Brad Frost

Last chance to get our courses at pre-release prices!

2026-09-23T00:00:00Z

I sent out a newsletter today and wanted to share it here too. Forgive the sales-y post, but we're at the finish line of the courses we've been pouring our entire selves into for the last two years. We're really proud of this work, and we're really excited to help people. With that out of the way, here we go. cue infomercial voice.

There's only one week left to get our AI & Design Systems course for $995 before it flips to the final price of $1495 on September 30th.

Get AI & Design Systems for $995

The course contains over 20 hours of video lessons, agent skills we built to improve your design system & products, a vibrant Slack community (with hands-on support from me, Ian, TJ, and industry leaders), biweekly community jam sessions, rolling new lessons, and a heck of a lot more.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

My Atomic Design Certification Course is ALSO now complete! It features over 11 hours of video lessons covering design system core concepts & hard-earned best practices. Get a sample design system architecture in Figma, code, and docs, and you can also join our Slack community. This is your last chance to get the course for just $50 before it lands at its final price of $150 on September 30th.

AND THAT'S NOT ALL!

We also have a MEGA BUNDLE of all three of our courses: AI & Design Systems, Atomic Design Certification Course, and our Subatomic Design Tokens course. This is the last chance to get all three courses (a $2550 value) for just $1600 before it increases to $1995.

Get all three courses (a $2550 value) for just $1600

We want our courses to be accessible to as many people as possible, so we have team discounts, purchasing power parity pricing for folks in different regions, student and job seeker discounts, and a payment plan. Email courses@bradfrost.com and we'll get you sorted.

It's very difficult to articulate the fast pace and sheer amount of effort that's gone into producing these courses. And it's going to take a while to get settled and feel like an actual human being again. We're so incredibly proud of the results and genuinely think they're helpful for anyone designing and building digital things. We hope you consider checking out our courses, and if you have any questions or need assistance, just reach out to courses@bradfrost.com.

Thank you!

Periodic Table of HTML Elements

2026-09-20T00:00:00Z

Periodic Table of HTML Elements shows all 115 HTML elements laid out as a periodic table.

Josh Duck created the original periodic table of HTML elements that I included in my Atomic Design book. Thankfully, Alena Batitskaia recreated it updated to the latest spec!

Code Snack

2026-09-10T00:00:00Z

Code Snack by Lauren Basser looks very useful.

Engineering concepts for visual learners. Updated weekly.

She's breaking down the Terminal, Git, and things like Web Components for people coming from a design background. We've seen a slew of designers swimming in new waters, so resources like this are super duper helpful!

Our AI & Design Systems Course Is COMPLETE!

2026-09-09T00:00:00Z

TL;DR: Our AI & Design Systems Course is complete; the price goes from $995 to $1,495 on September 30th.

What the course includes

Over 20 hours of in-depth lessons across 200 videos covering core concepts, tools setup, techniques, and practical implementation of AI & design systems
Installable agent SKILLS files that audit and improve your design system and products
Actionable workflows and in-depth tutorials for setting up and wielding AI & design systems tools
A vibrant community of AI & design systems practitioners and industry leaders
Biweekly community jam sessions with TJ, Ian, and me. These sessions are part office hours, part show-and-tell, part latest-and-greatest developments in the world of AI & design systems
A growing resource database of links, terminology, and other helpful AI & design systems resources
A certificate of completion to share on LinkedIn and your resume
New lessons and free updates for life as AI & design systems keep evolving

The price goes up to $1,495 on September 30th, so this is the last chance to get the course for $995. We have team discounts, purchasing power parity pricing for folks in different regions, student and job seeker discounts, and a payment plan are available. If you have questions about the course or if cost is an issue, just email us and we'll get you sorted!

The arc of the course

It was a LOT of work just even to arrive at a structure for the course, and we're really proud of how we're covering AI & Design Systems:

Core concepts. The benefits & challenges of design systems, the great potential (and great risks!) of AI, and how AI & design systems together make a powerful combo.
Environments & tools setup. We demystify installing and configuring LLMs, AI-powered IDEs, Figma, Node, API keys, MCPs, Git & GitHub, and more.
Make better design systems with AI. Make your design system AI-ready and address your check engine light. Learn how to use AI to help audit, improve, and synchronize your design system assets.
Make better products with AI & design systems. Apply AI & design systems together across the entire product design & development process to unlock quality, consistency, efficiency, and scale.
Inventing the next generation of UX. Inventing the future! Agents as users, generative UI, hyper-personalization, real-time interfaces, and the creative infinite.
Operationalizing AI & design systems at your organization. Get buy-in, run a pilot program, roll out across teams, and establish the governance to help your org navigate this fast-moving landscape.

We're well aware that this landscape is changing literally every day, which is why we've designed this course to be very much alive! We've been careful to present durable core concepts while leaving the door open for ongoing lessons and demos as the landscape continues to evolve.

