Treating Code as a Design Material

📰 3 THINGS TO CHECK OUT

How Blue Ventures Transformed Data Visualization Through Team Training

• With design work distributed across its multidisciplinary data science team, Blue Ventures faced a challenge: how to create a consistent approach to designing data products that work for a broad scope of users. They partnered with Designlab to build a shared set of data visualization and user-centered design practices.
• The impact went beyond better visualizations. The 15-person team applied the training to work in progress, updated its design process, simplified visualizations, and adopted a peer critique framework they described as a “light bulb moment."
• If your team could benefit from custom training, we can create a solution based on your goals and real-world work — from data visualization and design systems to AI and other emerging skills. Learn more.

When Code is a Design Material

• Google Senior UX Designer Katie Jacquez sees designers moving toward a more fluid workflow, moving between Figma and code throughout discovery, ideation, and delivery, not simply handing designs off to engineering at the end.
• She reiterates a point everyone is making: faster execution makes strong fundamentals more important, not less. But she also adds that designers need to know when not to use all that newfound fidelity. Sometimes the better design tool is still a block model, IA map, or rough diagram that keeps the team focused on structure instead of polish.
• “When code becomes a design material, the friction of execution is eased dramatically. But in product design, we need to ensure that reduced friction doesn’t translate to a lack of thoughtful strategy.”

"My Taste is Shaped by Others"

• It's a common argument: as AI makes execution easier, taste becomes more valuable. Microsoft Principal Inclusive Designer Bryce Johnson doesn’t disagree, but he pushes the conversation further, asking what happens when we treat our own taste as an objective measure of what’s elegant, intuitive, or well designed.
• Johnson’s point is that taste is shaped by experience — and so it carries blind spots. What feels obvious to one designer may be inaccessible to someone else. In an AI-enabled workflow, those assumptions can now be reproduced faster and at greater scale, making it even more important that users actually reshape judgment rather than just validate it.
• “The goal is not to design without taste. It is to develop a taste capable of being changed by the people we serve.”

💜 PORTFOLIO SPOTLIGHT

With experience in graphic design and an eye for simple, sophisticated interfaces, Rachel Li brings her aesthetic sensibility into UX without losing sight of usability. Her projects span an English-to-Chinese translation app designed around context and comprehension, and a Las Vegas bridal boutique experience that reduces the overwhelm of browsing and booking. What stands out is how Rachel uses research and testing to refine the details that shape each experience — from simplifying translation flows to creating clearer filters, navigation, and appointment booking. Her work shows how strong visual design can work alongside careful, user-centered iteration.

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Art is in service of oneself and one’s vision. Design is in service of others. — Bryce Johnson, Principal Inclusive Designer, Microsoft

🧪 FROM THE LAB

Save With Course Bundles

Bundling courses can help you build a complete skill set and save more than if you enrolled separately. We've curated course combinations that naturally fit together and accelerate your learning:

• AI Camp Bundle (save $500) — Pair AI Prototyping Camp with Vibe Coding Camp to speed up research, wireframing, and idea generation and ship a working web app from scratch.
• The Figma Bundle (save $300) — Pair Advanced Figma with Prototyping in Figma and become your team's go-to Figma master.

You can also mix and match any two or more courses yourself — the more you add, the bigger the discount you can unlock. Explore our course bundles.