These things also on my mind recently. I'm a freelancer, providing design-development services, and trying to understand as things changing rapidly.
I don't think even the tools are advancing, allowing us to build in a new way, not everyone will be able to develop production ready products. Or good looking ones. So there will be always in need for people know how to orchestrate the new workflows with good taste and years of experience.
For the same reason they use "tokens" instead of kilobytes: so that you don't do the conversion yourself and realise that for example spending a million "tokens" on claude-opus-4.6 costs you anywhere from $10 (input tokens) to $37.5 (output tokens). Now, 1 million tokens sounds pretty big and "unreachable" until you realise that's about 4 megabytes of text. It's less than three floppy disks of data going back and forth.
Now let's assume you want to send a CD worth of data to Opus 4.6. 700 megabytes * $10 (price per million input tokens) / 4 (rounding down one megabyte to roughly 250k "tokens") = $1750. For Opus 4.6 to return a CD amount of data back to you: $37.50 * 700 / 4 = ~$6.5k.
A terabyte worth of data with a 50:50 input/output ratio would cost you $5.7 million. A terabyte worth of data with a 50:50 input/output ratio on gpt-5.2-pro would cost you $25.2 million. (Note: OpenAI's API pricing still hasn't been updated to reflect 5.3 prices.)
So we get layers upon layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of obfuscation to hide those numbers from you when you simply subscribe for a fixed monthly fee!
"Think Different" also used to mean something, before Tim Cook cozied up to authoritarianism. Who knows, it's never too late for Anthropic to have a change of heart.
This isn't really a tasteful collection. It is just a bunch of popular books, all of which that I have read being about minimalism.
If that's what you want you can just use Apple as a case study because that's what you end up getting if you want "modern" and minimal. Even just drop the CSS file from source into an LLM and go through how it is implemented.
My first recommendation would be to impose a hierarchy --- surely the books can be grouped in some fashion useful to the viewer? Perhaps by the intended reader? So maybe:
- beginning designer
- developer working with designer
- developer working without assistance from a designer
- supervisor working with team of designers and developers
Long flat lists of undifferentiated items are a common problem in design and your page not solving that is decidedly not confidence-building.
Also, was surprised not to see what I consider one of the best books on visual interface design listed:
Unfortunately, this book was marred reputationally by the reissue having a ghastly cover and poor quality screengrab reproductions --- track down a first edition if possible.
Most web design books are essentially going to tell you to put a navigation bar on top or on the side, with a big call to action button in the centre while laying everything out on a grid (hence why most websites now looks the same). Logo design books now are always going to tell you take inspiration from the Twitter or Nike logo e.g. something that is simple but easily recognisable from afar (everything is now a swirl or a a single polygon). The colour theory stuff is half pseudo-science and mostly going to tell you to pick from a small colour palette with a consistent primary/secondary colour while keeping in mind that colours are perceived differently in different cultures (now you have everything in black/blue/red and white). The only one that I liked was Refactoring UI because it demonstrated how small changes can add up to make something that looks amateur look professional. But you can probably learn more just by investigating things you like yourself and implementing them.
"Understanding the logic behind these biases allows us to confront, moderate, and potentially use them positively. This directory takes a swift dive into various cognitive biases affecting our lives and work, aiming to help us design with greater awareness."
I much prefer React Aria's components. Yes fuck Adobe but take their RadioGroup for example: https://react-aria.adobe.com/RadioGroup Much better than shadcn's in terms of deps and LOC, and it uses an input. All of their components are built for accessibility first.
Yup, agents LOVE Tailwind+ShadCN. Even when I've explicitly told them not to use it, it still creeps in. There's a lot of prior art out on GitHub and LLMs can't help themselves. FWIW, the result does tend to look nice enough. For a POC I can't complain. If I'm really going to roll up my sleeves and get into the code though? I don't think I'd enjoy all of it.
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