The Design Loop

Ronan Flynn-Curran — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:29:59 +0000

Things are different. Our industry is having a bit of an existential crisis (one of many), part of a wider big reset moment that is a daunting and opportunistic time to design and build software.

The gap between idea and shipped product is vanishing quickly, and we're all jumping into a digital event horizon of unknowns together, surrounded by a swirling cacophony of noise, excitement and worry.

Design != design

At the surface, the emergence of new agentic Design tools can feel like a threat to the established canon of Design as a discipline, as a profession and as a career.

But typically the FUD misses the crucial distinction between design tools and Design (with a capital D); confusing the craft and and the equipment it utilizes - equating the how with the why.

This is not new, this is a common gap in perspectives between Designers and the view of design as a service in organizations.

It's the latest chapter in confusing the ability of a tool, of a framework, of a Skill or a method to represent the ability of insights, human understanding, ingenuity and creativity to surprise and delight us in the drudgery of doing work.

Designing the Loop

More than ever, the need for a point of view and a "spicy opinion" becomes vital in the core of what we build. When anything is possible, havuing a point of view imposes important edges on what we do. Trend and taste are decoupled. Output, experiemental, weird and raw is more visible and fascinating that it's been in some time.

My feeds, fully engulfed by promoted bot-driven clickbait, are dotted with gems of tasteful experiments, custom tools and interactive design playgrounds that remind me a lot of the early days of web communities and personal sites, as builders' ability to scratch an itch and (fully) execute on whimsy is suddenly re-ignited.

Playfulness and personal flavor is more crucial than ever in our design perspective.

It's the antidote to a web that has become so fully consumed by frameworks, so ubiquitous and linear. These changes have already broken the themes and the trends of the old ways.

Through this phase, these experiments, we will see a new phase emerge as the agentic tools we work with become better designed, and can deliver better designed outcomes.

The bleeding edges will slowly re-center what we do on user value, first-principles and the evolving needs of the person (or agent) consuming the resource we are shaping. The right framing can quickly map to powerful deliverables via the new AI capabilities we find ourselves wielding.

Work

These days I'm reevaluating what this work should be, and what is the best way to go about doing that work. I'm working on building and exploring new tools, ideas and products. I'm enjoying the intersection of agentic workflows and how they can redesign our interaction with our existing software systems (through CLI, MCP, UI and automation).

I've really been enjoying diving into the new stack of agentic tools and possibilities; expanding my capabilities and ambitions. Small, focused teams and builder communities have an especially powerful advantage now, and I'm energized by what is clearly being a reset moment for our industry, our ways of doing things and the ability to create, share and own more of the surfaces of what our work is.

I love the constraints and energy of early-stage work: shipping fast, gathering signal from users, and iterating based on real human centered problem-solving patterns.

Some days it still feels overwhelming, to live in a world that resets its own rules every quarter — but I'd rather be building the question than answering it.

This post was written by me, and reviewed and tweaked with Claude. Typos were intentionally preserved. We live in the grain of our typos.

Screen Sources:

Charcuterie — A Visual Unicode Explorer

A visual explorer for Unicode. Browse characters, discover related glyphs, and explore scripts, symbols, and shapes across the standard.

charcuterie.elastiq.ch
meodai / nutelch

Chroma relative to the gamut shell (cusp) in OKLCH/LCH. Dependency-free, LUT-backed.

nutelch

Chroma relative to the gamut shell (the cusp) in OKLCH / LCH A nut is a "Schalenfrucht" — it has a hull; so does a perceptual color space nutelch lets you say "halfway to the boundary" (relC: 0.5) at any lightness and hue.

Dependency-free at runtime: gamut boundaries are precomputed into compact LUTs (culori is a build-time dependency only) and looked up with bilinear interpolation. The OKLCH LUTs are adaptive — their grid lines bunch around the cusps, where the boundary bends, and thin out where it's near-linear — so they track the shell ~3× more accurately than a uniform grid while staying smaller. See Adaptive LUTs.

Where it sits: between OKLCH and OkHSL

nutelch borrows one idea from OkHSL — chroma measured as a fraction of the per-lightness gamut shell — and keeps everything else from OKLCH:

OKLCH nutelch OkHSL

Chroma absolute C (gamut-blind)

…

View on GitHub
Flipbook

An infinite visual browser generated entirely on demand in real time

flipbook.page
RYBitten

RYBitten is a color tool and library for exploring painterly, RYB-inspired color mixing, gamut presets, and palette generation on the web.

rybitten.space

OKLCH	nutelch	OkHSL
Chroma	absolute `C` (gamut-blind)

Summer 2025 Internships at Fermyon

Ronan Flynn-Curran — Thu, 22 May 2025 18:49:46 +0000

We’re looking for Summer Interns who can help developers understand and succeed with WebAssembly tools - and help bring about the next wave of cloud computing!

You’ll collaborate with our Product, Engineering, and Sales teams, work with Fermyon’s products and CNCF-backed open source technologies like Spin.

This is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys building, learning, and communicating—whether you're experimenting with the local developer experience, documenting a customer use case, or creating a sample that highlights a core platform feature.

About Fermyon

Fermyon is committed to a culture of belonging, inclusivity, and respect. We believe that different perspectives—shaped by life experiences, education, talent, and interests—are essential for creating thriving teams.

We welcome the unique contributions you bring in terms of your culture, ethnicity, race, sex, gender identity and expression, nation of origin, age, spoken languages, veteran status, color, religion, disability, sexual orientation, education, opinions, political preferences, and overall beliefs.

If you’re someone who values people and embraces differences, Fermyon is the place for you!

Applying

Learn more about these internships at https://www.fermyon.com/jobs/index

DEV Community: Ronan Flynn-Curran

The Design Loop

Design != design

Designing the Loop

Work

Screen Sources:

Charcuterie — A Visual Unicode Explorer

meodai / nutelch

Chroma relative to the gamut shell (cusp) in OKLCH/LCH. Dependency-free, LUT-backed.

nutelch

Where it sits: between OKLCH and OkHSL

Flipbook

RYBitten

Summer 2025 Internships at Fermyon

About Fermyon

Applying

Partnership between Fermyon & Akamai unveiled!

Introducing Fermyon Wasm Functions on Akamai