• The artist formally known as Clawdbot and Moltbot gained a ton of momentum this week. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework designed to autonomously carry out real tasks across apps and services, not just chat or answer questions. It’s getting attention for giving developers more control over AI-driven workflows, with the tradeoff of needing thoughtful setup around security and permissions.

  • Designers and Devs were buying Mac Minis over the weekend to run this, but Cloudflare built an experimental product to run Open Claw on a Cloudflare sandbox.

• Why this is big: The OpenClaw viral moment marks the shift from AI as a passive tool to AI as an autonomous actor, pushing product teams to design for trust, control, and agent-native workflows, not just interfaces.

Stripe launches a new home page

• The site and home page are filled with beautiful designs, interactions, and messaging. My favorite piece the is the number at the top “Global GDP running on Stripe: 1.55954974%” signaling their aspiration to have a massive impact on GDP flowing through their platform.

Agentation

• This week Agentation hit almost 150k installs

• This is a rad open source project simplifying the process of specifying UI prompts.

What are Skills?

• This video does a great job explaining what Skills are, how to use them, and how it can impact your work

Designers and Engineers are pushing the boundaries of Skills

• In the link above Notion has created a skill for you to create a visual and interactive page outlining everything a Pull Request might accomplish

The Best AI Coding Tools for Designers

• Ridd from Dive Club put together a great video that maps to my own experience around what has been the most impactful prototyping tools for the job at hand.
  

Cheers
-Kyle

I finished the year off with some personal posts.

My 2023 year in review

Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown
This fall I finally built a separate workspace. It has been such a wonderful improvement to working from home. I was on the fence about it for years and struggled to find a true breakdown of a project like this so I documented the process and broke down my costs for all of you who are thinking about doing something similar.

Design finds

Ambient Co-presence

Maggie Appleton is one of my favorite design thinkers. Maggie walks us through the thought process of rethinking the feeling of co-presence in a global world.

”Multiplayer cursors can add a sense of shared activity in digital spaces but lacks the ambient quality we're seeking. Seeing exactly which word or design mock your manager is focused on isn't the chill background sensation we're going for.”

Designing an analog clock for kids

An old find, but I came back to this over the holidays. Andy Allen walks through the process of designing and creating an analog clock that is easy for his young kids to understand. The process is delightful and the outcome is wonderful.

Figma’s Creator Micro Keyboard

Figma collaborated with the team at Work Louder to create a custom Keyboard just for Figma. The product looks absolutely beautiful.

Thought I want one purely because the look of it. I still find mapping my Logitech Mouse to Figma Keyboard shortcuts a more efficient setup. Here is my setup:

You can download Logi Options here if you have a Logitech mouse and want to do the same.

That’s it until next post. Go build something great!
- Kyle

To keep up with my day-to-day follow me on Twitter.

My team and I have been working hard all year to take Webflow Apps out of beta and fully launch it. The launch comes almost 30 new Apps, with loads of new experiences, improvements, and capabilities for developers to build apps with. Check it out and build an App!

A Portrait of Tenochtitlan

A 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire. This is a beautiful project and well worth a look!

A cursor for augmented reality

A fun and technical read about designing a cursor for a new media platform.

Off-Grid

A beautiful site diving deep into the stories of creators.

Knob

Love keyboards? Take a look at a keyboard project that will make your clicky fingers drool.

Thanks for reading!
-Kyle

📊 Leaning into business as in-house designers

Prototypes, pixels, and craft. As designers, we love these topics… But suppose you work as an in-house designer and desire to go beyond the “Senior Designer” job title.

By Kyle Lambert

Design Finds

How We Made MuseScore 4 - Music App Design is Challenging!

As a designer working on complex design tools (Webflow) this video hit home. When you work on complex products many times you have to navigate the tension of innovation and interoperability. There are so many decisions and trade-offs along the way. It was cathartic to watch this wonderful video with a team struggling with the same decisions my team and I face daily.

Mondwest bitmap font

I have been obsessed with this bitmap display font.

A beautiful new app Icon from Adam Whitcroft

Link to the original Tweet.

