There’s an AI-generated poster pinned to my village noticeboard.

I don’t know who made it, or more accurately, prompted it. It’s perfectly fine. I now know there’s a food market next Sunday at 11am. But every time I walk past it, something in me sinks a little.

That sinking feeling is my position on generative AI as a substitute for human creativity.

Before you jump to conclusions, I’m not a staunchly analogue artist, protesting change simply because it’s uncomfortable. I was a day-one ChatGPT user. I’ve tried a new tool almost every week for the last few years, genuinely looking for ways to make my life as a designer better. But I’d be quite happy if we could go back to the before-times, and here’s why I think that:

In the 1960’s, microwaving food was revolutionary. Magical. But in 2026, ‘microwaved’ is about the most damning insult that we give to restaurant food. Nobody brags about their microwaved baked beans in the way people brag about their ‘microwaved’ AI designs on LinkedIn.

What bothers me the most, in design specifically, is the way that generative AI’s skipping of the creative process is reframed as some kind of victory.

“Prompt to poster! Prompt to website! Ship 10x faster!”

But are we actually winning? Design requires connection, and connection requires someone to actually think through something. To make weird, intuitive, biased, imperfect leaps. To try a terrible approach and learn something new.

I keep being reminded of neuroplasticity; if you stop doing something, your brain will get worse at it. Not immediately, but quietly over time. I’ve noticed places in my life where I’ve offloaded my thinking to AI.

I think that a lot of people are starting to feel something similar. “Clankers” (the Star Wars slur getting a second life as shorthand for AI-scepticism) feels like another term added to the lexicon of collective unease, alongside brainrot and doomscrolling.

Virginia Dignum puts it well in The AI Paradox:

And that’s before we get to the energy. The environmental cost of running these models at scale goes beyond the internet’s already staggering footprint — and is largely invisible to the people celebrating the output.

The stock market and LinkedIn echo chamber may disagree, but I think people will start craving things made by real, talented, weird, fallible humans. And I hope that by the time generative AI’s ‘creativity’ is as mundane as microwave cooking, I won’t have quietly forgotten how to be a creative — because somewhere along the way, my thoughts, mistakes, and instincts weren’t profitable enough.

I spoke with Katherine Bjelke, a Copenhagen-based visual designer with a similar love to me for space. They’ve designed a plethora of space patches, with my favourite being for the Alisio 1 cubesat. Here’s what they had to say about their practice:

I’m guessing you’re a huge space enthusiast like me — how did you land your first space-related design brief?

“Yes, I am! Funny enough, it all started because I wanted an Apollo 11 poster, but I couldn’t find one I liked (or could afford at the time). So, I thought, “Why not make my own?” That got me into a whole series of space-inspired designs. Eventually, other space fans noticed and I got approached by TEIDESAT—a student cubesat and outreach project—to help with their designs. From there, one thing led to another, and I started working with more space-related projects and other companies.”

What’s the process of designing a mission patch like? What challenges come with the medium?

“Designing a mission patch feels a lot like solving a puzzle. It's like trying to tell an entire story in a super tiny space.

I usually start by talking with the team to understand the mission’s goals, symbolism, and any must-have elements they want included. Once I have the pieces of my puzzle, I sketch out different layouts and ideas, without making the design too crowded and take it from there.

The tricky part is the size, patches are usually around 8–10 cm. On top of that, you’ve got to think about the practical side, like whether it’ll be embroidered. For example, lines need to be a certain thickness, gradients might not be possible, and some manufacturers even charge per color, those are things you need to discuss with your client first, some will only have their patch as a sticker and that will give you a bit more freedom.”

Space missions often have enormous teams behind them — how do you create a design that represents the collective work of so many people?
And is it a challenge to make it something that the average non-space-enthusiast can enjoy too?

“I always design with the team in mind first. They’re the ones putting in the sweat and tears, I want the patch to feel like a celebration to them, so I try to include their little inside jokes or some easter egg that maybe only the team and people close to the mission can understand, while of course making something that explains the mission, and resonates with a wider audience, whether you’re a space expert or just someone who thinks it looks cool and wants to support the mission and the team.”

What styles influence your posters and patch designs? I’m getting a mix of Art Nouveau and Retro Futurism?

