You Can't Prompt This

Welcome back.

Recently, I've noticed a shift.

It started as a gut feeling: the apps I remember most aren’t the smartest. They’re the strangest. The most emotionally tuned. The ones that feel handcrafted when everything else starts to blur.

These interfaces aren’t just challenging best practices, they’re often rebelling against them.

While most teams optimize for speed and scale, a few are quietly chasing something else: depth.

They’re not adding features, they’re adding weight.

And it’s not nostalgic. It’s tactical.

This is the pursuit of defiant craft in software, and I asked three of the best taste-makers in the game to figure out how they’re doing it.

Let’s dig in.

- Tommy (@designertom)

Going to Config Next Week?

If you're going to Config 2025 in San Francisco, I want to meet you.

So here's the deal:

• I'll be hanging out with Dan Mall on the conference main floor

• ​I'm throwing a party with Jesse Showalter, Soren Iverson, and Femke van Schoonhoven

• If you read this newsletter, I'd like to take a photo with you

• If you bring an AI-generated meme of me, I'll have you sign it and hang it in my studio

Come to our Detach After Party on May 7th and mingle with design heavyweights and popular creators.

​This is the last week to grab your After Party ticket.

Why "Usable" Has Lost It's Edge

In 2025, “usable” is the bare minimum. It gets you in the door, but not remembered.

Every product team has the same playbook: ship faster, test harder, remove friction.

This has created the saturation of utility software that feels like nothing.

The most compelling builders I talked to are rejecting that approach entirely. They’re designing tools that go beyond working - they resonate.

Look at Not Boring Software.

Andy Allen and his team rebuilt the calculator, timer, and weather apps on purpose. But they didn’t add features or “enhance utility.” They stripped them to the core and followed one rule: no more boring software.

When I asked Andy about it, he explained they intentionally constrained themselves to force originality. “It’s not Calculator Plus,” he told me. “Same features, no more. If it can’t be better because of design, it doesn’t ship.”

That constraint unlocked the work. Every element - from sound to animation to layout pacing - had to earn its place emotionally, not just functionally.

It’s the same story at ​Fey​, where ​Thiago Costa​ builds interfaces that feel lit by candlelight. His process doesn’t start in Figma or Blender - it starts with watching how light wraps around glass, metal, skin.

He recreates that texture using vectors and contrast alone, then exports clean layers and rebuilds depth in CSS so the final product feels more physical than flat, all without compromising performance.

These designers aren’t chasing usability. They’re chasing intention.

To them, usable isn’t enough anymore: they want to make someone feel something.

How to Bend Tools to Serve Emotion

What’s striking about the builders behind Fey, Not Boring, and 10/42 Studio isn’t their tools - it’s how they use them “wrong”.

Thiago doesn’t use Blender for 3D assets. He uses Nomad Sculpt to explore form under light, then goes back to Figma for the final build. He rarely references other apps.

“It’s too easy to fall into subconscious copy-paste,” he told me. So instead, he draws from architecture, film, gaming - media that’s built for emotion, not optimization.

Andy Allen sharing his sketchbook

Andy starts with materials you can touch. Not because it’s cute - because it’s clarifying. I watched him hand over a 3D-printed camera body that mapped a digital UI idea in real space. “We needed to see what it felt like,” he said, “before we made any decisions.”

This isn’t nostalgia for skeuomorphism. It’s a functional belief: that material thinking creates stronger emotional logic. The resulting software doesn’t just respond to input - it carries intention.

Lee Black

​Lee Black, founder of 10/42 Studio, takes it further. His Figma files are cinematic, full of gradient stacks and lighting experiments that make flat files feel spatial.

He layers gifs and motion elements to create mood, not clarity. “I treat interaction design like film scoring,” he told me. “Not everything should pop. Sometimes, it needs to pause.”

Lee breaks tools on purpose. He uses Figma like clay, testing where it bends, where it glitches, where it reveals something unexpected. That unpredictability - the tension between control and chaos - is where taste evolves.

More importantly: these aren’t workflows. They’re rituals.

The High Craft Toolbending of 2025

Here’s how these designers actually work - the tools they reach for, and how they twist them.

Thiago Costa (Fey)

• Core Tools: Figma, Photoshop, Nomad Sculpt, Cursor

• Method: Sketches in Apple Notes, layers light using optical blending, exports vectors and rebuilds depth in CSS

• Inspiration: Pulls from Caravaggio and games like Inside, not digital apps

• Why it works: Every interface is built to feel touched, even when it’s flat

Lee Black (10/42 Studio)

• Core Tools: Figma, Framer, Notion, Midjourney

• Method: Starts with emotional rhythm, uses shadows and gifs to simulate cinematic motion, builds structure around mood

• Inspiration: Film scoring, brutalism, product packaging, jazz

• Why it works: Every decision bends the tool to follow the story, not the spec

Andy Allen (Not Boring)

• Core Tools: Notebooks, Figma, Final Cut, Swift, 3D printing

• Method: Begins with physical prototypes, maps emotional pacing in motion and sound before shipping anything

• Inspiration: Product design, game interfaces, music

• Why it works: The design isn’t added at the end - it is the product

The Bottom Line

In a world where software giants are mandating the adoption of AI, craft is the last unfair advantage.

• These designers don’t optimize for metrics, they build for meaning

• Their work bends tools, breaks defaults, and rewrites the role of design in product

• The result is software that doesn’t just work, it sticks

Craft isn’t a pretentious flex. It’s a competitive edge no template or AI model can replicate right now.

What’s the most emotionally resonant piece of software you’ve used recently? Hit reply and let me know.

Keep building strange, beautiful, heavyweight software.

Tommy

P.S. Forward this to the one person in your crew who’s designing like taste matters.