#ui-controls

#ui-controls

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.

Google recently released a new AI model, Gemini 3.1, that demonstrates great results in UI and web design tasks. I've already tested this model for web design tasks and in this article, I want to experiment with Gemini 3.1 and generate UI for a mobile application.

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).

Instructions I created. Instructions I am continuing to hone - instructions that required me to study my own old essays, identifying what I do when I write. The sentence rhythms. The way I move between timescales. The zooming in and out from concept to detail. The instructions tell Claude how I would like ideas composed. I pull together concepts and experiences from my lived expertise to formulate a point of view - in this case, on this new AI technology.

Teams often use customer and user interchangeably until it breaks alignment. Here's how separating the two clarifies research, prioritization, and messaging across B2C, B2B, and B2B2C products.

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."