And it's worth saying that nobody has this fully figured out yet, including us! That's why we've created a community that gives us a healthy place to explore, grow, and learn together.

Course member Katie Swanson put it better than we can:

AI reshaped our workflows faster than any of us could document them, and this course is the first thing I’ve found that treats that as a systems problem instead of a tooling trend. The structure and pace are excellent, the resources are genuinely useful, the Jam Sessions and Slack community 🧑🏻‍🍳💋, topped off with questionable (okay, great) 80s references - this course rock my socks! Brad, Ian, and TJ clearly built this for practitioners doing the actual work.

– Katie Swanson

Thanks, and more soon!

TJ, Ian, and I have been grinding away at this course for nearly a year, and we're incredibly proud of how it turned out. There are a ton of people to thank, but since both TJ and I are on the road now, we'll save the long list for another day. But we want to thank everyone who has preordered the course; your support helped fund this effort and has shaped the contents of the course. We're looking forward to continue learning and growing with you and everyone else who joins our community. Thanks so much, and more soon!

Get the AI & Design Systems Course for $995 through September 29th, and $1,495 starting September 30th.

GitHub CLI: Media in issues, pull requests, and comments - GitHub Changelog

2026-09-02T00:00:00Z

The ability to use GitHub CLI and add Media in issues, pull requests, and comments is an absolute game-changer for people working in AI & Design Systems.

Throughout our course (and especially in Chapter 2) we talk about the fundamental shift of how git and services like GitHub are used. It is SO POWERFUL for someone on a product team to capture (manually or using tools like Playwright, which we cover in the course) and effortlessly dual-file a visual bug back into the design system repository.

I don't use game-changer that often, but historically design system teams have been fielding shit like ""This looks broken in our environment" with no additional context. So to receive a detail-rich summary AND real screenshots of the issue is genuinely a game-changer for design systems teams.

Just You Wait, by Chris Shiflett

2026-08-11T00:00:00Z

Just You Wait, by Chris Shiflett is a fantastic read. While I'm slightly younger than Chris, his description of the journey of growing and evolving with technology feels very familiar. The whole article is well worth a read, but really loves how he closes it out:

For the first time in years, I see possibility. Not utopia. AI’s problems aren’t being exaggerated. Like every technology before it, it will reflect the people building it. But possibility is the right word for what I’m feeling, and I haven’t felt it in a while. Not just for young people who haven’t lost their enthusiasm. For people who have been here long enough to remember when the web was open, generous, optimistic, and built by people who simply wanted to make things and share them with the world. That sharing was an expression of our gratitude, and that gratitude is still there.

I think experience matters now more than ever. I think curiosity matters. And I think a lot of people who may have quietly counted themselves out have something important to contribute.

So here’s my birthday wish, for me and for you: let’s be curious and generous. I plan to spend a lot of my time making things again. I’d love some company.

Backyard Designers: Draft Your Dream Design Team

2026-08-04T00:00:00Z

Backyard Designers is making its rounds, and I got to see myself as a little character.

I saw commentary about it feeling icky in-club kinda stuff, which is why the parody site Brokeass Designers with its pitch-perfect Sarah McLachlan music made me LOL.

I'm not a fan of this type of thing, and have never liked being put on a pedestal.

Literally every person on this planet has value, and we can all learn so much from each other. While this is pretty g-rated and it's fine to celebrate people, I feel like we've already got enough crap dividing people and giving people complexes. Gimme more communal, collaborative stuff any day of the week.

Things Take the Time They Take: A 42nd Thought at 42

2026-07-30T00:00:00Z

Two years ago I shared 40 thoughts as I turned 40, and last year I added a 41st thought. So as I make my 42nd lap around the sun, I figured I'd throw another thought onto the pile.

42. Things take the time they take

When I was working at R/GA, someone (I can't remember who) said something along the lines of:

You can't make a baby in one month by throwing nine people at it.

Despite this reality, I've witnessed so many cleverly attempt to hack it over the years. None have worked, and I've found the "good, fast, cheap: pick two." triangle continues to be true.

But with each passing year, time feels more compressed and our expectation of immediacy grows proportionally. The digital world introduced near-immediate abundance, which shaped our behavior, package delivery timeframes, and our willingness to wait for damn near anything. Give us another couple years and we'll all fail the fucking marshmallow test.

Creating things has become easier and more immediate as well. We now have a new paradigm of tools that allow us to generate things instantaneously. Our expectations of immediacy will shift yet again. Don't get me wrong, this convenience and immediacy can be incredible and unlock exciting new opportunities, but there are certainly costs involved.

Even though we have an arsenal of efficiency-optimizing tools and tactics at our fingertips, I've learned that when it comes to human endeavors: quality things take time the time they take.

Quality takes time to cook

Quality takes time to cook. I've learned this from putting our courses together, doing client work, writing a book, throwing a big concert, and applying myself to grand new ideas.

