I found a bug in a colleague's design. Then I found out the bug was me.
Our users understood every chart perfectly, and then went and did absolutely nothing with it.
The best design decision I made that year was ignoring a brief. I'd like the record to show I read it three times first.
Someone says "let's just do it in a modal" and nobody asks why. I say it myself, way too often.
Our table loaded twenty rows behind a skeleton of three, and the whole page jumped.
The form told me my email was invalid before I'd finished typing it. Technically, it was right.
Most people who want better prompts actually need a better brief.
The AI output that worries me most is the stuff that looks finished.
AI can give you a beautifully consistent design system that still behaves like several different products.
I've spent two years testing AI tools. Most of them made my week longer.
Everyone's arguing about whether AI will replace designers. Meanwhile, the junior job is disappearing.
Most design systems have one empty state component, and it's usually the wrong one.
Every job description wants a user-centered designer. Nobody can tell me what that means.
Every portfolio tells the same tidy story, and almost none of them happened that way.
Some of my best design work has no screens. It's the record of something I talked people out of building.
Every designer's CV says "cross-functional collaboration". Most of them mean they went to the meetings.
I spent the first few weeks of a brand-new product without designing a single screen.
The brief says users are dropping off in onboarding. It doesn't say how anyone knows that.
Every design system post-mortem sounds the same, and it's rarely about the components.
The green line going down in your sustainability report is rarely telling you what you think.
We tested the cleanest, airiest table layout against denser ones. The pretty one lost.
