📨 Way of Working, Continuing
The pilot editions of Ways of Working went live last month. Thank you for the support, reactions, and messages. There were more exchanges about systems and routines than I expected, and that alone made the attempt worthwhile. Soon, I will be speaking with type designers, designers, comic artists, community builders, coffee brewers and more. If there is someone whose way of working you are curious about, suggest them. If you know them, connect us.
📰 Propaganda, Packaged Well
War again. The narratives arrive ready-made. Clean threads. Confident takes. The news does not slow down. Propaganda no longer looks loud. It presents itself as analysis. I once recommended Startup Nations without hesitation; it reads differently now, less like neutral observation and more like a strategic national narrative. Read before sharing. Pause before amplifying. It is possible to question a regime and also question a superpower. You do not have to adopt the side presented to you.
🧠 AI as Window
Design is changing quickly. Tools, workflows, expectations. Multi-agent systems. Token calculations. Autonomous drafts. It could be a bubble. It could settle into something lasting. Hard to know yet. If you are curious, this is a good time to learn. Try the tools. Understand how they work. Unlearn habits that no longer help. Even if the hype fades, the skill will remain. Pablo Stanley recently spoke about overload and the overwhelm designers are feeling. The pressure is real, which makes fundamentals, taste, and clarity more important, not less.
&Thats
A detailed walkthrough of how the original Stranger Things title sequence was animated in After Effects. Layer choices, type weight, timing. Watching it frame by frame shows how deliberate it really was.
Tonsky takes apart the macOS Tahoe icon set and compares it against the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992. A careful study of where clarity slips and systems drift.
The Life Calendar turns a lifetime into a grid of weeks. A minimal iPhone wallpaper. No quotes. No philosophy. Just time counted visually. Looking at it changes how long a year feels.
A heavy read on police brutality and social exclusion, where parents speak about the trauma of losing their daughter. Content in Malayalam.
The K-Shaped Future of Software Engineering looks at how AI may divide the field into uneven paths. Acceleration for some. Stagnation for others.
Two pieces on AI workflows. One describes running a company entirely on markdown files. Another shows Claude agents inventing a compressed internal language to reduce token costs. Both read like experiments from inside the shift.
Oat by Kailash Nadh is an ultra-lightweight UI library built without React. A simpler stack for those who prefer fewer abstractions.
Bangalore is full of Tabebuia Rosea right now. In peak Bangalore fashion, two separate tech projects emerged around it. Malavika plotted the trees across the city. Faris Mohammed built an interactive web tool to explore them. Same bloom. Different builds.
Completed reading Velichapadum Pocketadikkarum by K. R. Sunil. It feels like photography in prose form. The patience, the framing, the attention to light and detail reflect his eye as a photographer.
I’m Hiran Venugopalan, a product designer, maker, and home brewer. This&That is where I share things that caught my attention, something worth sitting with. Ways of Working lives here too, a series where I talk to people about how they think, decide, and get things done. If something here sparked a thought, write to me.