Feed for Christopher Butler
There is a pattern visible across the writing about AI this week, and it is older than the writing about AI . Each time a new tool drops the floor of access to a craft, the ceiling of mastery rises somewhere new. The interesting work moves up — out of execution and into the decisions that govern what should be produced, what to trust, what to delegate, what to keep. Takuma Kakehi names this cycle…
Every technological cycle is really a cycle of power. This is not a controversial observation when said about the ones we consider historical — the creation of the printing press and the resulting power of distributed narratives; the creation of the railroad and the resulting power of transportation; the creation of the mechanical loom and the power of production. But, it becomes harder to…
One of the more interesting moves in the writing about AI right now — visible across pieces from designers, researchers, and a critic of computers — is the rediscovery of the seam. For most of the last decade, the dominant design instinct around digital technology has been to remove seams. Frictionless onboarding. Seamless transitions. The disappearance of the off-switch. Each removal was sold as…
There is a fear narrative about AI that I think misses the most interesting thing happening. The story goes that we will offload everything to the machine — both the thinking and the doing — and that whatever we get back will be a hollow imitation of what we used to make. Some of this is true. There will be a great deal of work made by people who have abdicated both halves of the job to the agent,…
There is a useful frame for the AI moment that has been quietly emerging in the writing of the last few months. The work we do, it suggests, splits roughly into two halves. There is the half that produces — the rendering, the executing, the building, the delivering. And there is the half that decides — what to make, what to attend to, what to leave alone. AI is rapidly compressing the first half.…
Introduction There’s a pattern emerging across disparate domains: the collapse of meaningful distinction. Swiss watches stopped being precision instruments and became billboards. AI-generated text is making the web semantically narrower and relentlessly cheerful. Petro-masculinity turns environmental concern into a referendum on manhood. In each case, what once had substance—craftsmanship,…
There’s a piece of conventional wisdom about design leadership I’ve never agreed with. It goes something like this: as you move up, you rise above the details. You stop worrying about pixels. You worry about strategy. You focus on the “big picture.” I think this is wrong. I think it’s always been wrong. And I think what’s happening right now, with AI in the design world, is going to prove it.…
We do not know what is going to happen. This is a hard truth; we desperately want to believe the opposite. And so the most successful corners of the modern internet have been organized, very deliberately, around that desire to convince you that someone, somewhere, knows what is coming next, and that we should all look to them. The category includes astrologers and channelers, futurists and…
Irreducibly Human There’s a story we keep telling ourselves about AI : that it’s racing to catch up with us, that any day now it will cross some threshold and we’ll be obsolete. But this story confuses the frame with the framer. When a model scores 85% on a benchmark, we see it catching “us”—but what we’re actually seeing is the model getting better at operating inside a frame we built. The score…
This morning went the way most of our mornings go, which is to say I barely noticed it. The lights came on when I asked them to. The water was hot. The coffee maker did the one thing it exists to do. My daughter found her shoes more or less where she had left them, the car started, the road to school was open, and by half past eight I was at my desk having given almost none of it much focused…
Signals Something new here—a weekly signal from noise, or at least I hope so. Connections drawn between things I have encountered… Something strange happens when we put a name to things . The moment “cassette futurism” or “Corporate Memphis” enters circulation, it stops being a loose collection of visual ideas and becomes a fixed category—something that can be sold, politicized, weaponized. This…
A growing number of design firms, publications, and professional organizations have declared outright bans on AI-generated content. No generated text in our articles. No AI-assisted imagery in our portfolios. No automated code in our deliverables. These proclamations arrive with varying degrees of righteousness, positioning themselves as ethical stands against corporate exploitation, job…
This is something I say in the course of nearly every conversation I have with every agency design team I consult. I remind them, over and over again, that marketing is two kinds of persuasion: FIRST , persuading a person to actually pay attention, and THEN , persuading them of the thing you think is important. Most messages never reach people, not because they’re poorly articulated, but because…
I have a vested interest in the title of this piece being true. I’ve spent decades developing craft—not just making things, but understanding systems, seeing patterns, making judgments that can’t be reduced to prompts. If AI eliminates the need for that expertise, I’m in trouble. But I don’t think it does. And understanding why matters—not just for people like me, but for anyone who cares about…
Will what happened to the music recording industry happen to AI? That’s the main point Rick Beato is making in this video , which I find very intriguing. Rick shows how easy it was for him to install local models on his own machine and is basically saying that locally-run LLMs will undercut (if not beat) the largest AI companies selling access to their models. His perspective is that the same…