Through these efforts I've learned I personally can't sacrifice quality, even for things I explicitly say I'm going to cut some corners on to get out the door relatively quickly. Others might be able to dial back the quality knob to better fit the constraints of time & money, but it seems like I can't.

It's an unavoidable truth: to do big and important things takes a lot of time and energy sustained over a long period. The trick is to allow yourself to be ok with things taking the time they need to take. When I fight this statement of fact is when I get frustrated, feel guilty, feel ashamed, or feel like giving up because I'm not seeing immediate results. Complicating matters is other people's expectations of immediacy to see my results, which I still struggle with.

But for the most part, I've accepted the fact that things take the time they take. Things will get done, they will be good, and I'll do the hard work along the way to move things forward and bring ideas to life.

Front and back burner projects

In our work, I've adopted a vernacular of front burner projects and back burner projects. Our front-burner projects are the big important ones that are paying the bills and require the majority of our attention. A lot of back burner projects are the bigger ideas that can cook slowly, but you still have to occasionally stir the pot. The front burner projects eventually get done, and eventually some of those back burner projects graduate up onto the front burner.

What I've found is to allow yourself to keep stirring the pot and feel how you feel about something week over week. I've found that creating a working cadence (weekly, monthly, or otherwise) can help sustain that effort, iterate over ideas, and evolve things from idea into reality. It takes discipline to allow these things to take the time they take, but I feel like these lighter touches over longer stretches of time give things time to settle in and evolve at the necessary pace.

Valuing efforts that require time

With the rise of all this instant gratification, I hope we'll find ourselves valuing things that have clearly taken time to make. My family loves watching time lapse videos of art projects that take months and months — pencil drawings, canvases, murals, stuff that clearly requires sustained effort to arrive at a finished result. It's in the time lapse process that you can better appreciate the finished piece.

So yeah, it took me 42 years to arrive at this specific lesson, so there we go. And my advice is to just acknowledge that fact, and notice when you find yourself feeling frustrated, guilty, ashamed, or like giving up because you're not seeing immediate results in your work, your life, your relationships, and your endeavors. Things take the time they take.

Coming Up For Air

2026-07-23T00:00:00Z

Yesterday, I sent out a newsletter and wanted to share it here too because HOLY CRAP. It's been nearly two months since I've published a newsletter or substantive blog post, to which I say, “No sir, I don't like it.”

I'm tired of saying I'm busy (it's unhealthy, not a badge of honor), but it continues to be the truth. Just how busy, you ask? Well, I had a fantastic conversation with Don Norman (one of my all-time heroes whom I owe my career to) and literally haven't talked about it at all. Oof.

I've had to learn the hard way that there's a reason why people seclude themselves in cabins to create big projects. So while I'm still hunkered down with my big projects, my alarm clock went off so I need to come up for air, say hey, and share some big updates.

Exciting news: my website looks like crap!

If you visit bradfrost.com, you'll see that it looks like crap. Believe it or not, that's intentional.

I even got the old-school construction GIF in there.

My website has been my online home and primary means of expression for my entire adult life. Which is why it's a big deal to say that after **19 YEARS** (🤯) of bradfrost.com running on [WordPress](https://wordpress.org/), I just migrated the website to the fantastic [Eleventy](https://www.11ty.dev/). (Now's a perfect time to [subscribe/update via RSS](https://bradfrost.com/feed/blog.xml)).

With the platform migration done, I'm now redesigning/rebuilding it using our Eddie design system as video lessons for our AI & Design Systems course. I'm putting my money where my mouth is: walking through the entire end-to-end process of the most important website in my life (and the lifeblood of my business), teaching how to use design systems & AI together to make a beautiful, effective, and successful website.

Chapter 3 of AI & Design Systems is done!

Speaking of our AI & Design Systems course, Chapter 3 is complete! It contains over FOUR HOURS of in-depth video detailing how to wield AI to improve your design system foundations. We're now entering the home stretch of course production, running bi-weekly community jam sessions, and growing a helpful & supportive community. Join us!

My Atomic Design Certification Course is done!

Oh! Here's yet-another HUGE thing I haven't had even a second to share: my Atomic Design Certification Course is finally complete! AAAAHHH!!!!

The course contains over 10 hours of videos, sample architecture, and resources for how to master design systems: concepts, architecture, process. All backed up by a shitload of hard-earned first-hand experience. Right now, my team and I are QA-ing the included sample design system architecture in both Figma and code and putting a bow on things to get it ready for the actual launch. Consider this the last window to get the course for a comically-low price of $50 before the price increases to $150. You can also get ALL of our courses at a discount here.

