• Designspun
  • Posts
  • Reflecting Backward to Look Forward

Reflecting Backward to Look Forward

Conversations with pioneering designers, how the design tool landscape looks today, and what modern art can teach us about design

Author

Roger Wong
June 07, 2025

This week, Soleio, former designer at Facebook and Head of Design at Dropbox and now an investor, brought the design community a treat. He talks with six pioneers in design. I haven't had the chance to watch all of them yet—I started with the intro and the interview with Henry Modisett of Perplexity. But I'm very excited to watch the whole series, especially the one with Susan Kare, one of my personal design heroes. Here is a recent photo I took at MoMA, showing Kare's drawings for a simple animation:

Early Macintosh animation by Susan Kare

I will probably post more about the series on the blog after finishing it.

Two Surprises from the 2024 Design Tools Survey

Tommy Geoco’s 2024 UX Design Tools Survey results are finally out, and two things caught my attention.

Surprise #1: The Leadership-IC AI Divide

Design leaders adopt AI at 29%. Individual contributors? 19.9%.

That nine-point gap is interesting. The report doesn’t speculate why, but here are some possibilities:

  • Leaders are experimenting with AI for efficiency gains

  • Leaders write more than design (emails, memos, reports)

  • ICs are set in their processes and don't have time to experiment

More telling: 75% of AI usage focuses on writing and documentation—not visuals.

Surprise #2: Framer Won “Future of Design”

I had to double-check this one. Ten percent of respondents want to try Framer in 2025. Maybe it's the name of the award, but does Framer really represent the “future of design”?

I haven’t touched Framer since its early days. They’ve built a solid business, but I’m personally wary of creating websites in closed platforms.

Not Surprised at All

The survey’s conclusion mentions two predictable trends:

  • AI adoption will accelerate (8.5% cited AI tools as their top 2025 interest)

  • The design-code gap persists (46.3% report inconsistencies between design specs and code) Both feel inevitable.

I dive deeper into the survey data and share why the design-to-code gap is begging to be solved. At the end of this post, I quote photographer and camera reviewer Ken Rockwell, “Cameras don’t take pictures, photographers do. Cameras are just another artist’s tool.” Tools are commodities. Their favor come and go—look at InVision and Adobe XD. But our skills as craftspeople, thinkers, curators, and tastemakers are not. They endure.

Highlighted Links

Nate Jones performed a yeoman’s job of summarizing Mary Meeker’s 340-slide deck on AI trends, the “2025 Technology as Innovation (TAI) Report.” Half of Jones’ post is the summary, while the other half is how the report applies to product teams. The whole thing is worth 27 minutes of your time, especially if you work in software.

 

Christopher Butler reminds us about the importance of structure and how the proto-graphic designers we studied in art history, like Piet Mondrian, mastered it.

 

In this short piece by Luke Wroblewski, he observes how the chat box is slowly giving way as agents and MCP give AI chatbots a little more autonomy.

What I’m Consuming

How tech workers really feel about work right now. Burnout is at critical levels. In a survey of 8,200 tech workers, almost half are experiencing significant burnout. (Noam Segal and Lenny Rachitsky / Lenny's Newsletter)

AI Startups Burn Through Cash 2x as Fast, and 10 Other Top Learnings from SVB’s Latest in Enterprise. Some interesting recent stats about the startup sector. (Jason Lemkin / SaaStr)

The Brutal Math of Venture Capital — What Every B2B Founder Needs to Know. Related to the above, if you're working in a startup, you should read this.

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please consider sharing it with a friend or colleague.

Sponsor

Learn AI in 5 minutes a day

What’s the secret to staying ahead of the curve in the world of AI? Information. Luckily, you can join 1,000,000+ early adopters reading The Rundown AI — the free newsletter that makes you smarter on AI with just a 5-minute read per day.