111 - hello 2026 and a new mix series

                    

Happy new year everyone :) I hope you had some great time with family and friends over the holidays.

I’m making an addition to the newsletter this year so the structure will now look like this:

With each newsletter I send out, I'll be including a mix I record with new music that I've been collecting and discovering. 

I hope it will give you something new to listen to and give me the structure to share music more regularly.

The mixes live in a playlist on Soundcloud which you can find here.

…

 

In the next newsletter, I’m going to write about the Hot Topic in design circles right now which is all about AI workflows (Cursor and Claud Code). The shift is pretty phenomenal. I’ll share some of my exploration and the things I’ve been building.

  

Thanks for reading :) 

 

Nick

💌 If someone forwarded you this, you can click here to subscribe.

           

For the first mix I did something a little different. The very talented Laila Amira, recently gave me a USB with a bunch of disco and house tracks and so I plugged it in and hit record without listening to any of them before hand. It’s a 90 min fun, good vibes, mix that I would play if I was getting ready for a night out or having a drink in the sun after work. Let me know what you think.

Listen to the mix on Soundcloud.

           

Some of the recent-ish design tea is that the head of Apple’s human interface team has left and gone to Meta. John Gruber wrote a very interesting piece on his departure and discussed his replacement. In it, he explains that Alan Dye was an ex-print advertising and design director for Kate Spade. Umm… we could tell? For years Apple’s UI has been going in all kinds of strange directions. I hope Stephen Lemay can turn things around. Link

This is 6 months old now, but feels more relevant than ever. Elizabeth Goodspeed on the designers putting themselves at the center of their work. Link

It helps to understand your enemy. Link

 

(sigh) Link

 

An actual living legend, François has put out another mix where he talks through the history of a lot of great music. Link

 

I love these kinds of deep dives. Link

The rise of industrial software. Link

 

Biased, but I agree. Link

 

WSJ did an article on the guy who put the arrow on our dashboards showing which side the petrol/gas tank is on. Link (paywall)

 

A nerdy dive into the use of icons in the new Mac OS Tahoe. Link

 

Having trouble resizing the windows in the new OS? You’re not the only one. Here is why. Link

 

Turns out taxing a behaviour you don’t want to see does actually work. I dislike cars and designing cities around cars was a huge mistake. This is a great step in the right direction. Link