Category: AI

  • Gmail’s Next Leap: An AI Assistant That Manages Your Emails End-to-End

    We’re Still Doing Too Much

    Even in 2025, most of us are reading, responding, forwarding, snoozing, labeling, and generally wrestling with our inbox like it’s a pile of unsorted laundry.

    Sure, Gmail has AI features—Smart Compose, auto-categorization, summaries—but the experience still feels like Gmail is helping you manage email, not handling it for you.

    That’s the shift we need.

    Email That Writes Itself

    The real evolution of Gmail isn’t smarter suggestions. It’s a system that understands context so well that emails begin to write themselves—and not in a generic “Dear John, I hope this email finds you well” kind of way.

    Imagine email that’s aware of what you’re doing, what you’ve said, what you want to say, and how you usually say it. Fully contextual, fully personal, almost completely automatic.

    Most email doesn’t need our creativity. It needs our intent. The AI can handle the phrasing.

    Email Should Start Without You

    Picture this: you finish a Zoom call, and by the time you open Gmail, a follow-up email is already waiting in your drafts. It’s polite, it summarizes the conversation accurately, links the document you promised, and closes in your usual tone. All you did was have the meeting.

    Or a client emails you with a vague request. Instead of you decoding it, Gmail breaks it down, drafts a clarifying question in your voice, and highlights what needs your input. You don’t get a blank box—you get a launchpad.

    Even simpler: someone sends a calendar invite. Gmail checks your schedule, notices you prefer afternoons, and suggests a polite decline with an alternate time. Not canned. Not robotic. Just handled.

    Email Should Finish Without You

    We don’t need AI to help us send better emails. We need it to know when we don’t need to send them at all.

    Say a client is waiting for a report. Instead of you remembering to follow up, Gmail sees the task in your project management tool, notices the delay, and sends an update on your behalf—“Still on track, finalizing numbers, I’ll follow up by Friday.” You never touched your keyboard.

    Gmail should track threads with no response, remind you when proposals are going stale, auto-close conversations that have ended, and offer to summarize them before archiving.

    Email should not be a graveyard of to-do items. It should be alive, organized, and proactive.

    Emotional Intelligence in Your Inbox

    This isn’t just automation. It’s communication with memory and foresight.

    And it doesn’t stop at writing. Gmail should be able to rewrite. If your tone is too formal, too aggressive, or too apologetic, it should quietly suggest a version that sounds more like you—or more like how you’d want to sound if you weren’t rushing between meetings.

    Your inbox shouldn’t just be smart. It should be emotionally intelligent.

    Let Go of the Keyboard

    Most of us aren’t avoiding email because we’re lazy. We’re avoiding it because it’s overwhelming, constant, and never-ending. If Gmail truly wants to evolve, it must relieve us of the burden, not just reorganize the chaos.

    The future isn’t more tabs or smarter filters or another sidebar.

    The future is this: you don’t write emails. They write themselves. You approve, edit if needed, and move on. And if Gmail knows exactly how you’d reply—something you’ve said ten times before—it sends it for you.

    Quietly. Accurately. Effortlessly.

    And maybe, for the first time in twenty years, email becomes a tool that gives us time back instead of taking it away.

  • How AI Agents Are Revolutionizing Workflows for Designers, Developers, and UX Strategists

    What AI Agents Actually Are

    Think of a well-trained intern with technical skills, knowledge of your workflows, and no ego. That’s an AI agent. It doesn’t need prompting for every small step. You give it a goal, and it figures out the rest. For example, if you’re working on a client’s onboarding flow, you can ask the agent to analyze competitors, highlight friction points, and suggest a simpler flow. It will browse content, compare flows, extract insights, and provide a usable summary. Behind the scenes, it chains tools together and completes tasks. That’s the power shift: agents are moving from suggestion engines to autonomous executors. They work across systems, moving between Notion, Figma, Google Docs, GitHub, and your calendar. They can communicate with APIs to pull or push data. They’re like junior colleagues who already know your tools and learn fast.

    For Web Designers: Beyond the Canvas

    If you’ve designed for years, you’ve seen many automation tools come and go. AI agents feel different because they move with you through the design cycle. Imagine redesigning a SaaS dashboard. You ask your agent to audit the layout. It finds spacing inconsistencies, contrast issues, and hierarchy gaps, then suggests improvements tied to real design systems. You feed it product goals. It drafts three layout directions with annotated wireframes. You’re no longer starting with a blank canvas. The more context you share, the better its suggestions. In Figma, Sketch, or Webflow, agents can interact with plugins, extract layer data, or auto-label components. You can also use them for user testing analysis. Upload feedback from ten user tests, and the agent will extract insights, flag repeated issues, and generate a usability score. This includes pattern recognition, layout generation, typography pairing, and accessibility reviews in minutes.

