Maggie Appleton

Designer to Problem Solver with Creative Freedom? For real? I'm very excited to have Pir Ahmed join me on The Prodcast! He’s currently a Product Designer at PureSquare and the Founder of Desnify, where he’s helping purposefully build design systems and scalable product experiences. In this episode, we’ll talk about: 🛠️ Starting Desnify and leading design independently 🔁 Scaling repeatable systems for startups 💡 What young designers should stop doing when applying for jobs Pir’s hybrid experience as both a startup founder and a product designer makes this episode a goldmine of insights! 🎧 Stay tuned for the full conversation. To know more about me: YouTube: @asadnawazzzz Instagram: @asadnawazzzz Website: asadnawazzzz.com #ProductDesign #Podcast #Designdiscussion #Designerthoughts

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Entitlements are the building blocks of monetisation infrastructure. Getting them right matters. At MonetizationOS we've been thinking hard about the mental models behind entitlements and how to make them work for everyone, not just engineers. I wrote about how we solved it. Link in the comments. ⚙️

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AI tools for design systems have matured quickly. The operational work hasn't kept up. The token audits. The deprecation plans. The governance documentation nobody reads until something breaks. The stakeholder brief you put together at 11pm before a quarterly review. The drift you fight quietly before it becomes someone else's emergency. I've been using Claude Code skills to handle that work for a while now – structured prompts that know how to read a token file, classify drift, produce a deprecation plan with blast radius analysis, or translate system health data into business language. I tidied them up and put them somewhere public in case anyone else finds them useful. The first public release is live, and I'm expecting gaps to surface as more people run them against real systems. I'll be pushing updates as they do. https://lnkd.in/dBxPazYu

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Google just launched Gemini 3, its most capable model yet - and I’ve been genuinely impressed. I waited to try it myself before forming an opinion, and what struck me most wasn’t the reasoning or speed - it was how confidently it could design. Real, usable interfaces. Good hierarchy. Even decent typography. And that made me pause. For years I’ve said that design isn’t about moving rectangles in Figma. It’s about thinking: flow, clarity, intent, emotion. Yet, for every new designer entering the field, those rectangles still matter - they’re how you learn to see. Now I’m wondering: what happens when you can skip that part? Maybe in a year or two, junior designers won’t start by pushing pixels. They’ll start by prompting, by shaping flows in words, not layers. Just like architects once drew plans by hand before software took over, the next generation might jump straight into directing outcomes instead of tracing lines. And that’s both thrilling and strange. Thrilling - because it elevates the role of the designer from maker to conductor. Strange - because we may lose a piece of the craft that taught us to feel proportions, to see balance, to understand detail. AI isn’t erasing design. It’s redefining the entry point. Maybe the rectangles will stay - maybe they’ll just live one layer deeper, invisible under the prompts. Either way, design will still be about the same thing: understanding humans and shaping systems that fit them. The tools just keep evolving.

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Design Review & Critique Why are design reviews important? There is a right and wrong was to critique a design idea and which one you employ begins with the setting of expectations. You need to learn HOW to critique. It is not about ripping a thing apart, or “scoring points”. About 20 years ago, I had a VP give me absolutely terrible feedback in a design review. It was one sentence; "This design is shit." Not helpful. Not a very good leader in my book. That was the catalyst for me really thinking about design critique and I eventually put together a presentation that I now share with any team I lead. It was pretty simple. I still use it today. I begin by telling the story of the leader who didn’t know how to lead. I always started this presentation by asking about the image on this post.  Surprisingly some didn’t get it. Design Review & Critique Why are design reviews important? Critiques are meant to improve output, rather than hinder progress. Collaboration and feedback improves your work. The designer who owns the design should own the critique session. Reviews should be conducted early and often in the process. Moderator Have a Moderator to help keep people focused and make sure the presenter has a successful critique. They should make sure the feedback doesn’t veer away from the presenter’s scope; be a time-keeper. The moderator sends anything requiring deeper discussion to a ‘parking lot’. Explain that questions should be held/written down until the end. Presenter The person who owns the design. Explain what you are showing, convey what you have done, and be clear about where you need help. Communicate what stage you are at in the process. Walk through your rationale. Provide context. Accept any feedback graciously & thoughtfully. The commentary is (should be) on the work, NOT you. Take notes during the feedback. Reviewers Those critiquing the design. Ask yourself, ‘How can I help this person improve their work?’ Hold your questions until the presenter is done, unless it is a clarifying question. Write down any feedback you think of. Frame it for understanding and action. Your feedback should be useful. Speak about the design NOT the designer. Avoid the pronoun ‘you’. Understand what they have done. See the opportunities to improve. Be specific about what is working and what is not. Speak from the target-customer-user’s perspective. YOU are not the user. That’s pretty much it. What have you done? How have you handled difficult situations. What feedback do you have for me on this subject? Read more - and view the presentation on my Substack... https://lnkd.in/gwyZRNWp

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We’ve been here before. When design systems matured, UI stopped being the hard part. Craft didn’t disappear—but it moved. The value shifted from drawing interfaces to deciding why they should exist at all. AI is pushing the next shift. Most of what we call “design work” is already decomposing into patterns: layout, hierarchy, component behavior, presentation logic. That’s fine. It means the surface of products is becoming a solved problem. The real work is upstream: understanding users, shaping intent, defining the decision architecture behind an experience. I’m not nostalgic for pixel craftsmanship. I’m interested in what happens when AI tools make interface production as trivial and standardized as we made UI kits twelve years ago. That’s the moment when the center of gravity in design moves again—this time from the screen to the system. We’re not there yet. But that’s the trajectory

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