Case Study Club

The weekly read for designers who shape products.

The Dispatch

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Not ready for creative review

Last week we got hit by Google Design's post about their todo app.

The design community is merciless in its feedback.

I think Dann Petty's response is the most interesting one. His conspiracy theory: this must have been made by AI.

Google's Achieve app on a blue background, a todo list headed Launch my side hustle. The third item reads Choose a business name and check domain availability.

Who in their right mind puts purchasing a domain as the third item in a todo list when working on a project? The domain name is THE first thing one would register. "If it ain't available, we're not working on this project". It's funny because it's true.

Other designers are screen recording themselves removing Google from their work history (also, probably a joke). Fons Mans commented "There's still time to delete this".

Google Design even replied "Maybe this prototype wasn't quite ready for creative review".

This account is clearly run by a marketer, because who calls it "creative review" unless you work in marketing?

If you're posting on behalf of a respectable design account, make sure the product work has been through a product review first. We should expect better from a trillion-dollar company like Google.

Field Notes

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Intercom shipped Evals and Releases, which tests its Fin agent on simulated conversations before a change goes live and watches for regressions after. Inside Intercom

Researchers read 26 open-source design systems and found most of them unreadable to AI agents. State of AI in Design Systems

Mozilla's UX team swapped click-through prototypes for AI-built working ones, and testers started failing on the design instead of on the prototype. Mozilla UX

Backyard Designers launched, a fantasy game where you draft real designers and the salary cap is their follower count. backyarddesigners.club

The European Central Bank published proposed designs for the next series of euro banknotes and opened them to public comment. Creative Review

The Portfolio

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Pedro Marques's site: a single narrow column of prose under his name and the line Product designer and builder

pedromarques.me Portfolio, 2026

No case studies, and it still works

Pedro Marques is Head of Design at Footprint, where he joined in 2022 as the founding designer. Before that he worked at Fast, Kyte, SIXT and Personio. His site is one page of writing. He introduces himself, says what he likes working on, and puts the job list in a small table at the bottom.

There are no case studies on it. Instead he links three apps he has worked on: Storello and Pim, which he designed and coded himself, and Tangerine, which Apple featured in more than 160 countries. He also quotes Soleio, that the future belongs to designers who build. That's it. That's the whole portfolio, and his work history speaks for itself.

From the Archive

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A Kolkata repair shop at night, a man on the phone at his workbench beside an LED sign spelling LAPTOP REPAIRING in red bulbs, a painted CARTRIDGE REFILLING board above

itsnicethat.com Kwazi Design, Type Around Town

The letterforms of Kolkata

Kwazi Design spent several years photographing the letterforms of Kolkata. Shop signs, street signage, hand-painted boards. The project is called Type Around Town. The argument is that the type a city makes for itself carries its history, and that standardised design wipes it out. This lettering does not come from a component library. It comes from people who needed a sign.

The Tool

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Beautiful UI component gallery in dark mode, showing a Loading State panel and an expandable Thinking trace reading Thought for 4 seconds

beautifului.dev Beautiful UI by Turbo

Ready-made parts for AI interfaces

Beautiful UI is a set of components for AI interfaces, made by a product design studio called Turbo. You get loading states, streaming text, approval cards, tool chips, diff tables and task rows, ready to copy into your own work.

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

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Issue No. 012

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