    For Developers: Code, Context, and Clarity

    You know the pain points: unexplained errors, unclear legacy code, poor documentation, and boilerplate setup. With agents, you can spin up a project scaffold, get inline suggestions based on your style, audit component performance, and generate commit messages or changelogs. You’re still driving, but the annoying parts are handled. If you have a tricky API, your agent reads the docs, tests endpoints, and outputs a clean integration. Agents can keep a memory of your repo so you can ask questions about differences in auth flows or outdated components. On the frontend, they inspect DOM trees, suggest responsive fixes, and flag accessibility issues. They can analyze bundle sizes and recommend optimizations. Some teams use agents with live environments, where the agent watches for exceptions, logs them, and sends alerts with suggested patches. This is next-level debugging already working for teams everywhere.

    For UX Strategists: Pattern Recognition at Scale

    AI agents are powerful for research, synthesis, and alignment. You gather interviews, surveys, analytics, support tickets, and session recordings. Imagine uploading all this and having your agent cluster pain points, identify trends, and compare them to benchmarks. It suggests ways to solve the top issues. Mapping a complex user journey? Describe personas and touchpoints, and the agent drafts an outline, highlights friction zones, and suggests microcopy options. Prepping for a stakeholder session? The agent drafts the agenda, summarizes discussion points, and mocks up prototypes. This takes you from data to action faster and frees you to focus on insight, not just interpretation. The agent becomes your co-strategist, handling documentation while you guide the vision.

    Where to Start Without Getting Overwhelmed

    Don’t try to do everything at once. Start with a task that feels annoying but necessary. For designers, that might be generating alt text. For developers, setting up a testing suite. For UX strategists, summarizing user feedback. Use the tools you already know—most AI agents integrate with familiar platforms. Start small with one feature or task. See how it fits, then scale.

    Recommended first use cases:

    • Design audits for accessibility and consistency
    • Refactoring legacy front-end code
    • Research synthesis for UX surveys
    • Onboarding flow mapping from competitor analysis
    • GitHub issue triage and labeling
    • Sitemap generation from raw content

    Treat the agent as an extension of your workflow, not a disruption.

    Final Word

    This isn’t about giving up creative control. It’s about gaining mental space, strategic leverage, and more time for high-value work only you can do. AI agents aren’t perfect, but they are powerful. If you design, code, or map experiences, they might be the smartest assistant you didn’t know you needed. Let them handle the grind so you can return to the craft. Over the next year, the professionals who embrace these tools thoughtfully will have an edge. Not just because they move faster, but because they focus deeper on the ideas and experiences that matter.

  • The 7 Emotional Phases of Pixel Perfectionism

    If you’ve ever caught yourself endlessly adjusting pixels until your sanity dissolves, this journey through the seven emotional phases of pixel pushing will feel uncomfortably familiar. If a 0.5px misalignment has ever brought you to tears, consider this your therapy session.

    Simon Sterne
    Posted July 4, 2025

    Designing a website begins with clarity. You have a strong vision, a polished brief, fresh UI components, and maybe even full support from stakeholders.

    This time, you tell yourself, everything will be pristine. The file will stay organized. The button padding will match across every breakpoint.

    Then, 36 hours later, you’re nudging a div 1px to the left—again—and questioning if law school might have been the better path.

    Welcome to the quiet saga of every web designer: the seven emotional phases of pixel perfectionism.

    Optimism: The Fresh Canvas High

    It always starts with a blank frame and a brand-new component library. You feel powerful, strategic, and maybe even significant. You whisper to yourself, “This will be the cleanest file I’ve ever made.”

    Grids are built. Headings are dropped in. Everything snaps perfectly to the 8pt scale. You drag in the first button, and it locks into place like destiny.

    You are a god. A god with a design degree and very specific feelings about whitespace.

    Tweak Euphoria

    Every tiny adjustment feels brilliant. Move the image down by 4px? Perfect. Adjust letter spacing by 0.02? Inspired. You toggle between frames, intoxicated by each crisp before-and-after. You rename a layer from “Frame 12 Copy” to “Card_Main_Final” and feel as though you’ve finally mastered your life.

    This is peak productivity. You tell yourself you were born for this. That UX is your destiny. That this design will convert so hard it breaks the internet.

    And then…

    The Great Doubt

    You zoom out. You squint. Something feels off.

    Is the layout unbalanced? Are the icons too heavy? Is the heading aligned visually or mathematically? Is the palette too dull or too loud?

    You open the file in Chrome to test it. Now it looks worse. You scroll repeatedly, hoping clarity will appear through sheer friction.

    You consider starting over. Surely the grid is to blame. Or the typeface. Or the internet itself. Anything but you.

    Pixel Purgatory

    Welcome to the danger zone. You’re stuck in an endless cycle of microscopic tweaks. Every pixel feels threatening. Every shadow suspicious.

    You duplicate the same layout four times, each with a progressively deranged name:

    v2_exploration
    v2_exploration_better_spacing
    v2_final_v3
    v2_final_final_sendToJames

    You flip between them like a gambler waiting for a jackpot. None of them deliver. They look identical—yet somehow not.

    You start to believe in invisible design ghosts. Tiny misalignments sent to torment you. The Figma inspector confirms your fear: your 16px margin is actually 15.998px.

    You cry a little.

