Case Study Club

The designer who drew Cursor's icons

Marek Minor spent a year drawing Cursor's complete icon set: more than 600 icons, two sizes, two styles, every one by hand. He runs Minor Adventures from Amsterdam, and his own write-up, The making of Cursor's icons, documents the craft in numbers (156 explorations for one hamburger icon, 1.25px strokes at 16px). We sent him five questions to go even deeper into his world: how you draw a concept the industry has not settled on, when to stop, and who owns a set after handover. His answers keep returning to one idea. He calls it the attractor.

Cursor is full of concepts with no settled visual convention: agents, tab completion, MCP, background work. How do you draw icons for a concept the industry hasn't agreed on? Which was hardest, and what did you land on?

The first step is always understanding what the thing actually is. I search for it, look at how other tools have handled it, look at image results, look at what already exists in icon libraries.

What I'm looking for is what I think of as the attractor: the soul of the object, the shape a concept keeps pulling toward. What makes a bin a bin? At what point does a question mark stop reading as a question mark? Inside that attractor there are still plenty of ways to draw the thing, but it has to land instantly. It's communication first. When the industry hasn't settled on something, there's no attractor yet, so it comes down to exploration. You try the literal version, the abstract version, and everything in between, and you put them next to each other until a few start looking better than the rest, then a couple better than those, until you choose one.

The surprising part is that none of the new concepts were the hard ones. Drawing something nobody has drawn before is the fun part because you're not making another globe or another trash can, though those are fun in their own way.

The one I enjoyed most was Bugbot. It reads as a bug, but it's also a crosshair, also a slash, and also something close to an abstract logo. The legs double as the slash. I like things that work on several levels at once, like Lil Wayne's or Jay-Z's triple entendre. You're drawing hundreds of tiny little logo-like things, and some of them end up carrying more than one meaning. When you can slip that in, it's a bonus.

The full conversation covers the 156 hamburgers, the sharp-caps direction Cursor let go quiet, working with AI as a conductor, and why the project never had a clean ending. Read it at casestudy.club/marek-minor-interview.

I built a tool for talking to agents

For the past month I have been communicating with my agents through video. I record the screen, talk, and draw, the same way I hand over work to a dev.

I used Loom for a bit, then switched to Supercut. Both are cloud tools, and both got the job done. But this should be a local app, made for one job: briefing an LLM. Tool agnostic, no accounts, nothing leaves your machine.

So I built it. Comms records any screen you work in (Figma, Paper, Chrome, Cursor, Claude Code) and turns the recording into a structured brief your agent can read, with the frames marked for visual reference.

The open beta is free through September 30, at trycomms.app. If you try it, reply and tell me what broke. A bug report, or a feature request that makes it into production, earns you a free license.

Instagram rolled out its first visual identity update since 2016, a cleaner wordmark and a flatter system. Creative Review

Anthropic shipped an early preview of a /design command inside Claude Code, moving design generation into the development environment. Hey Designer

NN/g showed 77 people AI-generated and stock hero images. The ratings came back equal on trust, professionalism, and authenticity. Nielsen Norman Group

A web operator audited a 1.5 million-page site and found 99 percent of its traffic was bots. Patronview

Post-production studios are closing at an accelerated rate. Pod Ldn's founder argues the business model failed, and the craft did not. Creative Review

The attractors of 1955

In 1955, Birmingham printers Silk and Terry publish a publicity leaflet built from Monotype ornaments the trade calls attractors: patterned bands and flourishes with one job, pulling the eye across the page. The approach matches what Curwen Press is doing at the time, though the titling face makes the leaflet look a generation older than it is. Ornament as a commercial instrument, catalogued and sold by the case.

Seventy years later, Marek Minor uses the same word in this issue's interview, for the shape a concept keeps pulling toward.

Morphicons

Morphicons is a JavaScript library by Guillermo López González that animates smooth morphs between SVG icons, with spring physics and rotation solved in closed form. It works with React, Vue, Svelte, React Native, Astro, and plain JavaScript, consumes icon sets like Lucide, Tabler, and Heroicons as data, and weighs 6.5 KB with zero dependencies. Free, MIT-licensed, npm install morphicons. If your product's icons switch states with a hard cut, this is the fix worth an afternoon.

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

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