Design

Design

The 1970s were a sweet spot in product design, especially in France, where makers were beginning to marry natural materials like wood with the new optimism of plastic.

I designed this bag in the same way I designed everything else, so largely based on right angles, but perhaps a little more emotionally, more personally. Designing a handbag is undoubtedly different to designing a Braun stereo system, but I applied the same principles. It had to be functional, visually durable, and very aesthetic. Less, but better.

Pictoplasma is the world's leading conference on contemporary character-driven creativity, focusing on storytelling and how characters shape emotion, identity, and meaning.

Elisava's Master's in Graphic Design is ingrained with societal, cultural and critical contributions to the creative industry, going beyond its aesthetic output while fostering self-awareness in creatives.

Static images don't show motion. You can't inspect real product structure. You don't see how interfaces evolve over time. You rarely understand what actually works in production. So I decided to go deep. I reviewed every major design reference platform I could find - not just the popular ones - and analyzed how they actually help in real-world work. The conclusion?

Design tokens are all your design decisions, that define a design system's aesthetic properties, everything from colors and font sizes to spacing units and border radii. They are the modern evolution of hard-coded values. They are stored in a central, platform-agnostic repository, establishing a single source of truth for your entire digital product suite. This central management allows teams to consume the exact same design values across all platforms (web, native apps, documentation).

To be honest, for many years, I was mostly reacting. Life was happening to me, rather than me shaping the life that I was living. I was making progress reactively and I was looking out for all kinds of opportunities. It was easy and quite straightforward - I was floating and jumping between projects and calls and making things work as I was going along. Years ago, my wonderful wife introduced one little annual ritual which changed that dynamic entirely.

One skill separates good designers: the ability to clearly articulate their intention. No matter what tool you use, whether it's a traditional UI design tool like Figma or Sketch or AI tools like Figma Make, your ability to explain what you want to see accounts for 50% of your design success. The other 50% comes from your hard and soft skills. When it comes to AI-powered design, your ability to write decent prompts will have a direct impact on the quality of your design. In this guide, I want to share some specific tips and tricks that you can use for Figma Make to maximize the output.

In Andor, I got chills when Mon Mothma warns the senate of a chilling truth: When we let noise, conformity, or fear dominate, we lose sight of what matters. We risk allowing the loudest voices, often the safest, the most predictable, to drown out individuality, identity, and truth. To me, this line... This line echoes a growing tension I feel in content design.

Something's been slowly shifting in the design zeitgeist. I've been watching my feed on X and the vibe has changed. More and more, I see designers sharing finished experiments or prototypes they coded themselves, rather than static Figma files. Moving from working on a canvas to talking to an LLM. The conversation isn't "here's a design I made" anymore... it's "here's something I shipped this afternoon."