While I don’t doubt for a second that images like the one at the top of this page could be easily generated with AI , that they wouldn’t have been made by me predicts at least a million meaningful differences. This is what I explained to my daughter as we were making art together over the weekend. Yes, we could be making images much faster, but we’d be missing out on the experience that working…
“There’s no viable garage startup path in AI anymore.” When I encounter this claim—and I encounter it often—my blood runs cold. It feels so persuasive. How could any startup compete with institutions that draw more power than a town to deliver a result that is rapidly degrading from magic to expectation? The barrier to entry is billions in computational resources, massive datacenters, chips that…
Once basic needs are met—once you’re comfortable, secure, insulated from material consequence—wealth accumulation becomes divorced from survival or utility. It becomes a game. Rules, competition, scorekeeping, status. The difference between ten million and a hundred million doesn’t change your material reality. It’s just points. A way to keep track of who’s winning. But here’s what makes it…
Second Story experimented on their own website with many things, creating an experience that defied the boundaries of the browser. I loved it! I encourage you to follow the link above to see just how interesting their “newspaper” layout feels while scrolling horizontally and vertically. Here’s a snapshot of what the design did beyond the viewport edge: I’d love to see more websites that play with…
Lots of art time with the kids over the past couple of weeks has filled more pages! Unfortunately, the light here was harsher than I wanted so many of these images are losing some nuance. I found myself rescuing dozens of bits and scraps from the recycle bin this week. Mashed many of them up in here. ^ (Hi, Mom!)
This , from JA Westenberg, is well-put: “I’m going to argue that the pessimists have the best narratives and the worst track record. The doom scenarios require assumptions that don’t survive contact with economic history, and the psychological posture you bring to this moment actually matters for how it turns out.” Westenberg’s essay is about why optimism at a time like the present makes sense.…
I’ve been thinking about the science fiction novels that have stayed with me across years—the ones I return to in my mind even when I’m not actively reading them. Replay . The Sparrow . The Listeners . Way Station . Earth Abides . The Lathe of Heaven . I Who Have Never Known Men . When I look at them together, I see thematic consistencies that I didn’t recognize when reading them individually: the…
Over the last week, I’ve been setting up design-to-code systems that have had a profound effect on how our design team makes and ships things. We create files in Figma that are translatable by machine—integrated with Anima to produce HTML and CSS files, compiled and refactored by Claude, then implemented by providing Claude with contextually relevant information and code. Existing templates,…
At long last — catching up here! It’s been months since my last visual-journal entry here , but I have kept up offline. Here’s a sampling. A friend asked me recently about my collage source material. At this point, I very rarely cut something out of a book or magazine directly and fix it onto a page. Instead, I most often collect digital images and process them a bit before printing them at home…
Several years ago, I created a new design for my website and attempted to alter my Blot theme to match it. It didn’t work out especially well, and I became quickly frustrated by what I perceived to be a limitation of the theme to handle what I considered to be pretty simple design choices. I was wrong, not about how simple the implementation would be, but about how to do it. Blot themes use…
Can there be progress without disruption? It sometimes feels as if our culture has become addicted to doom — needing time to be marked by fearful anticipation rather than something more proactive or controlled. We’ve learned to expect that change must be chaotic, that innovation must be destructive, that the future must collide with the now whether we want it to or not. But there’s nothing about…
This is the reality of design work today. When you choose Webflow vs. WordPress vs. Shopify vs. custom development, you’re making decisions about what’s even possible to design, what fonts and components are available, how content will be structured, what the maintenance burden will be, what integrations are feasible, and what performance constraints you’ll live with. These are foundational design…
The economy is both thriving and failing, depending on where you’re standing. The stock market remains strong, driven almost entirely by the valuations of seven companies. Meanwhile, most people experience a daily reality defined by inflation — everything costs more, no one is being paid more, and the gap between what the market says is happening and what life feels like keeps widening. This fork…
For our first wedding anniversary, I gave my wife a clock that measures years. It’s called The Present , created by Scott Thrift, a designer whose work I’d followed for some time. I’d invested in his Kickstarter campaign, and the clock arrived just in time for that first milestone. A timepiece that takes 365 days to complete a single rotation seemed like the perfect gift for marking an anniversary…
I am not allowed to set up a stand in front of my local Whole Foods and sell the eggs my chickens lay or the blueberries from our bushes. I am not allowed to sell remedies or heal the sick out of my home. I am not allowed to build an app that handles the logistics for thousands of people to do either of those things, either. In all cases, regulations — rules enforced by government agencies and…