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Selected work and writing by Callum Flack, a designer and engineer working across language, interaction, and code.
Callum Flack
Designer who codes. Writes about creativity and process.
Latest posts
An answerable vocabulary for LLM collaboration
English is the new programming language. But fluency isn't proof. A vocabulary for keeping LLM collaboration answerable instead of merely fluent—tied to the repo, test, or source that can say no.
What I'm doing now
What I am focused on now: writing, agentic workflows, AI-native teams, and the work I am trying to make more legible.
Two interrogation skills
I published two agent skills for reading before responding: one for mining idioms, one for locating claims. They are small tools for preserving the shape of thinking.
Favourite articles
Essays I constantly think about or refer back to — on slack, creativity, scenius, cognition, strategy, and the shape of the dream time.
You can't design a UI without designing the code
A chair’s form emerges from its material and joinery. An interface’s form emerges from its code. You cannot design either surface independently of the structure that makes it work.
Letters
I'm Callum Flack—a design engineer and product leader with over 20 years of experience. I design and build beautiful hypertext products that work in the blink of an eye, creating the most valued currency—trust.
Themes for Shadcnblocks
Design deep-dive on three original Shadcnblocks website themes—Charter, Streamline, and Mainline. Covers type choices, Figma prototypes, UI trends, and the creative process behind each theme, with links to live demos and design files.
Notes on coding with LLMs
A set of strategies and tactics I've been using for riding the recent step change in LLM-assisted coding. How to offload writing code while maintaining control of it by dividing approaches into high-level thinking methods and specific implementation techniques using specific tools.
The work and team I'm after
A note is to help founders, colleagues, hiring managers and myself to get a better idea of the kind of work I'm good at and that I enjoy. I want a job where taste + code (design engineering) matters. Ideally remote. With a team that shares mutual respect, camaraderie, and a passion for what we build.
Forward deployed engineers
The Palantir solution to "the system is the problem" was to parachute engineers into context to create an "end-to-end solution to that specific problem, and to hell with generalizability".
Kalaurie outdoor campaign
A set of dual posters for easy glanceability, strewn across the city of Melbourne, September 2024
The unfolding afterwards is the experience
On The ordered unfolding of experiences and its connection to narrative structures
Coming out of silence
Scott Walker explains the process of creating his lyrical imagery.
I is someone else
I came across one of his letters called "Je est un autre," which translates into "I is someone else."
Convenience as a trap
How defaults/convention/conveience is a good thing until it isn't
Configuring Tailwind as a Design System
Well-crafted UI is your last defense against the coming slopwave of careless AI apps. Here's how customizing Tailwind can save you time and design bugs so you can focus on the irrational amount of care good UI requires.
About
I'm Callum Flack—a design engineer and product leader with over 20 years of experience. I design and build beautiful hypertext products that work in the blink of an eye, creating the most valued currency—trust.
Epic Guide App
Epic Guide App is the final addition to the Epic Platform, which DWS have been ideating, designing, building and testing for AJHackett Bungy over the last 3 years.
In a band, should all decisions be unanimous?
Effective teamwork hinges on a simple yet powerful strategy — disagree, then commit. It champions using individual strengths and acknowledges that the right ideas might wait for their moment. The key to success? Mix diverse views, test, and adapt. This approach cuts through complexity, fostering unity and driving progress with clarity and insight.
Ways of seeing Generative AI
Because Generative AI is a new general purpose platform, it is difficult to reason about its current use case potential, and what shape its native products will take. To help me think about it, here's some frames, metaphors and questions from the past year of thinking about it.
The difference between iteration and prototyping
Iteration and prototyping are not the same thing but they're related over time during a build process. To determine which method you're using, ask yourself are we trying to test a solution or are we trying to release a solution?
Library of Economic Possibility
Design and development of the brand and website for the Library of Economic Possibility. Built in collaboration with founders Kasey Klimes and Oshan Jarrow.
Vana
Working at Vana has been a fascinating journey of creating innovative AI-driven products like Portrait, a web app generating personalized images based on users' likeness.
Code, people and fallibility
Tech failures, like Facebook's DNS mishap and Atlassian's outage, highlight a key insight — it's not just about the code, but the humans behind it. These incidents underscore the importance of communication and collaboration in technology, reminding us that at the core of every technical glitch is a human error waiting to be understood and addressed.
Anchor Ceramics
A website and content system for Anchor Ceramics, a Melbourne-based ceramics studio.
Do the grid fins still fold in?
During a tour of SpaceX rocket-building facility, Elon Musk delivers an excellent distillation of his 5-step build process — question assumptions, eliminate excess, focus on essentials, speed up development, and finally, automate. A masterclass in problem priorisation that is widely applicable.
Aquiba
A breand and website for Aquiba, who designed and built smart water meters in Australia for Australian conditions.
Replier
Replier helps you quickly respond to questions buried in long messages by choosing what’s important and removing the rest. A text utility app created in collaboration with Jeremy Wortsman.
ByMany
Project overview coming soon.
Studio Round
Website rebuild for Studio Round's agency website, providing qualitative guidance and website management over a three year period 2019-2022.
Kalaurie
Brand and Shopify Hydrogen website for Kalaurie, a fashion label that creates ethically & sustainably handcrafted womenswear to order in Melbourne, Australia.
The First Principle
A website for The First Principle, a Sydney-based a B2B marketing and corporate communications consulting firm.
Building the Cleared Quiz Machine
A case study in scoping, designing and building a scalable Allergy Diagnosis Quiz system for Cleared, a digital healthcare platform I've been working on.
Notes on Deciphering Sun Tzu
My notes on the book “Deciphering Sun Tzu” which helped me understand the poetic paradoxes of ancient Chinese Philosophy as an alternative and coherent strategy of condition-consequence, adjacent to the Western rational means-end strategy of my cultural heritage.
The matter of taste
When business hinges on the user experience and how products make people feel, success or failure is often a matter of taste. But only when one understands taste as intuitive knowhow, not subjective preference.
Edge Hill Butchery
Project overview coming soon…
The instantaneous language of beauty
We rely on the pre-verbal language of aesthetics to sense our environment before we can think. We are naturally attuned to beauty because we innately know it represents a higher possibility of worthwhile information.
Practice boredom
Before you can generate new insights, you have to wander. How does one perform this wandering thing? Start by aimlessly doing nothing. In other words, practice boredom.
Aphorisms for remembering how to see
The creative process starts with learning how to see, then by collecting what you find. How do we remember our ways of seeing without losing the nuanced understanding we learned? Said another way, what are some variations of the "optimise for interesting" aphorism?
Rules for record collecting
My desert island discs aren't the same as yours. And they sure aren't what googlefacify tell us. To repeatedly discover music that blows your mind, you have to be begin by being an unfashionable hoarder.
Wander, wonder, wunder
The creative process requires a fascination that naturally draws you into an enjoyable flow state. How do we discover and cultivate these fascinations?
John Boyd's bloody-mindedness
Creativity may also demand another type of creative fuel—extreme disagreement, or bloody-mindedness. John Boyd's character is the perfect example.
Creativity starts with love and theft
Making something new doesn't happen by magic. An irresistible itch has to be scratched, love has to be found. An accidental essay about the missing triggers in the creative process, inspired by my years of collecting soul 45s.
Designers should code
If you want to know how to make software that connects with and works for real people, there's no substitute for shaking hands with the invisible demons programmers wrestle with.
Top Ten 45s for Hams
Eleven soul 45s and a few loose notes.
Breaka Milk
My first