SO many Wake Up Excited! episodes

I haven't been totally under a rock. In fact, I've been having utterly amazing conversations on Wake Up Excited! Do yourself a favor and listen to what these brilliant people have to say:

Sacha Judd on fandom and building healthy online communities
Dan Saffer on teaching the design of AI
Abby Covert on community & being human at work
Don Norman on ideas, design for good, & meta-communities
Luke Murphy on creativity, ADHD, and ethics
Luke Wroblewski on the evolution and pace of technology
Afyia Smith on human resiliency and docs-first design systems
Ridd on designers' shifting role

Whew! Keeping on theme with this update, my podcast just turned 1! Just one more thing I haven't talked about or celebrated. But for its birthday, I'd love it if you subscribe to the show on YouTube and audio!

And oh yeah, speaking of YouTube, I now have TWO YouTube channels:

Brad Frost - my main channel where I share ideas, design, have conversations, and more
Creative Exhaust - which widens my existing Cold Album Drumming project to include all of my musical and artistic shenanigans. Still very much WIP, you can watch me play music here!

Is that it???

At the beginning of this year, I declared systems bankruptcy and I've spent the entire year blowing up, overhauling, building, and bolstering all of the infrastructure and systems in my life and work. It's been difficult-yet-necessary work to do alongside getting our real projects out the door. All of this systems work is starting to bear fruit and will hopefully result in a saner, more sustainable pace moving forward. Holy shit, it better!

With this whirlwind of activity, my body, mind, and soul are looking forward to a much-needed break. Thankfully, next week I get to be a beach bum at the Outer Banks on our long-standing annual family vacation.

I hope your summer has been going well and that you've been doing interesting and restorative things! See ya soon.

Design System Maturity Model - zeroheight

2026-07-22T00:00:00Z

ooooo, Design System Maturity Model from zeroheight measures your design system maturity across 6 dimensions: Foundations, Documentation & Knowledge, Governance & Team, Adoption, Measurement & Impact, and AI Readiness

Poetic CSS

2026-07-02T00:00:00Z

Poetic CSS

Understand CSS as a system — so you can write, review, and maintain web styles with confidence on a timeline and under budget.

My friend Miriam Suzanne has a new course on CSS. I've learned SO MUCH from Miriam over the years and continue to have my perspectives changed and challenged by her thinking and hard-earned wisdom. It's an insta-buy for me. You should order it to, especially while it's on pre-sale.

Big AI & Design Systems Course updates!

2026-05-19T00:00:00Z

Chapters 1 & 2 of our AI & Design Systems Course are live! 🎉

Our course now has over 16 hours of videos, which includes course lessons, community jam sessions, and other demonstrations. TJ, Ian, and I have been busting our asses, and are SUPER pleased with how these new chapters turned out!

Chapter 1 - Core Concepts: This is a huge chapter that covers the broad arc of technology, the history, value, and challenges of both design systems and AI, how AI & Design Systems together are a powerful combo, and a big orientation into DS+AI tooling & terminology.
Chapter 2 - Environments & Tools Setup: TJ demonstrates how to set up AI tooling and demystifies often confusing/hard-to-find things like API keys. And I recorded 20 (!) videos about using Git & GitHub to operate in this modern landscape. I’m really proud that we presented all of this in a way that’s equally useful for beginners and experts alike.

We're now deep into recording lessons & demos for Chapters 3, 4, & 5, where we unpack AI & design systems in these areas:

Using AI to improve design systems (nearly done!)
Making better products with AI & Design Systems
Inventing the future with AI & Design Systems

Our growing community

While it feels so good to make substantial progress on the course, we feel even better about how our community is shaping up. We recently got a DM in our Slack community:

This community is the least toxic AI space I’ve encountered. It is so refreshing in that way; everyone seems so helpful and respectful.

It’s been tough to balance video production while simultaneously building the community, but it’s feedback like this that tells us we’re on the right path. We’re trying hard to create a place where people can ask questions, get & receive help, and share ideas, links, and interesting things. It truly feels like we’re all learning together!

Last chance for $500 super early-bird pricing!

The preorder price of $500 was established when we originally announced without anything in place. Now, the course has over 16 hours of video, a thriving community, and a slew of resources. To reflect this value, we’re increasing the course price to $995 after Monday, May 25th. So if your team has been on the fence, this is your last chance to get the biggest deal on the course!

We want to share a few important things alongside this announcement:

Purchase power parity is available for folks in different geographic regions, students, freelancers, and job seekers. We’re working hard to ensure anyone who wants to can join the course.
We’re donating a percentage of sales to organizations helping with sustainable development of AI. We want to put our money where our mouths are to do our part to mitigate the risks and harms of this technology. We’ll share more details soon!

So yeah! By purchasing the course, you get 16+ hours of video, access to our amazing Slack community, live bi-weekly jam sessions, a substantial discount on the full course price, and first access to new videos/resources/materials.

We're looking forward to bringing this course home over the next month. Thanks a ton for your support!

Grief in the AI Age

2026-05-18T00:00:00Z

I want to talk about this moment in time, this AI era, through the lens of grief. Grief is a powerful response to loss. When we think about grief, we often think about death, but it's taken me a long time to understand that we grieve all sorts of non-death loss: relationships, community, home, money, dreams, expectations, identity, sense of purpose, and even the loss of ideals or ideas.

