Jonathon Toon

In 15 years as a designer, I've witnessed others early in their career struggle with the gap between tidy process and messy work. Inspired by this observation, I recently gave a lecture to the students at the University of Canterbury about this gap, read more below.

Figma has all the power and abundance of AI , yet I still cannot add multiple strokes to a shape or frame?

Lately I've been struggling to get inspired by the design of most modern marketing websites and landing pages. They’re either super vague, saying little, or overly complex with visuals and animations, leaving me overwhelmed. Just me?

midjourney-hero-core, mostly definitely

problem selection

I was born for this.

I reckon AI design is close to having its Bootstrap.css moment. Clean and functional results that all look the same. As new technology raises the floor for "good enough", distinctiveness becomes the new moat. Weird beats optimal.

People say the em dash is a dead giveaway for AI-written content, but for me, it's this sentence structure: A rhetorical question? Here's the response.

I am somewhat of a collector of modern low IQ lexical slop. Help us out with the collection! "Transfer Funds" -> "Move Money" "Registration Complete" -> "You're in!" "Restore" -> "Put back" "Error"-> "Oops!" "System Failure"->"Something is broken" "Return"->"Go back" "OK"…

After five exciting years, my chapter @PlanetScale has come to an end. When I first joined, everybody was like, "Who the hell is PlanetScale? Do you actually like databases that much?" To be honest, I did not know a lot about databases nor really care about them, but I sure was…

Got Claude Code set up locally on device (Google Pixel 7a) via the Android terminal. Feeling unstoppable.

I made some icons. They’re 8-bit tiny.

hot take - your website just needs to load super fast and explain what you do and let me do the thing you want me to do very very fast. I dont care about the animations, the gradients, the scrolling effects. Just make it work awesome.

Facebook, 2012

possible, but it worries me. the trend in the 2010s of calling products “the os for finance” or “the os for productivity” felt like the laziest way a founder could describe what they have. it sounds great, but imo doesn't show clear focus or conviction on a specific problem.

The AI arms race is unreal right now. Also what does this say about Cursor...

I miss my copies of Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX and Age of Empires 2.