Case Study Club

Cheap to build, expensive to be wrong

Tony Fadell told Lenny's podcast this week that builders are sliding into cognitive surrender, handing decision authority to AI on early-stage products where the data is always incomplete.

Most of the industry filed that under taste. I don't like the word. Aesthetic judgement is not always the point anyway; if the product is a generic app for accountants, boring is OK.

The real shift is simpler. The speed of AI is tempting us to move faster, and execution is not the bottleneck anymore. Buzz Usborne draws the line between discovery and delivery, and delivery is the half that collapsed. Discovery didn't. It still runs on people. The users.

But here is the uncomfortable part: building is now so cheap that it often doesn't matter if we build the wrong thing. We can iterate our way to the right solution.

Often. Not always. A note-taking app can ship five or six features nobody asked for and walk away unhurt. A medical application cannot; there the data is absolutely critical, and discovery has to come first.

So it's not clear cut. Sometimes it's OK to defer discovery until after delivery, since the cost of being wrong fell with the cost of building. Other times skipping it is the most expensive thing you can do.

The judgement is knowing which product you're holding.

Figma rebuilt its layers panel and reports 30 to 50 percent faster interactions in large files. Figma

Intercom launched Fin Voice 2, a voice agent built on its new Apex Flash model. Inside Intercom

Bao is opening Bao Fast Foods with its design system and brand guidelines published open-source. Creative Review

fonts.xyz launched, a directory where independent foundries sell typefaces direct. fonts.xyz

GitHub is testing an agent that finds and fixes accessibility issues across codebases. GitHub

Swiss rigor, Italian play

In 1966, Anna Monika Jost designs a poster for a travelling Olivetti exhibition. She sets it in Helvetica and News Gothic, and the result holds two schools in one frame: Swiss constructive rigor in the grid, Italian play in everything the grid contains.

Jost belongs to the postwar migration of Swiss designers to Milan. They arrive with grid-based training and meet a commercial culture that wants expression, and the synthesis produces some of the century's most durable graphic work. The Olivetti poster is a clean example. Nothing loose about its structure, nothing stiff about its effect.

Fonts In Use documented the poster this week, sixty years after it was printed. Jost recently received the Swiss Grand Award for Design.

A typeface with a tone dial

GT Mechanik is a new release from Grilli Type: three families (Mono, Semi, Poly), seven weights with obliques, and a variable axis the foundry calls TONE, running 1 to 100, that morphs the letterforms between the family's mechanical and polished extremes. The launch site is a working demo rather than a specimen PDF, and it makes the case for the axis better than any description could. Creative Review wrote this week about foundries turning type launches into experiences; this is the live example, and it costs nothing to go play with the slider.

Written and edited by Jan Haaland. Published weekly from Norway.

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