WELCOME
Being Designerly 118 has curated content at the intersection of Design, Tech and AI to help you be more creative including Zapier's AI adoption, panic reducing creativity, creativity in obits, designer-AI showdown, emotional intelligence in the age of AI, Pope Francis' tomb font issue, logos go bold, Netflix goes TikTok, and Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD).
FEATURE
How Zapier rolled out AI org-wide and drove 89% adoption
Read about how Zapier spent the last two years turning AI from a curiosity into something embedded across how they think, work, hire, and build. Today, 89% of their team actively uses AI in their day-to-day work. But that didn't happen overnight. It took urgency, infrastructure, trust, willingness to get a little messy, and a cultural shift that rewired how the whole company operates.
zapier.com
CREATIVITY
AI, fear and the future of design: There Is nothing less creative than panic
In his latest Designism column, design leader Brian Collins believes it's time to turn and face the strange. He urges creatives to stop clutching their pearls and start imagining what doesn’t yet exist - because the very best work still requires something only humans have: soul.
thedrum.com
The Creativity Hack No One Told You About: Read the Obits
Reading obituaries can boost creativity by exposing you to distant ideas, fueling the associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs. First, start by reading them slowly, without searching for a big idea. Let the details wash over you — the places lived, the professions practiced, the odd hobbies pursued. Notice what sticks. It’s not just about learning new facts, of course — it’s about asking questions. Even if you don’t find all the answers, just posing the questions helps you flex the creative muscle that thrives on curiosity and connection. What you’re doing is filling up your brain with a range of very different cognitive material.
mit.edu
CRITICAL THINKING
This Competition Exposed How AI is Reshaping Design
An interesting perspective from Dan Mall after watching two designers go head-to-head in a high-speed battle to create the best landing page in 45 minutes. One was a seasoned pro. The other was a non-designer using AI.
danmall.com
EMPATHY
Emotional Intelligence in the Age of AI
Daniel Goleman writes about how AI has matched or beat humans on measures of mental proficiency, and the AI advantage will only grow with time as the technology gets faster and better. But the good news for us is we are quite likely to remain better than AI at human skills like emotional intelligence – and that advantage is likely to stay.
linkedin.com
VISUAL
Why the lettering on Pope Francis's tomb looks so bad
While people are celebrating the new Pope, there is a issue with his predecessor's tombstone. Many on the internet have pointed out that the kerning on Pope Francis’s tomb in the Basilica of St. Mary Major is objectively awful. The name “Franciscus,” due to terrible spacing between letters (aka kerning), reads something more like “F R A NCIS VS.”
fastcompany.com
Why every company is hitting ‘Ctrl+B’ on its logo
Following last week’s announcement of Amazon’s brand refresh, 2025’s three biggest rebrands to date—including those of Walmart in January and OpenAI in February—have, to the untrained eye, more or less involved hitting “Ctrl+B” on the companies’ wordmarks and logos to put them in bold.
fastcompany.com
UX
Your Netflix app is about to get a “For You” page
In the coming weeks Netflix will pilot the new feature, which it will populate with short-form clips of movies and shows tailored to the end-user’s viewing habits. Netflix users will be able to swipe through the feed to watch, save, or share content with friends, just like Tiktok. For Netflix, it’s a play for improving its own content discovery engine.
fastcompany.com
INCLUSIVE
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)
Celebrate the 14th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on Thursday, May 15, 2025. The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments.
accessibility.day
