Pixels of the Week is my weekly-ish curated newsletter for designers, UX folks, devs, and anyone building accessible, inclusive, usable (and let’s be honest, awesome) digital products. This week we explore creative provenance and trust in the age of AI generated content. Also don’t miss 3 amazing illustrators you must follow, the design of the new European banknotes and an ongoing reference library for Black hairstyles.

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Back from holidays!

Hello hello, I’m happy to report I’m back from holidays. It included hiding from the heatwave in Denmark where I discovered the “French Hotdog” and I would like to inform that I doubt any French person was consulted to name this French, in France we do NOT put a strange sausage in a full baguette like that. There’s was also another type of sausage, aka, Momo the sausage dog.  And of course, some crocheting of a Pikachu and some flower bracelets.

I also did some maintenance on this site: updated my server, WordOps (that I use to have WordPress) and the PHP version. It was an adventure to do all 3 at the same time. I had some RAM issues on August 14th which lead to RSS being dead, search not working, but it’s fixed now. I hope? I’ll monitor closer in the next couple of week, if something isn’t work around here, don’t hesitate to ping me as well.

So, social media posting and the newsletter shall slowly come back to “tech business as usual”. I’ve opened my RSS feed to more than 1000 things I missed, and, honestly, I gave up. Marked them all as read, done. If I missed something important in tech in the last 2 weeks, I think I should be fine. I hope?

Also, in case you sent me an email in the last 3 weeks: I haven’t finished checking all of those, so, no worries, I’ll eventually get back to you.

Articles

Wait, who made this?. The rise of creative provenance (6min) with the rise of AI, people don’t trust anymore that something was made by a human. Some companies surf on this trend and bring more and more “behind the scenes” to prove it’s human made. The process is becoming the product (or part of the product). Still, even those are curated, so you never know. Allie Paschal argues that, whether the provenance matters depends on the type of project. For expressive work (like the Odyssey movie), people would not be happy if it was entirely AI made. But most would be okay or not care, if AI was used to build systems utilities or transactional experience (for example a productivity dashboard). Also, for the fun, I asked an AI if this article was AI generated (because why not?). The answer is something like “there are some sentences that smell AI but a lot of human touch, so, more likely human written but AI polished.

Make It Work vs. Make It Good (4min)  “Make it work” is the first 90% of the work. “Make it good” is the other 90%. Yup, a great analysis by Jim Nielsen

Inspiration & Illustrations

KantaKerro is a siberian Artist based in Malaysia with an amazing talent for working light into illustrations.

Larisa Kravets is an illustrator based in Lisbon. She works a lot with ink and watercolor and explores themes of identity, transformation, mythology, solitude, and the relationship between humanity and nature. I love the black and white style and the way she manages to convey motion in static drawings. Don’t forget to also check out her instagram.

Mortale Lethe is a French illustrator. I love her tarot card style characters inspired by Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology. Also check out their instagram.

I don’t want to influence your votes but honestly the H proposal for the new European bank notes looks amazing and you should totally give it a good grade!

Useful tools & resources

Sharp is an image processing tool that lets me reduce the size of all images on my blog using the command line. I was using Squoosh but it’s not maintained anymore, so sharp is my new squoosh. Those names, haha.

Afro Index is an ongoing reference library for Black hairstyles. This is super useful for creatives who want to draw more diverse characters. Explore the styles names and filter, and get reference images.

Frameworks and concepts

The COM-B Model for Behavior Change (15min) if you are interested in behavioral science, you need to learn about the COM-B model: any change needs capability, opportunity and motivation. This is often used at higher levels to change human behavior in their daily lives, but we could also imagine using it for adoption and change management for new tools or new processes within an organisation for example.