It's taken a ton of time and a hell of a lot of work to understand my own grief as I've recovered from my many and varied traumas over the years. I've also learned a ton about grief from my wife, Melissa, who through her journey to become a professional counselor has worked in hospice and other really challenging environments involving grief, death, and loss. It's through my own experience and awareness of grief that I start noticing it in other places.

AI and the 5 Stages of Grief

The explosion of AI onto the scene has caused a shock to the system has triggered a real grief response for many people —myself included. I see it in the conversations I have, and of course with the abundant opinions about it I see online.

The Five Stages of Grief, also called the Kübler-Ross model, are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I want to run through each one of these five stages through the lens of how you might be feeling about AI right now.

Stage 1: Denial - This is certainly something that I went through, especially when AI was still generating images with seven fingers and laughable code results. It was easy to dismiss it and just push it away. I still see this with a ton of people saying, "Ha, look at how crappy it is! Look at how many mistakes it makes!" to dismiss it entirely, effectively pushing it away so as not to confront it.
Stage 2: Anger - When we realize that denial isn't viable anymore, we get frustrated and start looking around to find someone to blame and take our anger out on. I feel this myself a lot, and think about this stage when I see a lot of commentary levied at the people making this technology, inflicting it on all of us with seeming reckless abandon. We get angry the many real and potential harms & risks. These feelings are certainly valid, and a lot of that anger is real and justifiable. But it's also hard because we tend to take this anger out on the people around us.
Stage 3: Bargaining - Here is where we say "I'll use AI for this little thing, but not for these other bigger things. It's never going to touch my production code." Here we're trying to negotiate our complex feelings around AI; we're still angry and in denial in many respects, but we're also beginning to understand that it's here or maybe isn't entirely bad. We feel confused and are trying to make sense of it all.
Stage 4: Depression - I see this a lot in many of the conversations that I have with professional designers and developers. They say something along the lines of, "What's my entire career been for if these things could just come in and generate a website in a couple seconds?" "Nothing really matters anymore. What does craft mean? What does judgment mean?" "We're all screwed; we might as well just pack it up and then go live in an underground bunker." Again, those feelings come as a natural response to pouring your heart and soul into something and feeling a real sense of loss: a loss of stability, a loss of identity, a loss of livelihood, a loss of a lot of things. That depression is real.
Stage 5: Acceptance - Acceptance is really misunderstood because acceptance can be misinterpreted as, "Oh, suddenly I'm cool with all of the downsides, all of the harms, all of the risks around this technology." When someone we love dies, this acceptance stage is ultimately where we understand that person isn't coming back but you ultimately can make some form of peace with it.

Acceptance doesn't mean that you no longer get sad or you no longer are angry that they're gone. It just means that you accept the fact that the loss has happened and that you're able to move forward with resolve. You can convert a lot of that grief into real commitment to live your life in a way that honors their memory and hopefully continues to make them proud.

Grief Is Personal and Isn't Linear

I think I went through my own stages of grief around AI a bit sooner just because my circumstances had me working with it a little earlier. I distinctly remember many conversations "Screw all this stuff, this sucks." But I'm also realizing that a lot of my grief training at a personal level has really helped me be able to navigate this moment with a better sense of clarity and understanding that I otherwise might not have had, had I not gone through a lot of that hard. Silver linings.

These five stages of grief come with a lot of caveats. Grief isn't a linear process. Every single day, we might feel depressed, angry, in denial, bargaining, or we might be in a state of acceptance. This isn't a linear step-by-step process that everyone goes through cleanly or on a uniform timeline. It's a useful tool to help us reflect on how we feel.

Striving for Acceptance & Commitment

So here's a little reflection for you with respect to your feelings about AI. Which stage of grief do you feel you're currently in: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, or acceptance?

Once again, it's important to stress that getting to acceptance doesn't mean that you're never also angry or depressed. It's just an acknowledgment that AI is here; it's a reality. And with that acceptance comes another real important word: commitment.

Acceptance and commitment therapy is a whole thing worth exploring. With acceptance, with the acknowledgment that AI is here, it's likely not going away, despite my feelings and my grief around it. Making peace with that fact allows us to commit to doing our part to make sure that we're putting good things out into the world. We're able to do our part to ensure that it's wielded in a safe and responsible way, and that we can do our part to move towards betterment rather than shittiness.

Just to underscore this once again, getting to this place doesn't mean that you also aren't still pissed off, you also aren't worried, you also aren't anxious, you also aren't depressed. It's a real willingness to address this reality head-on and realize that we are in a place of agency and empowerment, and that we can move forward with resolve and try to make the world a better place.

