Top management talent from across the world heading to India

These urban legends prevent firms from getting sustainable advantage

Looking for things which are going right can often help address those which are not

Reducing complexity and friction between members is important

Global shortage of 400 million kg of tobacco spurs export demand for the crop; premium leaves fetch farmers in Prakasam and Nellore districts a record ₹210 a kg during e-auctions

Government hopes the measure will ensure adequate domestic availability of rice, wheat and atta; it plans to bring down reserve price of rice by ₹200 a quintal, which will now be ₹2,900 a quintal

Vegetable prices may cool next month onwards, but dal prices pose a fresh worry

Traders claimed the central government's decision to impose 40% duty on the export of onions till December 31, 2023 will adversely affect the onion growers and its export

Reduced import duty on produce and relaxed norms will affect farmers and traders here, they say

The multi-state cooperative has so far earned Rs. 22 crore profit from April during the current financial year

Once a ubiquitous beast of burden, the donkey is slowly making its way out of oblivion in Tiruchi as the global beauty industry discovers the benefits of its milk

Onion prices have further risen to ₹65-80 per kilogramme in the retail market of the national capital on lower supply.

Growers in Punjab are worried over the drop in prices in the ongoing season and have demanded State intervention; many fear that they won’t be able to recover input cost

They have to declare stock position of paddy and rice every Friday

‘We intend to bring a revolutionary change in the agriculture sector with a special focus on promoting animal husbandry,’ Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu tells the hill State’s milk producers

Traders are allowed to export this quantity till March 31

BKS terms the government’s attitude towards farmers’ demands “regrettable”; seeks MSPs, abolition of GST on agri inputs, and increase in Kisan Samman Nidhi income support payments for farmers

Centre has permitted 24,400 MT shipments to the country amid ban on exports ‘till further orders’; exporters allege selling price being set too low, triggering windfall profits for selected UAE importers

The country is among those most vulnerable to water management risks, and has the poorest access to basic services, including water, among G-20 economies, the rating major flagged

The Centre added that shipments by rail rake to Lucknow and Varanasi will be scheduled in next few days

A group of Indian Ocean islanders, forcibly removed from their homes 50+ years ago and deported to England, are still fighting for recognition and basic rights. By Alexi Demetriadi.

Britain’s largest festival about refugees and sanctuary is more relevant than ever, writes Lydia Noon.

Kim Jong-un's headline grabbing aggressive irrationalism takes some beating (though he might have met his match in recent times...)

He puts his life on the line to protect the Democratic Republic of Congo's national parks.

KidZania is an unashamed shrine to the sterile, dystopian human-made landscapes, comedian Steve Parry writes.

Over the years, I've given more than 300 presentations on design. Most of these have been accompanied by a slide deck to illustrate my points and guide the narrative. But making the content in these decks work well with the Ask Luke conversational interface on this site has been challenging. So now I'm trying a new approach with AI vision models.

To avoid application specific formats (Keynote, PowerPoint), I've long been making my presentation slides available for download as PDF documents. These files usually consist of 100+ pages and often don't include a lot of text, leaning instead on visuals and charts to communicate information. To illustrate, here's of few of these slides from my Mind the Gap talk.

In an earlier article on how we built the Ask Luke conversational interface, I outlined the issues with extracting useful information from these documents. I wanted the content in these PDFs to be available when answering people's design questions in addition to the blog articles, videos and audio interviews that we were already using.

But even when we got text extraction from PDFs working well, running the process on any given PDF document would create many content embeddings of poor quality (like the one below). These content chunks would then end up influencing the answers we generated in less than helpful ways.

To prevent these from clogging up our limited context (how much content we can work with to create an answer) with useless results, we set up processes to remove low quality content chunks. While that improved things, the content in these presentations was no longer accessible to people asking questions on Ask Luke.

So we tried a different approach. Instead of extracting text from each page of a PDF presentation, we ran it through an AI vision model to create a detailed description of the content on the page. In the example below, the previous text extraction method (on the left) gets the content from the slide. The new vision model approach (on the right) though, does a much better job creating useful content for answering questions.

Here's another example illustrating the difference between the PDF text extraction method used before and the vision AI model currently in use. This time instead of a chart, we're generating a useful description of a diagram.

This change is now rolled out across all the PDFs the Ask Luke conversational interface can reference to answer design questions. Gone are useless content chunks and there's a lot more useful content immediately available.

Thanks to Yangguang Li for the dev help on this change.

For years, designers have used Lorem Ipsum text as a placeholder in interface design layouts. But unless you're designing a pseudo-Latin text reader, using actual content provides a much more realistic picture of what a UI design needs to support. Today Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide designers with highly relevant content instantly so Lorem Ipsum can finally die.

