➕ The Conditions 233

“Drawing” the Mona Lisa with GPT-5.6, Claude, Gemini, and Grok
Four frontier models, a blank canvas, and colored pencils. We tracked every stroke, dollar, and output as they tried to draw the Mona Lisa

Claude Cookbook
Practical guides and code examples for building with Claude. Learn prompting techniques, tool use, multimodal capabilities, and more.

A Concrete Definition of “Product Sense” (and How to Build It)

AI can now handle many tasks that once made product builders valuable.
As a result, designers and engineers are under growing pressure to decide what to build, not just how to build it. This shift has fueled the rise of the term “product sense,” but the concept is often loosely defined, creating confusion more than clarity

Intuition comes with time and repeated exposure to real product decisions and results. AI may rob you of the chance to develop product sense if you aren’t careful. Stay in the ring, own your decisions, and face the results. This is what will make you valuable for years to come..

A fun breakdown of fictional UIs from Jurassic World

Future euro banknote design proposals
10 proposals for a full redesign – the first since the single currency’s paper money entered circulation in 2002 – were unveiled by the chair of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, last week. They include five proposals on the culture theme and five on the wildlife theme.

My favourite is ‘Design D’ by Rudy Guedj and François Girard-Meunier

The story behind Present & Correct, the perfectly curated stationery shop that’s every graphic designers dream [via itsnicethat']
A lovely interview with the founder of Present & Correct – my favourite stationery shop here in London

The Obama Presidential Center by Pentagram
The typographic installation on the façade of the new museum in Chicago features an excerpt from President Obama’s 2015 ‘You Are America’ speech.

ShieldFont is a Typeface That Poisons AI Crawlers

ShieldFont was created by the Brazilian creative studio Seneda & Abrucio (S&A) and the Copenhagen-based type foundry Playtype. The objective was to create a versatile typeface that looks like regular text to human readers but feeds scrapers altered wording.

Using OpenType glyph substitution, it changes select words in the HTML to alter sentences’ original meaning but keeps them grammatically coherent, so they’re more likely to pass AI quality filters.

“ShieldFont is not an anti-AI project,” S&A’s founders Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio stress. “We’re simply against the idea that publishing is the same as consenting. We saw how existing opt-out protocols such as robots.txt were being routinely bypassed, so we wanted to create one that could enforce itself. The answer was to turn the content itself into the opt-out.”

Less design related but still on the topic of creativity – prodigious music duo Domi & JD Beck have a new album out this week and their approach to art direction matches the thoughtfulness of their music.

A great hour-long interview with them by Rick Beato – on their approach to composition, their hugely varied musical influences.