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’s highlights:  my project definition framework, an interesting essay on being both engineer and artist in the AI era and some Claude Design limits for design systems. Also don’t miss 2 beautiful technical dataviz, and a very important potato quiz.

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Now: what I’m currently up to

It’s been a busy couple of weeks:

• I published “La Carte Blanche: A Project Definition Framework to Avoid Chaos“. It’s a small A6 little card that you can ask people to fill before you start a project, to align everyone around a clear project definition.
• I run my Accessibility User Journey Mapping Workshop at Flupa UX Days last week. I got nice feedback on the method and the cards.
• I was interviewed by Dave Smyth to talk about my design process: from La Carte Blanche to enterprise UX, why personas don’t always work, and getting access to users as a non-negotiable.

Interesting articles that caught my attention

Stuck in the middle: Being an engineer & artist in the AI era (14min) very interesting essay by Annie Sexton, who is both an engineer and an artist, touching topics like how engineering changed in the last 12 years, how AI agents are both a blessing and a curse, her own conflict using it to build tools while also being an artist who stands against AI art of any kind, how code isn’t art in her opinion (just like apples are not orange, none is superior to the other), the environment impact dilemma, how AI pushes people to work in a capitalist society and why she doesn’t want to outsource the fun hard work to AI when coding. I confirm that the post and the contradictions she expresses resonate a lot: “until AI is regulated, we should all feel conflicted.”. Yup.

Claude Design Is Not a Design Systems Tool. That’s Okay (10min) can you feed Claude Design your design system and hope it will produce pages for you following said design system? According to TJ it works when you prompt it about the content of your design system, but when generating complex compositions, it ignores existing components and writes lookalike code instead. So, Figma gets to live another week haha? So what is Claude design good for? Apparently, prototyping. With all the prototyping tools we have now, I hope we will finally get to run those usability sessions we were all supposed to, right?

The newest term in the AI lexicon is “interpassivity” (12min) Software is inert without a human user, even though modern-day “agentic” apps are doing their best to squeeze human agency out of the loop. The focus on the tech and not how it is used has intensified an old phenomenon: interpassivity. The vision tech has been pushing (software that “uses itself”) has created a synthetic replacement for human agency. It is harder and harder to care, and that is by design. by Pavel Samsonov.

Curiosity cabinet: non-design/tech rabbit holes I enjoyed

Apparently there’s a neurological reason neurodivergent people love axolotls and it has to do with their perpetual baby face.

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

The Pez Dispenser If you like illustrations and technical drawings, you will love the work of Bryan Macomber. He created those amazing dataviz that explains, step by step, how some items work technically. His Instagram account is also quite nice.

If you enjoyed this, you should also check out  Bartosz Ciechanowski’s explanation of how bicycles work  (brought to you by Viraptor on Mastodon)

What Is Your Inner Potato? I don’t usually care about buzzfeed quizzes, but, this one is about potatoes. I repeat: potatoes. So, it’s super important you take the test.