exactly what designers in this space need.

Download the Qt embedded design report

We’re excited to be part of Crafted, UserTesting’s conference for people who build products, design experiences, and do research.

May 28th: Seattle

September 17th: London

It’s a hands-on event — workshops, panels, and keynotes from practitioners — held in spaces designed to actually get people talking and collaborating. If you’re a product leader, designer, or researcher looking for fresh thinking and practical tools you’ll use after you get home, this one’s worth a look.

My colleague Bobby Hughes and I will be running a workshop in Seattle on AI + Design Thinking and UX Research.

More info coming soon, and register here if you can attend in either Seattle or London.

Get Tickets