Ahoy Smashing Friends,
Good design needs good taste and a strong point of view. When everyone can build and design anything, having a good judgment about what to design and build is what makes all the difference. That’s what separates generic from great.
As it turns out, we can borrow expertise and build upon the thinking and the judgment of people we trust or admire — with AI skills. And today’s newsletter is just about that.
As always, we’re proud to present to you the upcoming online workshops we’ve been working hard to organize — perhaps join us in one today? In today’s free session, Paul Boag explores if synthetic testing can help, where its limitations and use cases are.
Stay curious!
— Vitaly
1. Claude Code For Designers
Getting started with Claude Code can seem daunting at first, but it appears way more complicated than it really is. Tommaso Nervegna’s step-by-step guide to Claude Code for designers is a great starting point for all your upcoming AI design adventures. You’ll learn how to design and ship production-ready websites and web apps with a workflow that prevents generic AI output and brings your actual design vision to life.
2. Design And AI Workflows
A wonderful little helper for designers using AI comes from Carmen Rincon. She has turned all the Claude skills, workflows, and project setups she has built so far into a Notion repository. In there, you’ll find UX, UI, copywriting, and prototyping skills, as well as a useful AI design dictionary, design tokens pipeline, and much more. The collection is updated regularly.
3. Claude As A Knowledge Base
Coding prototypes or prompting artifacts are usually the things we think of first when it comes to building with AI. Ryan Rumsey came up with a different use case. He uses Claude Cowork to turn his learned experience into a knowledge base. In his guide, he explores several ideas of how Claude can help build thinking infrastructure.
4. Product Design Skills
How can we design products with depth in the age of generative AI? Jamie Mills created a set of nine AI skills to give your product a solid foundation. Based on his Layers framework, the skills don’t generate output but help you and your AI reason about which design decisions need to be made, at which layer, and using which method. Layers works in whichever AI tool you use.
From our sponsor
You’re Testing For Accessibility Earlier. Why Is The Backlog Still Growing?
You’re checking code for accessibility issues during the build—but the bugs keep piling up post-launch. What’s going wrong? You’re dealing with the resolution gap: the friction between finding issues and fixing them, for good. Learn how to break the cycle in our on-demand webinar.
5. UX Strategy And Design Skills
To turn your favorite AI coding tool into an informed design partner, Carlos Cuéllar created Design Skills for AI Agents. The skills give generic assistants deep knowledge of established design frameworks, heuristics, and methodologies to get them fit for anything from UX research and journey mapping to UX strategy, interaction design, and other design challenges that might come your way.
6. Skills For Designers And Researchers
Whether it’s running a full design system audit or planning a usability test, MC Dean created an open-source collection of more than 90 design skills and 28 commands for Claude. The aim is to teach it the full breadth of what designers know, not to replace them, but to give junior designers better scaffolding and senior designers more time to focus on more nuanced challenges.
7. UX Writing Skill
Button labels, error messages, empty states — UX writing plays a crucial role in how people understand and use your product. To make your UX writing systematic, scalable, and consistent, Christopher Greer created a UX writing skill for Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Based on research-backed practices, it enables AI to write and edit user-centered interface copy. You can even connect the skill to Figma to audit copy directly in your mockups.
8. Accessible UX Research, Now Shipping 📚
We’ve got exciting news! Our newest Smashing book, Accessible UX Research by Michele A. Williams, is finally shipping worldwide! Get the book right away or order the eBook for instant download.
Meet our brand-new book: “Accessible UX Research” by Michele A. Williams. Printed copies shipping now.
Accessible UX Research is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the book right away.
9. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
10. Person Of The Week: Ben Sauer
Please give a warm round of applause for our Person of the Week: Ben Sauer. Ben has worked as a UX Designer at Clearleft, led AI projects in healthcare, and trained people around the world in designing chat and voice conversations, including at NASA. His communication design frameworks have been adopted by teams at Amazon, Google, and the BBC.
Ben regularly shares insights on communication, design, AI, innovation, and culture as a speaker and through his writing. He is also the author of Death by Screens, a guide that helps creatives tell strategic stories about their work.
Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear Ben! 🧡
11. Recent Smashing Articles
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Cosima Mielke, Vitaly Friedman, and Iris Lješnjanin.
Sent to truly smashing readers via Mailchimp.
We sincerely appreciate your kind support. You rock.
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