Smashing Newsletter: Issue #562

Editorial

Good design needs good taste and a strong point of view. When everyone can build and design anything, having a good judgment about what to design and build is what makes all the difference. That’s what separates generic from great.

As it turns out, we can borrow expertise and build upon the thinking and the judgment of people we trust or admire — with AI skills. And today’s newsletter is just about that.

As always, we’re proud to present to you the upcoming online workshops we’ve been working hard to organize — perhaps join us in one today? In today’s free session, Paul Boag explores whether synthetic testing can help, where its limitations and use cases are.

Giving Your Users a Voice in Every Decision with AI Free with Paul Boag. June 9
Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. June 22 – July 2
The Modern UX Practitioner UX
with Paul Boag. June 24 – July 2
Config Recap: What’s New in Figma Free
with Christine Vallaure. July 2
Designing Complex UIs in the Age of AI Free
with Vitaly Friedman. July 9
Complex UIs and Enterprise UX UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Sep 2–3
Naming Design Systems Design Systems
with Samantha Gordashko. Sep 8–22
Interface Design Patterns Live UX Training UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Sep 11 – Oct 12
Jump to all workshops →

Stay curious!

— Vitaly

1. Claude Code For Designers

Getting started with Claude Code can seem daunting at first, but it appears way more complicated than it really is. Tommaso Nervegna’s step-by-step guide to Claude Code for designers is a great starting point for all your upcoming AI design adventures. You’ll learn how to design and ship production-ready websites and web apps with a workflow that prevents generic AI output and brings your actual design vision to life.

Claude Code For Designers: A Practical Guide

2. Design And AI Workflows

A wonderful little helper for designers using AI comes from Carmen Rincon. She has turned all the Claude skills, workflows, and project setups she has built so far into a Notion repository. In there, you’ll find UX, UI, copywriting, and prototyping skills, as well as a useful AI design dictionary, design tokens pipeline, and much more. The collection is updated regularly.

3. Claude As A Knowledge Base

Coding prototypes or prompting artifacts are usually the things we think of first when it comes to building with AI. Ryan Rumsey came up with a different use case. He uses Claude Cowork to turn his learned experience into a knowledge base. In his guide, he explores several ideas of how Claude can help build thinking infrastructure.

4. Product Design Skills

How can we design products with depth in the age of generative AI? Jamie Mills created a set of nine AI skills to give your product a solid foundation. Based on his Layers framework, the skills don’t generate output but help you and your AI reason about which design decisions need to be made, at which layer, and using which method. Layers work in whichever AI tool you use.

5. UX Strategy And Design Skills

To turn your favorite AI coding tool into an informed design partner, Carlos Cuéllar created Design Skills for AI Agents. The skills give generic assistants deep knowledge of established design frameworks, heuristics, and methodologies to get them fit for anything from UX research and journey mapping to UX strategy, interaction design, and other design challenges that might come your way.

6. Skills For Designers And Researchers

Whether it’s running a full design system audit or planning a usability test, MC Dean created an open-source collection of more than 90 design skills and 28 commands for Claude. The aim is to teach it the full breadth of what designers know, not to replace them, but to give junior designers better scaffolding and senior designers more time to focus on more nuanced challenges.

7. UX Writing Skill

Button labels, error messages, empty states — UX writing plays a crucial role in how people understand and use your product. To make your UX writing systematic, scalable, and consistent, Christopher Greer created a UX writing skill for Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Based on research-backed practices, it enables AI to write and edit user-centered interface copy. You can even connect the skill to Figma to audit copy directly in your mockups.

8. Accessible UX Research, Now Shipping 📚

We’ve got exciting news! Our newest Smashing book, Accessible UX Research by Michele A. Williams, is finally shipping worldwide! Get the book right away or order the eBook for instant download.

Accessible UX Research is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the book right away.

9. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences

That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.

Smashing Online Events — With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.

As always, here’s a quick overview:

Giving Your Users a Voice in Every Decision with AI Free with Paul Boag. June 9
Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. June 22 – July 2
The Modern UX Practitioner UX
with Paul Boag. June 24 – July 2
Config Recap: What’s New in Figma Free
with Christine Vallaure. July 2
Designing Complex UIs in the Age of AI Free
with Vitaly Friedman. July 9
Design Patterns For Complex UIs and Enterprise UX UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Sep 2–3
Naming Design Systems DS
with Samantha Gordashko. Sep 8–22
Live UX Training UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Sep 11 – Oct 12
Accessibility For Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Sep 21–29
Jump to all workshops →

That’s All, Folks!

Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!

This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).

June 9, 2026 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #562

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