Showing up for design quality

Happy Monday.

Two things happened last week:

• I published a video I've been working on since November about moving slow when the tools are fast

• We shipped the State of Prototyping: Spring 2026 survey

1,478 designers across 18 regions, interactive report, raw data, open API. If you haven't explored it yet, go poke around.

– Tommy (@designertom)

The Craft People Who Showed Up

I made a video about beautiful software that died. Everpix, Rdio, Vesper, my own startup StreamPro. Every one had extraordinary taste, and they’re gone.

The dead apps and the survivors had roughly the same level of craft. What separated them was a specific set of decisions that had nothing to do with design quality.

The survivors treated distribution as a design problem.

• Andy Allen spent three years on a calculator app. He 3D-prints custom camera mounts for it. That sounds obsessive until you realize it's also his entire marketing strategy — every detail becomes a reason for people to talk about the app.

• Jonas Mockas has run Are.na for fifteen years with four people, no algorithm, pulling $1.4 million a year. He didn't scale the product. He scaled the community's ownership of it.

Neither of them outsourced the "how do people find this" question. They designed for it.

They scoped to survive, not to impress.

• Karri Saarinen built Linear to 135 people, profitable in year two, operating on one rule: "the simplest way to increase quality is reduce scope."

• Tobias van Schneider ships MyMind as private bookmarking — nothing shared, nothing ranked.

Both could have built bigger. They chose to build things they could sustain.

They participated inside the system instead of withdrawing from it.

• Patagonia told people not to buy their jacket. Then they made it the most visible brand in outdoor retail. They didn't opt out of commerce — they used commerce to fund the mission. Revenue hit $1.5 billion before Yvon Chouinard gave the company away.

• Pietro Schirano left his design lead role to build MagicPath. He ships in public, talks about the process, sells directly. He’s participating in building AI tools while fighting for the soul of them.

Quality alone doesn't compound. Quality plus participation does.

Quick Hits

• Awesome Design MD — 31 reverse-engineered design systems (Apple, Spotify, Linear, Airbnb, SpaceX) packaged as single DESIGN.md files. Drop one into your project root, AI coding agents reproduce the design language. Free, MIT licensed. 6.6K likes.

• Cursor Design Mode — Cursor shipped ⇧⌘D: click to edit elements, drag to draw new ones, shift+drag to box-select. Visual editing inside the IDE. The line between code editor and design tool keeps getting thinner.

• Apple fired the Liquid Glass designer — The person responsible for iOS 26's most controversial design language is out. Employees celebrated. He's heading to Meta. Sometimes taste without usability is just aesthetics.

• Taste by Alex Kehr — A tool that extracts design tokens from your Figma files so AI coding agents can build in your actual style. Six axes: color philosophy, typography feel, spacing density, shape language, depth, and vibe.

If you're sitting on something you care about, go build it. The people in that video who survived aren't smarter or luckier. They just didn't wait.

See you soon,

Tommy