Case Study Club

The weekly read for designers who shape products.

The Dispatch

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AI will never get to 100

Everyone is waiting for AI to one-shot design. It will never happen.

Working deeply with these tools for over a year now, I've realized something. Think about quality on a scale, 0 to 100.

Before AI we worked ourselves up to whatever point on that scale our budget, skills or intuition would let us. It could be 50, 60, or 100 if it mattered.

Now, with AI, we go straight to 50. Everyone has this capability now. Everything looks OK.

But to take it from OK to excellent. That's where designers belong.

AI will never get to 100. Ever. It lacks human context and intuition. It is the iterative process, going from 50 to 80, 90, or 100, that now separates OK from excellent.

Use AI for what it's worth. Iterate and make it better.

Make it excellent!

Comms

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Show it, say it, send it to any agent.

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Field Notes

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Coinbase used Figma's Code Connect to point coding agents at its design-system components and cut token use by 22.5%. figma.com

Monzo's Vuokko Aro and Coral Garvey talked to It's Nice That about keeping the brand's character while the bank went mainstream. It's Nice That

Dropbox built an in-house auditor that checks cookie-consent behaviour across more than 200 web surfaces, with the rules kept outside the code. dropbox.tech

Volvo's new film pixelates competitors' cars that adopted the safety features it gave away, starting with the three-point seatbelt in 1959. Creative Review

Design Observer surveyed nearly 50 readers, who asked for two things: more community, and practical guidance on gaining influence in business. Design Observer

The Portfolio

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janne.me process page, step 01 The Discovery Call with a client quote from Joonas Tuompo beside it

janne.me Portfolio, 2026

One client quote per step

Janne Koivistoinen is a full-stack product designer and design engineer in Finland, working as Janne & Co. He was the first designer at Sharetribe and stayed ten years. Three case studies, each with client, role, stack, challenge and outcome stated at the top.

Pay close attention to his process page. Six steps, from the discovery call to handover, and next to every step a quote from a named client. Jared Chelf of Coulee Creative: "one of the few designers that gets the 'whole picture'." Juho Makkonen, CEO of Sharetribe, in the case study: "the ability to turn his pixel-perfect designs into production-ready code."

From the Archive

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Clippy by Kanon Foundry, the word Clippy set in five colours over a black and white photograph

kanonfoundry.com Kanon Foundry, Clippy

Paperclip Contour, 1973

Ad Werner draws Paperclip Contour and Mecanorma releases it in 1973. It is a contour-only design with no uppercase, and that keeps it to record sleeves and the odd logo. A year earlier Werner had used a filled version for the logo of Opzij, a Dutch feminist magazine. It was never sold as a typeface.

Tor Weibull of Kanon Foundry found it on a Drifters sleeve, Kissin' in the Back Row of the Movies. Kanon released Clippy in 2025, a reinterpretation with the letters filled in, an uppercase added, fewer diagonals, and sixteen styles from Roman through Italic to a reversed cut they call Retalic. It is one variable font, and It's Nice That covered it this week.

Read it on It's Nice That.

The Tool

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soverybright.com HDR logo tool

So Very Bright

So Very Bright by Chris Bennett takes a logo, lets you pick which colors should glow, and exports an HDR JPEG. On an HDR screen the chosen parts shine up to 7.5 times brighter than white. Everywhere else it is a normal JPEG. It uses the gain-map format from ISO 21496-1, so nothing breaks in older viewers. Free, runs in the browser, nothing is stored. Worth a look if you have a white wordmark on a dark page.

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

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Issue No. 015

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