Pixels of the Week – September 7, 2025

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. I share interesting articles, tools, inspiration, and resources I found during the week. This is the archive version. If you’d rather get it straight in your inbox (plus be notified when I publish other articles), subscribe to my newsletter.

Now: what I’m currently up to

 Uxcon vienna  is approaching, and I’m super happy to be talking there! The conference is turning 5 this year. It’s one of the best UX events out there. If you’re getting a ticket, use the code stephatuxcon25 for a special discount:

Grab your uxcon ticket

Most popular content this week

The National Design Studio is a Scam  I sadly agree with Christopher Butler here, Trump administration dismantled 18F and now appoints a guy who got rich, dodging regulations to improve design of public services? What a joke. I quote: “True design requires understanding constraints, working within complex systems, and serving users’ actual needs rather than exploiting regulatory gaps. Gebbia’s track record suggests a fundamentally different approach — one that prioritizes disruption over responsibility and profit over genuine public service. I’m not sure he can differentiate between entitlement and expertise, self and service, commerce and civics. “`. More on that topic from Ethan Marcotte in A notional design studio, where he explains how excluding the new site is (read: not accessible, super heavy to load, authoritarian, among many other annoying things).

Interesting articles that caught my attention

Designing for Autonomy: UX Principles for Agentic AI Systems (7min) Agentic AI changes design from building screens to choreographing behavior. UX teams now face 4 big challenges: building trust and transparency, managing state and context across time and apps, ensuring interruptibility and control, and shaping the tone and relationship between user and agent. I’m curious how this will evolve and how we will adapt our processes.

Quality is a trap (10min) I have to agree with Eric Bailey here: quality is whatever someone else needs it to be. The term is too vague. It’s temporal: something high quality today, might not be tomorrow anymore. It might also depend on people’s expectations. And sadly, sometimes it’s box-checking “good enough” (until you accidentally send a missile alert by mistake to your whole population). We should instead, focus on tangible objectives: performance, security, stability, localization, accessibility (I would ass usability to the list).

How AI Is Changing Search Behaviors (17min) A long, interesting study on how IA is reshaping search. People still mostly rely on Google to search, out of habit. But AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are starting to change that, especially when they help users skip long research tasks. AI isn’t replacing search, but it’s slowly becoming part of how people look for information. By Kate Moran, Maria Rosala and Josh Brown at NN/G.

On Dashes, A.I., and Screen Readers (10min) Geeking out about the different types of dashes (em dahs, en dash, hyphen, minus symbol), how and when to use them to make ensure they are read properly by screen readers.

Chat is: the Future or a Terrible UI a couple of articles on why chat is the future of softwares, but, also, why it’s not. It’s nice to check both sides. By Luke Wroblewski.

Make things happen (6min) Cap Watkins shares a great reminder that “cool projects” don’t just land on your desk. They often start messy and hard, and it’s what you make of them that turns them into great work. His advice to designers: stop waiting to be picked for something shiny: make the work in front of you exciting, and make things happen. I absolutely agree with that. I often got handed “boring not fun” projects, where I was able to find amazing challenges that made my work so much more fulfilling. Yes all the way.

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Interactive Eye-Following Card a fun Figma make experiment, cookiiiiiiie!

Trust Issues So, Gray is darker than DarkGray. No wonder people who’ve worked with CSS long enough have trust issues. This is on point haha.

Useful tools & resources

Pattern Craft  a gallery of nice patterns backgrounds you can copy past in CSS. I really enjoy the Aurora dream ones, but, the geometric ones also give me ideas if I even want to redesign my own background. I love how you can make cool things just with CSS gradients!

Tutorials

5 heading accessibility issues to avoid (8min) An introduction to heading accessibility, covering empty headings, skipped heading levels, missing first-level headings, no heading structure, and “possible headings” (text styled to look like a heading but not marked up as one). These issues make navigation harder for screen reader and braille users. Some, like skipped heading levels, don’t technically fail WCAG, but they’re still frustrating for assistive technology users. By Whitney Lewis. For more on what does and doesn’t fail WCAG, check: Heading off confusion: When do headings fail WCAG? Either way, avoid these issues whenever you can.

Conferences

Web Accessibility in Mind Conference is a free virtual conference about accessibility, happening on September 16 – 17. The line up is amazing, you need to check it out