In Summary

Grief is a powerful response to loss.
We grieve things other than death like the loss of relationships, identity, sense of purpose, health, money, home, dreams, expectations, community, and even ideas and ideals.
These shocks to our system can elicit a really powerful response that are captured in these five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
These stages are really just labels and are not a rigid or linear process; everyone ebbs and flows in and out of each of these stages at any given moment.
While these stages can be helpful descriptors, it's important to not fixate on them or feel like there's anything wrong with you if you're not further along in the stages of grief. We are complex emotional creatures and our emotional states change over time.

I hope you keep this in mind, and remember to go easy on yourself. Go easy on each other. Know that everyone's in their own place in feeling and processing this complex moment in time. And the best thing we could do is to be kind to one another and support one another.

The Boring Internet | Terry Godier

2026-05-12T00:00:00Z

The internet you grew up on isn’t dying.

A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.

YESSSSSS.

The Boring Internet by Terry Godier

Spicy Chicken w/ Brad Frost | Wireframe Live

2026-05-08T00:00:00Z

I had a wonderful chat about design systems and AI with Donnie D'Amato on his wireframe show. We talked about all sorts of spicy topics, and I feel like this conversation captures a lot of where my head's at lately and the picture we're painting with our course.

Building Healthy Community with Ben Callahan

2026-04-23T00:00:00Z

On the latest episode of Wake Up Excited!, I got to talk with my friend, fellow traveler, and recent collaborator, Ben Callahan. Ben and I met at BDConf many many moons ago, and since then we've shared many adventures together, including recently collaborating on an actual conversation. I have so much admiration for Ben and the community-oriented way he operates, so I'm incredibly pleased we got to spend a whole conversation digging deep into it.

We cover so much ground in our conversation: building healthy communities, the critical importance of values, humanizing work, how hard things force you to reevaluate things, the sharing culture of the web, lessons from music, the cosmos, and a whole lot more.

If you enjoy conversations like this, I'd love it if you subscribed to Wake Up Excited! on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Links & Resources

Get Together book
Design Downtime podcast

Music

Ben's endeavors

Ben's website
The Question - Ben's weekly open community design systems community
Redwoods - Ben's new paid community for design systems practitioners
Sparkbox - Ben's agency

Mouth Coding

2026-04-20T00:00:00Z

Lately, I've been talking websites into existence. Not metaphorically, but actually sitting in important meetings with people — clients, collaborators, my wife, friends, neighbors — watching real websites materialize in front of us as we converse.

I've been half-jokingly call it mouth coding, and the more I use that term the more I like it. Mouth coding is one of the things that has me most excited about this new era of digital creation: human beings getting together and actually collaborating. Actually making something together. Not just talking about the work (lord knows we've all had our fill of that), but literally talking the work into existence together.

What mouth coding looks like

My wife Melissa works as a counselor and arts therapist at a small private practice called Lucent Counseling in Pittsburgh. The owner, Andrea, is fantastic and is committed to helping people heal, move past trauma, explore multiple therapeutic modalities, and live healthier lives. Her passion for this mission is abundantly clear.

Like many small business owners, Andrea is spread thin juggling many-and-varied tasks. She created a Wix-powered website and did her best with the tools and time she had. The website exists, but she admits it needs some love to better align it with the practice's mission.

Enter Melissa! In addition to her counseling role, Melissa is now helping with marketing, communications, and design work. (Melissa's background designing digital experiences for Nike and other huge brands certainly doesn't hurt here 😂). I offered to help with the website (trying to be a good partner haha), and had a great conversation with Andrea about her values, mission, and eventually goals for the website.

From there, Melissa and I found a time to sit down outside on a sunny afternoon to create the website. In the course of a single hour, Melissa and I mouth coded a website that was a vast improvement over the current website. Here's the video of our session:

We cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time, pulling in context from our conversation (Melissa wanted to be off-screen and was at a distance so forgive the distant audio), the live website, Melissa's design exploration work, best practices (including some I didn't even know about!), and more to create the basis for a brand-new website for the practice. It starts as a specification that we refine together, and then eventually give the green light to generate the actual website.

What exactly is mouth coding?

Mouth coding requires a few ingredients:

An actual conversation between a person — or better yet multiple people — and an LLM to interpret the intention and facilitate the creation of the website.
Live transcription — Speech-to-text transcription during a conversation becomes essential for acting in real time. I'm now used to staring at a grid of funny-sounding faceless AI notetakers on Zoom calls. My personal favorite is Notion's AI meeting notetaker/ Notion is already my home base for all of my operations, so meeting notes ooze into my workspace, enriching my knowledge base with each additional conversation.
Sturdy web infrastructure — While mouth coding with free-reign vibe coding is possible, if we're trying to make something real we need to be able to answer "Is it good?" with a resounding "yes!" That's the theme of our entire AI & Design Systems course: couple the generative powers of AI with hard-earned, high-quality UI infrastructure to create quality websites at speed and scale.
A live preview — actual pixels rendering as the conversation moves. This could be in Storybook like what Dom showed me, could be a contained artifact the agent produced in the context of a chat, could be in an experimental real-time UI environment, or could be in the actual product environment. But the point is to actually SEE what you're collectively creating.
Additional context — Existing artifacts, agreed-on values, goals, context, constraints, are all helpful to have on hand before and during the conversation. This is where starting with a specification first can be really helpful. The spec is able to pull all of the different threads together into a coherent plan of attack that all takes place before the actual construction happens.
Human taste, judgement, critical thinking, and skills — And here is the sauce: humanity! Hooray humans! Everyone involved in the conversation uses their collective talents and discernment to make calls about what any result should be.

