The design industry, decoded daily.
A daily design digest that reads the industry and returns the five things worth your time — sourced, dated, hype-checked.
UCD Coach
Design · Vercel · Live
At a glance
Problem
Design news is a firehose of announcements with no signal about what's real.
Role
Product, editorial model, AI pipeline, interaction design, front end, monetisation.
Stack
Next.js App Router, daily AI editorial pipeline, seven topic taxonomies, RSS, dated archive.
Status
Live, publishing daily.
The problem.
Every design newsletter has the same problem: volume without judgement. You get twenty links and no view on which of them matter. A pipeline that summarises more, faster, makes that worse rather than better.
0→1.
Built the editorial constraints into the pipeline rather than the prompt: every item carries a source and a date.
Every item gets a hype status — Hype, Adoption, or Established — so the reader knows whether something is a press release or a practice.
Each briefing ends with one action. Five items a day, across seven topics.
Layered a human-curated "Coach Picks" tier on top so the whole thing isn't machine-judged.
Under the hood.
A daily pipeline sources, classifies and summarises, then writes to a dated archive that becomes the permanent URL structure. Every digest is addressable at /archive/YYYY/MM/DD, which is what makes the archive product possible at all.
Interaction.
Hype status as a visible badge
The single most useful piece of metadata in design news, and nobody was surfacing it.
Receipts on every claim
Source domain and date sit next to the summary. When something couldn't be verified, the digest says so out loud — that honesty is the product.
One move per briefing
Editorial output that ends in an action beats output that ends in a summary.
Topics are landing pages
Seven taxonomies, each an indexable page with its own description. Structure serving both the reader and the crawler.
What shipped.
- A daily digest publishing five sourced, dated, hype-checked items across seven topics, with human-curated picks, RSS, a full dated archive, and an affiliate revenue layer. Live.
- Daily publishing cadence with source-linked briefings
- Clear hype vs adoption framing for AI and tooling news
- Free, no-signup entry point for the UCD product family
- Editorial AI
- Content ops
- Front end