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Design Current

by Koi Studios

Subscribe to get UX strategies, design trends, and real-world examples to help you build better products.

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February design inspirations đź’Ś

Hi friend, This is Design Current, your go-to newsletter about user experience design. In this issue, we want to share a few design inspirations and thought pieces that has helped us grow and reflect. First, a celebration! Our studio has just entered our 4th year! We started Koi Studios with a simple belief: thoughtful design can do good. What began as a desire to create impactful work grew into a studio built around care: for users, partners, and the problems worth solving. Fast forward to...

22 days ago • 2 min read
Side-by-side comparison of two mobile money transfer screens: a baseline prompt design with bold cards and multiple payment options, and a front-loaded prompt design with cleaner layout, clearer hierarchy, and additional details like fees and estimated ar

Hi friend, This is Design Current, your go-to newsletter about user experience design. Over the past few months, we've been exploring how to better incorporate Figma Make into our design workflow at Koi Studios. But then, I quickly realized: If the output quality I'm getting from my prompt is bad, it doesn't matter where I use it in my design process, because it's useless. So I started researching best practices for prompting Figma Make. The top tip: front-load your prompt If you’ve looked...

about 1 month ago • 3 min read
A blue page titled “Understanding Neural Networks, Visually,” featuring a colorful neural network diagram with connected nodes.

Hi friend, This is Design Current, your go-to newsletter about user experience design. And to those celebrating: Happy Thanksgiving! ✨ As a little gift of gratitude, we pulled together a handful of design gems our team at Koi Studios fell in love with this year. They sparked a ton of inspiration for us, and we hope they do the same for you. Design candy Understand neural network visually → Epic visual storytelling that turns a complex topic into something truly digestible. Poolsuite → An...

3 months ago • 1 min read
A close-up of a person’s hand and forearm extended outward, with the index finger pointing to the right.

Hey friend, This is Design Current. A newsletter about user experience design. Lately, I’ve felt a bit… gaslit by AI products about my prompts. Any time the output misses the mark, I’m told: “To get good results, you need to write better prompts.” But why should users know what is a good prompt??? This is a real issue for AI products that rely on chat interfaces. As designers, we take this seriously. This is what we did to improve AI chat UX and, in turn, boosted product adoption. 1. We...

4 months ago • 2 min read
A hand places a blank square sticky note beside a grid of nine other blank sticky notes arranged neatly on a dark surface.

October 2025 Hey friend, This is Design Current. A newsletter about user experience design. It's the time of the year again. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year… but also 2026 planning season. Yep, the time when everyone’s scrambling for a spot on the roadmap, arguing for headcount, trying to prove why their priorities matter most. And if you’re like most designers I’ve talked to lately, one theme keeps coming up: “We really need to invest in our design system more.” But here’s the...

4 months ago • 2 min read

October 2025 Hey friend, This is Design Current. A newsletter about user experience design. It’s 2025. Designers shouldn’t be regarded as the people who just make things “pop” anymore. But respect isn’t given, it’s earned. We have to show that product design is not subjective. How? By speaking their language. In this newsletter, we’ll talk about how we’ve advocated for design, whether we were in-house or freelancing, or working at a startup versus a large enterprise. Shifting the perception...

5 months ago • 3 min read

August 2025 Hey friend, This is Design Current. A newsletter about user experience design. I love reading books, but I hate reading copy in apps. And I know I’m not alone. You’ve probably heard the phrase “users don’t read” before. It’s true -people skim long instructions or descriptions, and sometimes skip them altogether. So the real question is: how do we actually get information across to users? Here are a few approaches that have worked well for us. The low hanging fruits Be less polite...

6 months ago • 2 min read

August 2025 Hey friend, This is Design Current. A newsletter about user experience design. Over the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with AI tools in real-world design work. But tbh, we're tired of the AI hype. Can it actually help us design better? So instead of chasing headlines, we wanted to know: Which tools are actually useful, and for what? Where do they fall short? How could they fit into our workflow? What makes a “good” prompt anyway? Here’s a peek at what we’ve learned so...

7 months ago • 2 min read
Two screenshots. On the left is three screens from iOS 26's latest design, mimicking glass. On the right is a series of mockups from Material Design, with bold colors and typographies.

June 2025 Hey friend, This is Design Current. A newsletter about user experience design. Have you noticed how things feel a little more... alive lately? Your apps are getting sassier, your favorite brands are cracking jokes, and even Google is telling us to get emotional about design. Let me tell you what's happening. The rise of expressive design The big players are getting personal Left: iOS26 Right: M3 Expressive Google released Material Design M3 Expressive - a design system literally...

8 months ago • 2 min read
Screenshot of an AI assistant interface showing the prompt “Improve my proposal for the Climate Grant.” Below it is a checklist labeled “STEPS” with completed items: Research the grant opportunity, Align proposal structure to requirements, Identify any mi

June 2025 We just hosted our very first New York Tech Week event! 🙌 It was a fantastic session exploring our theme: “Crafting AI products that stick.” You can watch the recording here. One of the big ideas we tackled was how AI products can earn and maintain user trust - a topic I love diving into, because it’s a timeless challenge in UX design. So how do we design products that users actually trust? We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. Let’s dig in. How to design for trust As...

9 months ago • 2 min read