Close Figma Tab (Chrome extension)

This is the Chrome extension I didn’t know I needed. It auto closes that Figma link page that we all know and love

Until next time
- Kyle

Recent posts from yours truly:

Who has the credentials to deliver design feedback?

Being an exceptional designer does not equate to being skilled at delivering feedback that enhances the work of others.

Defining your own “success”

I spin when I lose sight of what I deem successful and start playing the comparison game. But when I’m grounded in what I’ve articulated as success in my own life, I find better footing.

Design finds!

What makes a shadow look realistic?

A great thread from Dan Hollick on the composition of shadows

New Google font: Bricolage Grotesque

I love this funky and playful font from Mathieu Triay. “A free and open source variable font with French attitude and British mannerisms”

Higher Level Design

An insightful post from Julie Zhuo: what does it mean to achieve higher and higher levels of design?

Until next time
Kyle

Why is making a dark mode greyscale so hard to get right?

A great thread around dark mode design from Dan Hollick

Calligrapher.ai

A really interesting use case for AI, generating handwritten text. This could get around the awkward experience with handwritten fonts reusing characters.

Visual design rules you can safely follow every time

A post stacked with foundational visual design practices

Teenage Skeuomorphic Desktop Designs

Some fun throw-backs

How to draw ideas

Four ways how to use drawing to get more ideas: Study, Explore, Develop, and Show.

“Most of our users are on Desktop”

How survivorship bias impacts our product development planning

The Four Horsemen of the Tech Recession

“it's so disorienting to see the insane number of tech layoffs recently and then to see today that the US added 517K jobs + pushed unemployment down to lowest level in 50 years...”

That’s it. Those are the links, have a great week all

-Kyle

• 🚮 Our digital clutter is costing us

• 🧠 My brain struggles with a tidy process

• 💙 Today’s design influencer: quick tips get hits

Enough about me! Let’s get into the rest of the internet.

Links I am vibing (or super bummed about)

🤕 Twitter is killing their third-party clients

I understand that Twitter made an intentional decision for their business, and that is acceptable. However, the big disappointment is how the rollout was handled and the lack of care that went into not communicating with developers. The way Twitter dealt with this was unbelievably disrespectful and unprofessional.

• The third-party apps Twitter just killed made the site what it is today

• Twitter Intentionally Ends Third-Party App Developer Access to Its APIs

👏 Fun things

• Rafa launched a new Mac App (Hi Dock) to manage your doc on multiple screens

• I discovered you can access source image files from Figma

• Corey Moen launched No-code Supply, a digital general store of hand-picked, no-code goods.

• Sketch launched a homepage redesign

• Obsidian launches canvas. It is a really interesting step for their product

• Not anything new but I have been going through Free Code Camp. The content is so helpful

• A great post from Matthew Ström: What it means to design a platform

• (Not tech or design related) One of my favorite authors Brandon Sanderson launched his book “Tress of the Emerald Seas” - it has been a fun read

• I have been reading a lot via RSS and loving it. Net Newswire has been a great app

• I have been alpha testing Ivory, a new mastodon app and it has been a lot of fun following along and watching Mark’s design process.

Until next time folks
- Kyle

New things

I recently updated my personal site. Check out the latest imkylelambert.com

Recent blog posts

I joined a new team at work focusing on building Developer Ecosystems at Webflow. The work is very technical. To make sense of things I have been creating more and more design artifacts to drive clarity. So naturally I wrote about it:

Driving clarity with design artifacts

I also wrote about gaining momentum in writing, and my approach to writing blog posts quickly.

The real fun:

Things around the web I have been diggin’

• All the beautiful and detailed app icons that Gavin Nelson has been creating

• Maggie Appleton’s write up on Command K bars

• Teenage Engineering’s computer cases. Do I need a new computer? Do I want to build one just to use these cases? Yes.

• Mode.com’s new branding and marketing site

• Diagram’s Magician Figma plugin

• Mastodon, no seriously, despite the upfront hurdles, I have found the platform refreshing. No algorithms, just content from people I follow. Find my here.

• Matthew Ström’s post Generative art Open Graph preview images

Until next time
-Kyle