Look at that: the classic setup — a blog, a couple of posts, and then disappear.

There are several reasons why that’s happened and I’ll get to those, hopefully in subsequent posts. The short version: yes, I’ve been busy, but I’ve also felt somewhat overwhelmed[1] and slightly removed from design discourse for a couple of months. I think that’s largely due to the sheer volume of things going on in the design-adjacent world right now. Yes, AI as always — but it’s also the discussion around process, where we’re at, what a designer even is, and so on.

I’ll be considering a few posts on that soon. I’m even considering doing some videos, which terrifies me — which probably means it’s the right way to go.

For now: what have I done recently?

Quick note on AI usage: it’s completely dropped off for me, and I feel like the hype has really flattened in the last two months, which is very interesting. After the initial “oh, this is cool” phase, I’ve not used it half as much — though it is still very useful.

Today I added a swipe file section to my website. I was inspired by recent.design, by Daryl Ginn, who shared a bit of his process behind how he set that up.[2] So I had a crack myself, using Cloudflare and Telegram. Now I have a little bot I can feed a link to, which publishes it to a new page on the site — a place I can go and look at all these lovely pieces of visual inspiration.[3]

Super quick, very rewarding, and something I’ve struggled with for years: just having a good place for this stuff that I know I can easily update and access. I find the fossils of previous attempts at these systems from time to time, in places like Notion, Dropbox Paper and recently tried Fabric.so. Having it close to my portfolio makes sense — go there, review my own work, then look at things I might want to take inspiration from or emulate. What I like about AI, I can make it, how I want it, in no time: it’s there, it exists, and it’s mine.

More to come soon 🙃. I need to work out what’s most useful here — for me, and for anyone who stumbles across these words.

Thanks for reading. BYE!

  1. Overwhelmed probably isn’t the right word. Completely saturated maybe. Over-imbibing banal tooling chatter maybe? It’s a swamp. ↩︎

  2. His thread on X, if you want the details behind how it works. ↩︎

  3. Most of which comes from this list that I have on Twitter (I know I know I should get off there. The network effect is killing me). That said, the majority of the things I’m putting in my swipe file come from a handful of accounts: Design Reviewed, Figs from Plums, Pixel Symphony. Check them out. ↩︎