🦄 Craft skill won't make you influential. Neither will AI. ✦ Unicorn Club

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Hey, welcome to this weeks newsletter 👋

Most of us are confident about things we shouldn't be. Knowing what to hand off and what to keep is a skill that doesn't get easier just because AI can do more of the work...

Here are my three picks: CSS containment, design principles with a point of view, and why designers struggle to build influence.

Enjoy 🦄 - Adam at Unicorn Club.

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The three picks I'd send to a teammate:

Build: CSS containment - the layout trick Harry Roberts says most sites are missing

Shape: Design principles deserve a point of view, not a committee

Ship: The real reason designers struggle to build influence at work

Top 3 this week 👇

Build: What Is CSS Containment and How Can I Use It? ↗

Harry Roberts on the one CSS property that changes how browsers calculate layout.

Why: Containment lets the browser skip recalculating the rest of the page when only a widget changes. Most sites don't use it. Find one in your product and test it.

Adopt: Find a self-updating widget, add contain: layout, measure the result.

Shape: A Practical Guide To Design Principles ↗

AI makes skipping the process look appealing. The thing is...

Why: You usually know when a principle is real because you've watched it go wrong. Good principles come from knowing what you've got wrong before, not from articles about what other teams got wrong.

Adopt: Choose your principles deliberately, not because someone declared process is dead.

Ship: Why designers struggle to build influence at work ↗

Craft skill is not the blocker. Influence is.

Why: Better craft doesn't usually change how much influence you have. What moves the needle: showing up before the brief gets written.

Adopt: Shift from executing deliverables to shaping decisions earlier in projects.

Dive into more

Build: Evals are for everyone ↗ Phil Morton on why evals catch what vibe coding misses, and why that's worth caring about before you ship.

Build: Vibe Coding Best Practices: Avoid the Doom Loop with Planning and Code Reviews ↗ This is the one where you keep changing your mind after you've already started building, realise you've undone half a day's work, and then do it again.

Build: A Product Manager's guide to using AI to build working prototypes ↗ Design and engineering are where ideas go to get translated, and translation always loses something. AI cuts that loop and ships before the idea gets away.

Build: Animating 160,000 Cubes in Three.js to Visualize Dithering ↗ Ordered dithering with WebGL: 160k cubes, no textures, no post-processing. The technique that makes grain look intentional rather than broken.

Useful Extras

Build: What Is Your Site's AI Chatbot for? Users Can't Tell ↗ Most users reach for Google or AI before they'll search your site.

Ship: The Methodological Problems Hiding in Your Research Tools ↗ Research tools have always had blind spots. Now AI is making them worse.

Shape: Statistical Significance Isn't the Same as Practical Significance ↗ Your A/B test can be statistically significant and practically useless.

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Thanks for reading

Adam from Unicorn Club

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🦄 Craft skill won't make you influential. Neither will AI.

What makes good digital products work.