Case Study Club

The weekly read for designers who shape products.

The Dispatch

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The catalogue is back

Case Study Club began as a collection. Before it was a weekly publication, it was just me, finding good work, saving the link, passing it on.

For years that collection lived on the old site as a free directory. It came down with the redesign a few months back and stayed down while I cleaned it up. Now it is back as the catalogue: every case study and portfolio gathered over the life of this publication, the ones still online, free for newsletter subscribers. If you joined in the last few months, it is new to you.

And it keeps growing. From now on, every portfolio featured in this newsletter is added to the catalogue the same week, starting with Sue Park below.

I hope you find something in there you might have missed.

Field Notes

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Netflix's design leadership is prioritizing systems thinkers over UI designers in senior hires. Hey Designer

Figma's security team runs an AI agent in production for alert triage and remediation; time-to-resolution is down 71 percent. Figma

Figma Make added a properties panel and annotations, so elements can be edited without touching the generated code. Figma

Nielsen Norman Group pinned down "product sense": predicting which decisions will succeed by recognizing patterns from past experiments. NN/g

Vizcom, an AI-powered design platform, rebranded around "The Messy Canvas," by Enter Outland. Fonts In Use

The Portfolio

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Sue Park's portfolio homepage, a handwritten name above three project listings with date ranges

suepark.xyz Portfolio, 2026

Product design where the product has arms

Sue Park leads design at Aniai, a robotics startup automating commercial kitchens, after public-benefits work at Goinvo and healthcare tools at athenahealth. Her portfolio is one page: a handwritten name, three sentences of bio, three projects with date ranges and dotted leaders, like a table of contents.

Start with the newest project, an interface for cooks working alongside a kitchen robot, documented while it is still shipping (2026, ongoing). The earlier two cover the internal tools behind the robots and a 2023 case study on nudging patients toward on-time bill payment. She describes her mindset as an engineer's, and the site reads like it, down to the footer: "Built with millions of tokens of love."

From the Archive

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The Chinese Cigarette Museum homepage, a grid of cigarette pack designs around the site title in Chinese and English

ciggies.app Archive, 2026

A museum of the Chinese cigarette pack

The Chinese Cigarette Museum archives 3,258 cigarette packs from 219 Chinese brands, photographed in high resolution and filed by brand, era, and design lineage. It is one collector's record of how Chinese commercial graphics moved through decades of state and private production.

The pleasure is in the variants. The same brand appears again and again, redrawn across editions: cranes and pagodas, foil finishes, health warnings layered onto ornament, each pack dated and traced back through the designs it replaced.

The Tool

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Originkit's component browser, a dark grid of animated interface components with categories listed in a sidebar

originkit.dev Component library, 2026

Ready-made motion for interfaces

Originkit is a free library of animated interface components: text effects, buttons, cursors, image galleries, backgrounds, each browsable as a live preview. Every component ships three ways: copy the code, pull it into Framer, or connect it over MCP so a coding agent can place it for you. Still in beta. For a site that needs one good motion moment, this is faster than building it from scratch.

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

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Issue No. 010

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