These ingredients set the conditions for a successful mouth-coding session, and underscores an important core value:

**AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.**

AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.
AI should facilitate human creativity, not replace it.

Honest-to-goodness collaboration

For my entire career, I've been clamoring, begging, cajoling, prodding, and pleading to get people to collaborate with one another. But alas, the industry has moved into insular silos, building rigid walls built from Jira tickets. Cross-disciplinary collaboration between designers and developers has been relegated to a fucking toggle switch. Even in this new era, it feels like the real desire to wire all of these MCPs up is so we can avoid having to talk to one another.

Not only is this extremely depressing, it's also terribly fragile, one-dimensional, and results in lackluster work. Genuine human collaboration has always been the answer, and these new AI tools can help facilitate that human collaboration in ways that are both old and new. I've noticed a few key things since the arrival of this new generation of tooling: fewer things slip between the cracks. context is able to be retrieved on demand, blind spots and areas for improvements are surfaced, and next steps become clearer. As someone who goes here, there, and everywhere over the course of a conversation, this added structure is extremely welcome.

But above all, here's what excites me most about mouth coding: it is accessible. it is inclusive. It is participatory. It democratizes the design process. Mouth coding allows for a diversity of voices — all with unique, valid perspectives and crucial context — to actually participate in the creative process. To work together to collectively sculpt the work. I'm well aware of the irony: this AI-assisted process feels like the most human digital collaborative work I've experienced in years.

And because the website artifact is conjured out of the ether before our very eyes, most everyone recognizes it as a prototype. But the big a-ha moment for people is when we make the first iteration after the initial website generation. As soon as people see a little tweak happen ("Make the heading say 'Better together'"), everyone lights up. They truly understand this is a wet ball of clay to be iterated over together. Ideation. Sculpting. Refining. Dialing things in. Honing. You just keep talking, and the thing keeps improving until either things feel really good or we run out of time.

Of course, mouth coding alone likely isn't going to get you to the finish line. For Lucent Counseling's website, we still need to write final copy (we have a rule not to let AI author copy. Scaffold and first draft? Sure. Final copy? Nope.), set up Netlify, transfer domains, and do the plumbing work to bring the website to life. But it is worth stating that even all of that work is a lot less intimidating, laborious, and time consuming than it once was.

Mouth coding for good

Mouth coding facilitates human collaboration and unlocks a more inclusive, accessible, and participatory design process that represents a diversity of perspectives.

For these reasons, I'm especially excited at the prospect of mouth coding to help non-profit organizations and community-oriented small business. These mission-driven organizations are tragically underfunded and their well-meaning teams are spread thin. They often don't have funding for professional, full-time web staff. Their languishing websites tend to reflect that unfortunate reality.

While the people at these organizations may not be professional web designers & developers, they are able to clearly articulate their noble mission and know what the website should be in order to help them advance their mission. With mouth coding, they can articulate their vision and watch it come to life before their very eyes.

Here's the thing: this still requires some degree of technical know-how. And guess what! Many of the professional designers and developers in my sphere are eager to help their communities, work with non-profits, and put their energy towards helping noble causes. Time and effort have always been the biggest legitimate blockers. This new era of tooling is making the means of production much faster, allowing for professional practitioners to help organizations without it needing to feel like an additional full-time job. This is great news for organizations and practitioners alike.

I'll eventually be conducting workshops on mouth coding (amongst other things!), and if that sounds interesting you can sign up for my newsletter to stay in the loop.

In the meantime, I'd love to facilitate more mouth coding sessions with non-profits and post them publicly to help teach people how to do this. So if you know of amazing non-profit organizations who would be open to publicly mouth coding their website with me, feel free to send them my way!

Adaptability, Curiosity, & Creative Breadth with Brendan Dawes

2026-04-13T00:00:00Z

Brendan Dawes is a brilliant multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and technologist. Just one of his many many many creative projects is working on the incredible Eno documentary (directed by one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, Gary Hustwit). Brendan created the technology so that the film is different every time it's viewed. Which, C'MON. Creative generative systems for a generative film about a generative artist. Freaking incredible.

