🟣 TOOOLS #23: Zoah, Book of Shapes, Beautiful UI, All In Frame, vgpu

   TOOOL OF THE WEEK

   ALSO ON THE RADAR

Book of Shapes

A collection of minimal, generative SVG patterns by Nikolaj Sokolowski, each one adjustable in the browser and downloadable for your own layouts.

Beautiful UI

A small, open-source set of extremely crafted interface pieces for AI products: chat, thinking states, approval cards and the other moments where an agent has to talk to a person.

All In Frame

A free stock photography collection led by disabled creatives, made so marketing and product work can tell more authentic stories about disability.

vgpu

An open-source toolkit from Vercel Labs for GPU-powered graphics that AI agents can drive directly, so shaders and generative visuals can be prompted into being and run right in the browser.

   A FEW READS & LISTENS

BUZZ USBORNE  📖 ARTICLE

AI Operating Principles

Five principles for bringing AI into design work without outsourcing the judgment: the why matters more than the how, stay in the unknown, earn the right to slow down, humanity balances logic, beware of normalizing complexity. Short enough to pin on a team wall, and the last one is the one most teams skip: AI lowers the cost of making things, not the cost of maintaining them.

UX COLLECTIVE  📖 ARTICLE

Researcher-in-the-Loop

Jennifer L. Bowie flips the usual question: not whether AI replaces researchers, but who keeps research honest once everyone on the team can run it. Her answer puts the researcher in charge of designing and governing the system, with sourcing, confidence ratings and escalation built into the tools rather than bolted on as a review step.

NN/G  📖 ARTICLE

The Custodial Era of UX: Cleaning Up After AI

Anna Kaley and Raluca Budiu on what happens when features get built faster than anyone can evaluate them: the UX work shifts from the blank page to deciding what from AI to keep and what has to change. Their way out of janitor mode is triage, faster evaluation, and teaching teams the difference between what can be built and what should be.

   UPDATES & NEWS

Figma adds Around and Evenly spacing to auto layout, so the gaps at a frame's edges can finally follow the same rule as the gaps between items

Photoshop gets Camera Raw's exposure controls as a non-destructive Light adjustment layer, plus AI markup for client feedback and a natural-language editing assistant in beta

Spline's 2D design canvas Hana reaches V2: a built-in AI agent that turns a prompt into editable layouts, Illustrator and 3D model import, and SVG and PDF export

Webflow now works inside ChatGPT and Codex: connect a workspace and let the AI audit a site for SEO and accessibility or update CMS content, free and without burning AI credits for now

   ONE MORE THING ...

A REMINDER WORTH KEEPING

"New tools feel like magic. So did light switches and recorded music."