Case Study Club

The weekly read for designers who shape products.

The Dispatch

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The Comms agents panel listing two connected agents, with the recording bar below it

trycomms.app Comms, agents panel

My new AI design workflow

For the past month I've been communicating with my agents through video. I record my screen, talk, and draw on it. Same as handing work over to a dev.

I wrote about that here last week. The part I didn't have then is what I launched this weekend.

My agents listen to Comms now.

So when I'm done recording I just send it to whichever agent is working, and it picks it up from there. No copy pasting into a chat window.

I recorded a walkthrough of the whole workflow, start to finish. Click here to watch. (About 16 minutes.)

Comms is in open beta and free through September 30. I would love for you to try it out. And if you do, please let me know what you think.

Click here to download Comms beta

Jan

Field Notes

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Giorgia Lupi opened her first solo exhibition at Gallerie d'Italia in Vicenza, with an identity by Francesco Poroli. Fonts In Use

The Type Founders rebranded, pairing ATF Super Condensed and Grtsk with Meno across its roster of foundries. Fonts In Use

NN/g published an AI glossary written for product and design work, covering tokens, context windows, agents, evals and prompt injection. Nielsen Norman Group

The French Football Federation had Solstices Studio sharpen its national team identity rather than replace it. Creative Review

McDonald's put fictional food from World of Warcraft, Fallout, Halo and Candy Crush on a real menu, with Leo UK. Creative Review

The Portfolio

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alexkyr.com, Alex Kyriakides introduced as a visual designer and developer of eight years

alexkyr.com Portfolio, 2026

Every project titled as a scope of work

Alex Kyriakides is a visual designer and developer of eight years, working on brand, web and motion for tech startups. His portfolio puts six projects on a single page.

Each one gets a full sentence instead of a name. The sentences state the deliverable and the size of it, so the index reads as a scope of work rather than a mood board. He says what he made and how much of it, then stops.

From the Archive

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Eighteen original Macintosh icons drawn by Susan Kare, including the Happy Mac, the bomb, the trash can and the command symbol

99percentinvisible.org Susan Kare, original Macintosh icons

The pixels everything else came from

Susan Kare drew the graphics for the original Macintosh. The Happy Mac. The trash can. Chicago, the typeface the whole system spoke in.

She was working on a tiny pixel grid, and her point about it is the one I keep coming back to. At that size you can't simplify by taking things away. That just gives you mush. You get there by drawing the same shape over and over until it reads.

Decades later, most of what is on your screen still traces back to those pixels. The talk is here.

The Tool

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balsa-ui.com Component library for agents

Balsa UI

Balsa UI is an open-source component library for Vue and React, built on the premise that the code will be generated and modified by an agent rather than typed by a person. It prioritizes machine readability and programmatic control over the conventions a human developer expects from a design system. Free and open source. Worth a look if you are shipping a product where agents touch the front end.

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

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Issue No. 014

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