    Design System Betrayal

    The design system—your trusted library—becomes your nemesis.

    You drag in a component. You nest it in a card. Everything implodes. Text overflows. Padding disappears. Auto-layout snaps in the wrong direction like a haunted accordion.

    You click “Detach Instance” in desperation. Now you’re in uncharted territory.

    Hours later, you discover someone updated the master component. Everything broke—again.

    You once believed in the design system. You advocated for it. Now, you fear it.

    Existential Dread

    Questions begin to echo:

    What is good design?
    Does whitespace matter if no one notices?
    Is this form changing anyone’s life?

    You stare at your screen, hollow-eyed, convinced you’re arranging decorative boxes in a digital mall no one will visit. You wonder if your work has purpose. If your A/B tests mean anything. If “user-centric” is just a convenient myth.

    You search for “remote villages with no Wi-Fi.” You close the tab. You fix the margins again.

    Release and Numb Acceptance

    It’s done. Assets exported. The dev handoff begins. Someone says, “Looks great!” You lack the strength to ask if they actually looked at it.

    The tracking pixel is live. The deadline is past. You feel nothing.

    You promise yourself next time will be different. Cleaner. More rational. No more 3am tweaking. No more self-inflicted spacing agony. You close the file—relieved and broken.

    A Slack message pings:

    “Hey, quick thing—can we make the hero section pop a bit more?”

    The cycle starts again.

    The Strange Beauty of Pixel Pushing

    Pushing pixels isn’t just a compulsion—it’s a ritual. A way to find control in a field of constant chaos: shifting trends, stubborn clients, unpredictable browser quirks.

    It’s maddening. It produces identical-looking layouts and mild carpal tunnel. But it also bridges the gap between almost good and truly great. Between forgettable and magnetic.

    So nudge that button again. Rename that frame. Obsess over the space between lines. It’s not just pixel pushing. It’s care. It’s craft. It’s love.

    Ask ChatGPT

  • Fresh AI Tools and Resources Designers Need to Know – July 2025

    Another month brings a fresh collection of design tools powered by artificial intelligence to streamline your workflows. Expect this trend in design, development, and productivity tools to keep growing. Hopefully, some of these will help you work smarter and faster.

    Magic UI

    Magic UI offers over 150 open-source animated components and effects for website design projects. Everything is built with React, Typescript, Tailwind CSS, and Motion, giving you flexible elements for almost any idea.

    Flow

    Google recently launched Flow, an AI-based filmmaking tool built on Veo, Imagen, and Gemini. Flow helps storytellers quickly explore ideas and create cinematic clips. It’s still early, but Google plans to shape it with feedback from creatives and filmmakers.

    Solar

    Solar makes it easy to build custom AI agents, workflow automation, and full-stack apps without coding. You can focus on your project while Solar handles the technical complexity.

    Stitch

    Stitch helps you generate polished user interfaces for mobile and web apps with AI-powered assistance. You can export designs to Figma or access production-ready code. The tool is in beta and open for testing.

    Jogg AI Ad Generator

    The Jogg AI Ad Generator simplifies creating digital ads. Combine stock elements, avatars, and your own products to produce still and video ad assets designed to convert. You can even turn any URL into a video ad.

    Cursor

    Cursor is an AI code editor that predicts code as you type, learns your codebase, and suggests next steps. You can write code with instructions and update entire functions or classes in a single prompt.

    Paste 5.0

    Paste 5.0 is a clipboard manager that lets you copy and paste across devices, save clippings, and collaborate with others. It helps keep track of all the bits and pieces you collect for design work.

    Tapflow

    Tapflow, currently invite-only, uses AI to transform your notes and ideas into sellable products, templates, and playbooks. You can streamline your team’s workflows or package your knowledge for online marketplaces.

    DeckSpeed

    DeckSpeed creates professional presentations without relying on templates. Enter a prompt, and the AI generates slides, 3D visuals, charts, and more in seconds.

    Copy as Markdown

    Copy as Markdown is a Chrome extension that converts any web content into clean markdown with one click. It’s handy for quickly moving formatted content into an AI chat or documentation.

    Vibrantsnap

    Vibrantsnap helps you produce polished videos with AI avatars narrating your script. It’s perfect for how-to demos and explainer videos without needing special equipment or editing skills.

    Habit Tracker and Todo Task: Sun

    Sun gamifies your habits and tasks, making it easier to stay consistent with workouts, projects, and other goals.

    Avocalist Font

    Avocalist is a retro-style font recently refreshed, ready to bring a nostalgic vibe to your design projects.

    Basnet Font

    Basnet is a light, condensed serif font with a whimsical personality that adds character to headlines and display text.

    Eastwhile Font

    Eastwhile is a display serif with elegant connectors between letters, giving it a unique look.

    Kinetic Motion

    Kinetic Motion is a bold script with thick, brush-like strokes that work well for branding or expressive headlines.

    World’s Largest Hackathon

    The World’s Largest Hackathon is underway through the end of June. With $1 million in prizes, it’s a great opportunity to showcase your ideas. Register online to get your builder kit and join in.