Case Study Club

Rick Rubin does use data

This weekend I watched Rick Rubin on The Diary of a CEO. It runs almost three hours, and I recommend all of it.

Product design is a strange profession. Part of it is science. We measure, test and optimise for the business. The other part is a point of view, and that is what makes a product a joy to use.

Rubin works only from the second part. Asked about measuring success, he says: "I can't think of an example where we would want to use data."

But listen to how he picks what to work on. If one person recommends a film he doesn't fancy, he ignores it. If two or three do, he watches it anyway. To him, that is the universe putting energy behind something.

That is how he ended up in vibe coding. The day Andrej Karpathy coined the term, someone paired it with a photo of Rubin in headphones, eyes closed, hand on a mouse. Friends sent it to him hundreds of times. He answered with a joke tweet. It got 1.5 million views, where his usually get 10,000 to 20,000. So he set his professional work aside and wrote a book, The Way of Code, the Tao Te Ching rewritten for vibe coding.

He calls that decision indefensible. I don't think it was.

In qualitative research, when the same thing comes up in more than one interview, we pay attention. That is all Rubin did. He just does it subconsciously.

He also says AI has no point of view, only the collected ideas that already exist. Which is a point of view. Everyone just gets the same one.

So yours has to be different. Otherwise you end up like everyone else.

Jan

Dropbox says about 70 percent of its code is now AI-generated, the same share Uber reported. dropbox.tech

Figma opened Community publishing for Weave tools, from moodboard-to-room mockups to nail previews. figma.com

Nielsen Norman Group published PACED, a framework for deciding when to disclose AI use, as EU disclosure rules took effect in August. Nielsen Norman Group

Petdex lists more than 4,870 open-source animated pets for coding agents, Codex included. petdex.dev

Marina Willer at Pentagram built the BFI London Film Festival identity from projected light. It's Nice That

Who designs Wikipedia

Wikipedia's first logo was an image Bjørn Smestad submitted to a Nupedia logo competition in 2000. The puzzle ball came next. Paul Stansifer won a logo contest with it, and Wikipedia adopted a redesigned version in 2003.

The site itself has barely changed. "Consistency goes a long way to establishing trust in a piece of software," says Justin Scherer, a UX designer at the Wikimedia Foundation.

For the 25th birthday this January, a community member's doodle became Baby Globe, the first official birthday mascot.

Read it on It's Nice That.

Category Colors

Category Colors by Matt Ström-Awn builds colour palettes for charts with many categories. Set the number of colours and a range in the OKHSL colour space, then generate. The optimizer scores each palette on how easy the colours are to tell apart, how they hold up for three types of colour blindness, and how they print in greyscale. The result shows on live sample charts, with a report and hex values to copy. The code is open source on GitHub.

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

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