I was already thinking about Brendan a lot as we enter the creative infinite, so when I saw his name in the Eno credits, I literally screamed and reached out to him immediately. Brendan and I had a wonderful conversation about creativity, curiosity, and what it actually means to thrive as a maker right now. Brendan beautifully explains the importance at staying on the event horizon of your knowledge, why craft+judgement+people+time is the formula for escaping AI's average output, and what Brian Eno figured out about technology that so many creative professionals are still struggling with.

Follow Brendan Dawes:

I'm doing a lot more of these kinds of conversations so I'd love it if you followed along! You can:

An update on life and work

2026-04-08T00:00:00Z

I've gone a lot of hard and scary experiences that's made me deeply value stability. After enduring varied traumas, I really turned on the afterburners to make up for being ripped away from my own life and to rebuild a sense of forward momentum. That translated into a real drive to earn money to feed my family, which I'm sure is an instinct that we all share.

I've been head down grinding for over 13 years, and I've been able to reflect and came to a realization.

My goal is to be in a place where I can give as much of myself away as possible. I want to make things, help people, collaborate, learn new things, help people learn new things, collaborate, build community, riff, share, create, and help people live more creative, fulfilling lives. And have a good time while doing it. That's what I'm here for.

I've always had a hard time taking a compliment, and would awkwardly bristle when people would describe me as inspiring. But ya know what? Fuck it. I'm now embracing it. If I'm decent at inspiring people to do creative things, to live better lives, I realized I want to do that as much as humanly possible.

Ian and I have been grinding hard to put the financial floor in place in order to take care of our families. If we can do that with the courses we're building, that's amazing.

A hard realization about client work

I'm doing a client consulting gig right now, and it's been super rewarding. I've been working with heroes of mine and people that I really admire. The work's interesting and we're helping them and we're doing a lot of good and meaningful work. I feel appreciated and confident in my own abilities to make a difference.

Which is why it's bizarre to say this: I've come to the hard realization that I can't do client work anymore.

It's certainly not for lack of wanting. But as much as I love it, client work is very laborious and time consuming. You're up close and personal, intimately getting to know how an organization operates at a human level, at a technology level, at all sorts of things. That's what makes it meaningful. That's also what makes it consuming.

The fact of the matter is I've been hard at work building this whole other thing now: courses, workshops, teaching, videos, creating, producing, publishing, mentoring, community building and more. I've got a whole freaking THING going!

I have full awareness of how lucky I am that technology companies call me asking how they should do technology. It's crazy. I'm very privileged and I'm very honored.

As much as love helping one company do things better, I want everybody to be helped by what I'm putting out into the world. I want to connect with people from all over the world and teach them things and learn from them, and to create the conditions for people to connect and learn from each other.

So after 19 years of client work — my entire professional career — I think I need to commit to that instead.

Building community

Our courses aren't just some cluster of videos; we're truly putting all of ourselves into them. They've grown well beyond our initial vision and have become a living, breathing organism. We're increasingly bringing everybody together into a vibrant, collaborative community — scheming with friends, building a center of gravity around learning cool and relevant stuff, having fun, treating each other well.

So yeah, that's where I'm going! Building community. Giving things away. Teaching, connecting, learning from people. That's what I want to commit my life to. That's why I've been fighting so hard for: to put the financial foundation in place so I'm finally free to do this mission.

So here we go. Let's see where this goes!

Thank you for coming along for the ride

I've met a lot of people from a lot of places now. We have these strange relationships that are 15+ years old because we said a thing to each other on the internet once. But even if that isn't the case, if you're reading this at all, thank you so much. It really means the world to me, and I truly want to connect with you.

"I want to connect with you" feels so weird and disingenuous to say. I feel like the landscape has gotten so polluted where everything feels transactional or grifty. But fuck all that influencer noise that's been built up around social media and the web.

At its core, the web still just people connecting. I want to demonstrate that you can (still!) really wield the ideals of the web, connect with people, do that authentically, and to point it at good things.

So that's what I'm here to do. It's still a strange phenomenon talking through pixels and time and space, but I love connecting with people and knowing that there's some people out there that are on the same wavelength as me. That makes me feel really good. I want to do more of that.

This has been a freaking journey, and I'm excited for what's to come. Thanks.

Storybook MCP with Dominic Nguyen

2026-04-06T00:00:00Z

Dominic Nguyen (Founder of Storybook and Chromatic) joins me to talk about Storybook MCP the long journey of design system quality.

We get into what it actually feels like to be "scaredcited" right now, and Dom shows off the newly-released Storybook MCP. He shows me a demo where AI generates a new search feature using sturdy existing design system components, run it through Storybook's testing gauntlet, and catch a real accessibility issue in the process.

It was really awesome to see years and years of hard-earned knowledge & features come together to serve this new era. The freaking power of open source software! Just incredible.

If you're want to learn how to actually wield Storybook MCP and the plethora of other tools out there to help you:

make better design systems
make better products using AI & design systems
invent the future of user experience

Then we'd love it if you checked out our AI & Design Systems course.