Connor Rothschild

As I learn more about design, and work with talented designers, I've come to realize that design is quiet and loud.

Design is loud, in that you notice it when it's good. It's quiet in that it's hard to articulate why it's good. Great design speaks for itself while simultaneously remaining difficult to put into words.

It is very easy to make something that is ugly, and very easy to overstep some design trend in a way that is jarring.

This is why imitations are so obvious and seem so uninspired. They're merely imitations of patterns. Good design is more than just creating something that looks good—its solving problems in ways that emerge from deep understanding of purpose, audience, and context.

AI for UIs (think v0, Lovable, Bolt, etc.) feel pretty feature-complete. The next major phase is AI for fullstack. Which of the UI-first agents will integrate backends most effectively, or will a new player (Convex, Replit, etc.) emerge?

Netflix could do two things to get people to watch their big livestream fight (they did the first):

1. A popup ad that reads: “Watch Tyson vs Fury on Saturday night”
2. A warning notification that reads: “Heads up: You may experience degraded viewing as we allocate more resources for the Tyson vs Fury fight Saturday night”

1 is meh because it reads like an ad—it does not generate interest. People will click out of ads the second they can.

2 is better because it grabs attention and instills immediacy. It subtly creates FOMO, because people ask “wow that many people are watching?” 2 may be true (good thing they prepped people for it), but if its not, who cares?