🤝 Design Meets Code #5

Hi! Welcome to the fifth issue of the Design Meets Code newsletter!

Here's what caught my attention this week:

⭐ The Story of the Week

BlueSky’s Social Media Revolution

BlueSky, born from a Twitter research project in 2019, is making waves in social media. After hitting #1 on the US App Store and seeing a massive influx of users from X (formerly Twitter), the platform has grown to 22 million users with notably high engagement rates.

What makes BlueSky different is its "AT Protocol" - think email for social media. You get an address like @user.bsky.social that works independently of any single app, giving you unprecedented control over your social experience. You can:

• Keep your identity across platforms

• Choose your preferred content algorithms

• Maintain connections between services

• Create custom feeds and filters

The web and mobile platform is built on modern tech ([React Native](https://reactnative.dev/) and Expo and is completely open source, with its 211,000-line codebase available for anyone to examine or build upon. This transparency has attracted notable developers like Dan Abramov from React.

With $23M in funding and a subscription-based revenue model, BlueSky is working toward a stable AT Protocol 1.0 release. Their focus on openness and interoperability could reshape how we think about social media, making it more like the open web than a walled garden.

Some interesting related resources:

🔗 Read this thread about how it works from a core developer of the AP protocol - Paul Frazee

🔗 Create your Starter Pack - a personalized invitation bundle with your favorite follows and feeds to help friends find their community.

🔗 Check out Design Meets Code starter pack

🔗 Collection of libraries & SDKs for starting to build with BlueSky.

🔗 If you wanna dive really deep, check out AT Protocol docs to develop apps/addons on top of the BlueSky or even launch your own PSD (Personal Data Server)

My top picks of the week:

🥇 The CMS for Next.js: Payload CMS 3.0 is stable and production ready! For Next.js website development, Payload is now a first-class citizen providing CMS and admin interface. The admin dashboard is generated automatically through configuration files. Payload 3 marks a major evolution with its Next.js native architecture, allowing developers to run both CMS backend and admin panel directly in their Next.js apps without separate deployments. It introduces powerful features like database joins, advanced querying, improved rich text editing, and a robust jobs queue system. Check out their announcement video and templates.

🥈 Jaguar's Controversial Rebrand: The "Copy nothing" campaign sparked a design community backlash, with designers creating satirical logo variations and mocking the rebrand. However, all this attention might actually benefit Jaguar in their build-up to the final product line reveal - sometimes there's no such thing as bad publicity.

🥉 OpenSourcers Around the Globe: Explore the top GitHub contributors by country 🌏

The gems of the week:

💠 Pricing Strategy: Hunter Hammonds shares insights on how to price design services. Project-based work offers the best balance of profitability (50%+ margins) and client satisfaction, while subscription models tend to have lower value capture despite being easier to sell.

💠 Women-First Design: The Woman-centric design handbook provides a comprehensive toolkit with frameworks and methodologies for designing products that better serve women's needs. Includes practical examples and exercises, available in multiple languages.

💠 Software Deal Discovery: Fellow solo founder Dan has created Rare Big Deal - a curated platform for discovering genuine deals and discounts on selected SaaS, software, apps & services during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

💠 The Fastest GitHub Search: Vercel acquires Grep - the fastest search engine for code across half a million GitHub repositories.

💠 My Favourite Web Analytics Tool: Umami, the free and open-source web analytics platform, introduces Revenue Reports in v2.14, helping identify the most profitable website pathways.

💠 Learning SEO: This week I'm diving into search engine optimization to drive free organic traffic. I bought Danny Postma's SEO course (affiliate link) - worth checking out if you want to reduce dependence on paid marketing.

AI

💠 Free AI Moderation: Just discovered - OpenAI offers a FREE moderation API - a fine-tuned model that can detect whether text may be sensitive or unsafe. Thanks to Linas Lekavicius for pointing it out.

💠 AI is Challenging Engineering: Bolt.new, v0, Cursor, Windsurf and Claude continue to challenge the software development market, enabling MVP launches in minutes/hours at zero cost instead of thousands of dollars.

💠 AI Industry Move: Amazon doubles down on AI with an additional $4B investment in Anthropic (creator of Claude), intensifying competition with OpenAI.

💠 AI-Powered Gradients: Justin Jay Wang, Designer at OpenAI, shares some methods for generating beautiful gradients using AI techniques.

💠 Ben Affleck on AI in Hollywood: Ben Affleck shares his opinion on how artificial intelligence might impact the film industry.

Design Systems

💠 eBay Enterprise Design System: eBay openly shares their new Design System called eBay Playbook. Packed with valuable insights and featuring a beautifully crafted documentation website.

💠 Design System Evolution: There's a growing shift towards lighter-weight "design toolkits" that provide reusable components without enterprise overhead. Successful startups like Perplexity and Cron prove you don't need product-market fit to start building basic design blocks. Learn more in this detailed analysis.

💠 Design Documentation: Fig Mayo caught my attention as a promising tool for bridging the gap between design and development documentation. It helps teams align on both code and visual components - though I haven't tried it personally yet.

💠 Dev Tools Update: Figma enhances developer experience by making Figma Variables visible in Dev Mode.

💠 Design System Metrics: Building Design Systems can be resource-intensive. Here are actionable Design System Metrics to help measure ROI and effectiveness.

Quote of the week

That's it for this week!

Found something useful? Got cool stuff to share? I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line – your finds might make it into next week's issue.

If you know someone who'd like this too, feel free to pass it along!

Stay curious,
Edgaras