Hello everyone,

I hope you're all well?

I've written a longer piece today that will end up on my blog too. It's about how tech companies are in a hurry to buy up design talent and why?

Something similar happened in the mid-2010's when Silicon Vally was first discovering design, but this time feels different.

Let me know what you think.

Happy Friday,

Nick

I think it was Jobs who said something like, design isn’t just how something works, it’s how it looks and feels.

In 2025, I think the most important word in that sentence is ‘feels’. I belive the kids say ‘vibes’.

A lot of the 00’s and 10’s were about making digital things look good.

Screen sizes didn’t change much, there were only a few good fonts you could use, and web-tech hadn’t evolved to give you much room to do any fancy animation.

Fast forward 10 years and it is no longer enough to make something look good. It must feel good too.

Banking apps need to feel secure. Social apps need to feel fun. News sites need to feel reputable or something like that.

This is much more of an art than a science. Finished products are certainly made of 1’s and 0’s. Interaction design, animation, css, javascript, load times, etc. But initially, this all starts by people asking, ‘how should this feel? And why?'

And the only way to answer that is to imagine someone using the product, imagine what their life is like, imagine the context they are using your thing in and then trying to create something that speaks to them.

Lately, I’ve heard people describe this as ‘having taste’.

Taste = knowing what something should feel like?

My current working theory is that with all these new AI tools, people are vibe-coding new products quickly and cheaply. But, they don’t feel right…

They all kinda look the same and feel the same. It’s sort of like if we turned the whole internet into a Bootstrap front end tomorrow.

…

Side story: I have a client right now who asked me to name their new product. I spent some time on it, came up with something I liked and my friends did too. Gave it to the client. They took it away for the weekend and used ChatGPT to help them. Came back on Monday and said, “Let’s call it ‘Cadence’”.

I was with the team from After Hours in London recently and told them about this and they laughed and said they had had two clients ALSO want to use ‘Cadence’ as a name for their new venture!

If everyone is asking the same LLM the same questions all over the world, are we just getting the same answer!?

Also, why do so many designers dislike ‘Cadence’? Taste?

…

We might be at the beginning of a flood of soulless products. But at least some of the people making them know enough to know that their products need to feel like the ones that have on their phone already.

And this sameness, soullessness is creating a new serge in demand for designers.

I've not experienced this first hand, but my best guess is that right now inside every tech company, management are asking how they can get great designers to make all these new AI created things feel like something…anything!

You could create a product or an environment that designers want to work in! Or you could off them lots of money! And the later is certainly happening.

Let me give you three examples.

This week the Greenpoint based two-person design studio, Molly announced they had been acquired but Shopify. With them, they are bringing some serious NYC talent from Instagram and Airbnb to form a new in-house design studio.

I’m friends with these guys. They’re on the cold face of product design right now. They’re all about AI informed interfaces that adapt to who you are etc.

I like them a lot. But part of me thinks that joining Shopify was a missed opportunity. It’s early and there is lots to do. But there is no doubt at all that Shopify will deeply benefit from their product-vibe thinking.

Here is a link to the Fast Company article announcing it.

The very boring, very rich, Australian dev-tools company, Attlasian announced yesterday that they have bought the NYC based Browser Company for $600m in cash. Real cash!

There is some strategic value in owning a browser right now (will write about this next time), but Dia, their flagship product, has very few users.

It’s hard to not see this as a very big taste talent acquisition. 

The Browser Company have executed SO WELL on their go-to-market videos, on-boarding, branding etc. for so many years. At least in my eyes, they set a new bar in product execution.

Would or will they ever build a successful browser? IDK. Maybe. But can they help Atlassian craft better feeling products and help them attract other great design talent? 1000%

Old news by now, but same gist.

Open AI have been doing really nice job with the software, but they have to move into browsers and hardware (again, more next time on this).

Who do you call when you want to make some hardware that feels good?

Ive seems like a good bet if you can get him. And they got him.

Why is this all happening now? 

When things were about making products look good, it was fairly straight forward.

But AI is different. Everyone is pitching AI as some kind of human-like companion.

It’s in the name and it’s baked into the underlying philosophy that sits behind all this work.

And belief is that intelligence is ‘substrate agnostic’. It exists in our brains and it can (and will) exist on GPU’s given enough time and money and development effort.

Really, there is nothing uniquely human about intelligence. Or that’s the idea.

I’ve shared it before, but the Lex Friedman interview with John Carmak reveals all!

But of course, computers aren’t people and they don’t have feelings.

But this won’t stop the companies trying to make their products feel as human as they can. And designers are going to be the people to make that happen.

Maybe the most hopeful, realistic, sensible, thing I’ve heard about all this was in this brilliant interview with Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith.

You will like it because of the insane founding story or Pixar, plus there is a very nerdy discussion about what a pixel actually is (turns out I didn’t know!).

In the second half of the interview he talks about how, now matter how much compute power we throw at AI, it is never going to have taste, feel anything or making art that makes us feel something.

It was a very informed and balanced take. I enjoyed it a lot.

…

I expect that over the next 12 months, AI will continue to ‘feel’ more and more humanish. Designers and studios will get solid acquisition offers and there will be a serious race to see who can attract and secure talent that not only have a vision for how these products should feel, but also have the technical chops to make it happen.

As always, I feel a bit conflicted. I am happy that our industry and our peers are getting the recognition (and money) the deserve. But we're moving quickly and there are lots of serious questions about the AI tech that remain unanswered.

It's already been 15 months since I asked the question of whether we should even be letting people design these products to imitate humans.

It's all happening - would love to know what you think.

Chat soon,

Nick

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