Brad Cohen

Leveling up your design career means improving in three areas: AI tools: Assembling an evolving AI design stack to ship fast — My stack: Cursor, v0, Prismic, Magic Patterns — AI fluency: Learning how to design for unpredictable systems Human-advantage: Strengthening moats like craft, agency and judgment to stay ahead of automation Together with strategic thinking and human-centric skills, these pillars shape your path toward becoming an AI-native designer. #design #architect #AI

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Terminal Fluency: As AI becomes more central to Designer workflows, I’ve been seeing more questions about whether the terminal is still worth learning. I think it is, terminal is core skill that compounds and unlocks next-level control over agents. Make terminal your second brain with this tmux + vim cheatsheet (or just get started) and keep your hands on the keyboard. https://lnkd.in/eV5bAFhF

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Episode 2 is out now! Delighted to be part of our panel on Design Systems as Strategic Investment, where I was joined by Ash Amrite, Billy Hanna, Christopher S., and Luis Ouriach from Figma. Together, we explored key questions: - How do you quantify value? - How do you align stakeholders across design, engineering, and product? - And what does success look like at scale? We dug into how organisations can: ✅ Define the ROI of design systems ✅ Align cross-functional teams ✅ Navigate enterprise adoption ✅ Turn design consistency into real business impact Whether you’re scaling a new system or refining a mature one, this session is packed with actionable insights to take back to your org. 👉 Watch the full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gDsUEeUY #DesignSystems #EnterpriseUX #ProductDesign #DesignOps #UXLeadership #DesignStrategy #Merkle

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Edit: Andy’s exaggerated head nods included, this is worth listening to. One thing to call out is that while Des describes CRUD, the broader point these days is that a designer, even an AI designer, does benefit from understanding this pattern.

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The top design trends we'll see this year blend emotional storytelling, authenticity, and advanced digital tooling to shape the future of visual design. https://lnkd.in/g5KMcuxV

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This is what investing in AI in design looks like. As with many other job families, the design industry focuses on what might the impact of AI be: will it lower the quality with slop? Will it replace humans? Etc But I don't see much focus on to understand and really capitalise on the potential AI brings to design. We are largely treating it as any other tool: a way to get incrementally better. At best it's a short course for the designers, at worst it's expecting designers to already know how to use it. But AI has the potential for making radical shifts and leaps. I'd love to hear, and learn, from anyone who is making significant strides to drive AI transformation in design.

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👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾This report articulates something many teams struggle to quantify… Design systems aren’t just internal tools. When they’re treated as real infrastructure, they shape customer trust, speed, and how a brand shows up. When they’re not, people feel the gaps long before teams see the impact.

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Hiring a designer can be rough. Ask yourself these four questions, and it will make the task a little easier.

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With Outset unlocking new research methodologies comes understanding new UX terminology. Hear Aaron Cannon explain what “tokens” are and how they relate to evaluating generative UX.

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