It's long been argued (well at least by me in 2019) that using Lorem Ipsum text to mock up application interfaces fails to represent real content, often leading to usability issues and unrealistic designs that don't account for actual text lengths, line breaks, or content hierarchy in a final product. But Lorem Ipsum persisted as a design tool of choice because getting real content was hard.

To get very realistic content, designers would need access to where real content existed or pester engineers or domain experts to collect realistic content for them. It's not hard to see why some of these requests took a while or never got prioritized. And while some teams took the time to build tooling that enabled more realistic content in the design process, Lorem Ipsum was a much easier path for most.

Today, Large Language Models (LLMs) can not only generate sample content but also create highly specific and relevant content for just about any application you're designing. And given these tools are fast, widely available and free, there's no excuse to not use very realistic content in application designs. For example, if designing a food delivery app. A few prompts will give you real content, real quick.

So there's no excuses for Lorem Ipsum no more.

In his Is Atomic Design Dead? presentation at Smashing Conf New York, Brad Frost discussed the history of design systems and today's situation especially in light of very capable AI models than can generate code and designs. Here's my notes on his talk.

• Websites started as HTML and CSS. People began to design websites in Photoshop and as the number of Web sites and apps increased, the need for managing a brand and style across multiple platforms became clear. To manage this people turned to frameworks and component libraries which resulted in more frameworks and tools that eventually got integrated into design tools like Figma. It's been an ongoing expansion...
• There's been lots of change over the years but at the highest level, we have design systems and products that use them to enforce brand, consistency, accessibility, and more.
• Compliance to design systems pushes from one side and product needs push from the other. There needs to be a balance but currently the gap between the two is growing. A good balance is achieved through a virtuous cycle between product and systems.
• The atomic design system tried to intentionally define use of atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages to bridge the gap between the end state of a product and a design system.
• As an industry, we went too far in resourcing design systems and making them a standalone thing within a company. They've been isolated.
• Design system makers can't be insular. They need to reach out to product teams and work with them. They need to be helping product teams achieve their goals.
• What if there were one global design system with common reusable components? Isn't that what HTML is for? Yes, but it's insufficient because we're still rebuilding date pickers everywhere.
• Open UI tracks popular design systems and what's in them. It's a start to seeing what global component needs for the Web could look like.
• Many pattern libraries ship with an aesthetic and people need to tweak it. A global design system should be very vanilla so you can style it as much as you want.
• The Web still has an amazing scale of communication and collaboration. We need to rekindle the ideas of the early Web. We need to share and build together to get to a common freely usable design system.
• AI models can help facilitate design system work. Today they do an OK job but in the future, fine-tuned models may create custom components on the fly. They can also translate between one design system and another or translate across programming languages.
• This methodology could help companies translate existing and legacy code to new modern design systems. Likewise sketches or mockups could be quickly translated directly to design system components thereby speeding up processes.
• Combining design system specifications with large language models allows you to steer AI generations more directly toward the right kind of code and components.
• When product experiences are more dynamic (can be built on the fly), can we adapt them to individual preferences and needs? Like custom styles or interactions.
• AI is now part of our design system toolkit and design systems are part of our AI toolkit.
• But the rapid onset of AI also raises higher level questions about what designers and developers should be doing in the future? We're more than rectangle creators. We think and feel which differentiates us from just production level tasks. Use your brains, your intuition, and whole self to solve real problems.

We tend to ignore the view of people around us. We also tend not to value the potential around us. The result is someone like the S&P grades us negative and gives us Gyan!

The Government may have tightened gold import norms, making it difficult for investors to invest in the yellow metal. But if you are one who is willing to take risks, then there is a door that is wide open to help you take advantage of the current situation.

A visit to the 160-year-old Minerva watch factory in Switzerland is a revelation for the watch enthusiast about the many complex components that ultimately makes for a fine timepiece

A walk through the University of Leuven in Belgium throws up insights, brews and delicious food

The new Land Rover Velar looks and acts like the concept car of your dreams

Wake Up Call, Bali, was an awakening of the senses

Up, close and personal with Masaba Gupta on wedding outfits and life choices

In conversation with Jean-Marc Pontroué, CEO of Panerai, which recently opened its third store in India

If you love great design and architecture, Finland’s capital is right up your alley

A tour of the Ulysse Nardin manufacture factory highlights age-old techniques of enamelling perfected by watchmakers

As a programmer, your desk is the platform to everything you do. Every line of code you write, CSS you minify or updates you push out is done right there. See how to set up your desk for maximum productivity.

Edmonton, Alberta : Brush Education Inc., [2023]

London ; Philadelphia : Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024.

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge , 2024.

Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2023]