“You’ve got a great eye, that's exactly right. I’m a sucker for Art Deco, Retro Futurism, minimalism, and anything geometric, but honestly inspiration comes from everywhere. I think I based the top part of the Auroras poster on a lamp I saw at a restaurant for example, so it's not too weird seeing me taking photos at random objects I see while Im out, from lamps to plants to any funky shape. But I definitely lean towards Art deco and geometric styles.”

Finally, if you could make a mission patch for any sci-fi space mission, what would it be, and how would it look?

“That’s such a great question! I haven’t thought about it in detail, and I think I would have trouble choosing, it would be fun to make something for Interstellar with the Endurance and the wormhole or the black hole in the middle, in a very minimal design, but would also love to do any of the thousand cool concepts from The Expanse or the Wayfarer Crew patch from Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series.

Not sure how they would look just yet though, I guess I'll have to make them all to figure it out.”

You can see more of Katherine’s work on their website.

Thanks for reading,
Tom 🐢

Hi again, and a warm welcome to new subscribers too 👋

In short, this publication is now called The Shell-Out. If you’re subscribed via email, you’ll continue to receive posts directly to your inbox — nothing will change. Via the web, the new address is theshellout.com 🐢

If you’d like the longer story, there are 3 key points about the change outlined below.

1) The turtles are staying.

Doodling silly turtles is essential. The brand has been tweaked a tiny amount for accessibility, but it’s otherwise remaining firmly naïve and silly.

2) I’m not just a UX designer.

Writing here creates a space to share my love of design and technology. After six months, I’m more adept at understanding what works for me, and it doesn’t always fit neatly under a publication name ending with ‘UX’.

3) It’s more honest.

I partially selected Turtley UX with a vague hope that someone searching ‘Substacks about UX’ could discover it. Turns out SEO is a bit more complicated than that.

In reality, writing really isn’t about numbers at all — I’ve amassed enough people to fill the average British McDonalds1, and that’s enough people to avoid putting growth before authenticity.

So in conclusion, I’m not chasing numbers or search terms, and I’m naming this publication a cheesy pun that brings me joy…

…because otherwise…

I’d be a shell-out.

Best wishes,
Tom 🐢

Web browsers are not very cool. Have you ever been excited to see a Chrome update? Across the board, the UI/UX conventions of web browsers are mostly the same — full screen websites with tabs across the top.

But I’ve been testing Arc, a new kind of browser, for a month — it’s a totally different way of experiencing the web. Here are 6 reasons why I think you’ll like it too 👇 #NotAnAdIJustReallyLikeIt

1. The sidebar of magic and prosperity.

Arc does away with the standard tab layout. Your precious vertical screen space is freed up with a resizable sidebar, which you can hide with a quick slap of CMD+S. Every tab you want to keep sits above a line separator, and everything under this gets cleared out after 12 hours (or a time of your choosing). This means more space for your content and less scrolling — something that makes a huge difference on my little 13-inch MacBook Pro.

2. It does spaces too, but better.

Arc’s ‘spaces’ lets you easily switch between different sets of tabs. Personally, I use this to switch between browsing in ‘personal’ and ‘work’ modes, but you can use as many or as little as you’d like. You can even be logged into different accounts on the same site across spaces, which is awesome for users juggling multiple logins. It’s easy to tell your spaces apart, thanks to the endless customisation of colours, icons, transparency, and noise effects.

3. Searching for stuff is super fast.

Arc encourages the use of simple keyboard shortcuts, which in turn has hugely increased my website-browsing efficiency. You make new tabs through a spotlight-esque search box, with direct integrations to search basically any website, or even start a new ChatGPT prompt.

Even though I’m a self-proclaimed competent and experienced user of the web, using Arc has encouraged me to use more shortcuts in my browsing — so even if I went back to something more traditional, I’m now a faster and more efficient internet-er 🥳

4. AI integration that’s actually good.

Yeah, I know, it’s trendy to announce that your product is now ✨with AI✨, but it’s not just another rehashed way of starting a ChatGPT conversation. OpenAI tech is built into website searching, where you can hover Google results to get summarised previews of webpages without ever visiting the site — great for skimming webpages.

5. You can hide the TikTok dances.

Arc Boosts are awesome. Unexpected dance routines while you’re searching for cat videos are not. Regardless of your HTML or CSS knowledge, you can modify how sites are displayed when you visit. For example, with just a few clicks, you can permanently hide Shorts from YouTube’s homepage. That’s up to 100% less cringe per page. Check out the video below to see Boosts in action 👇

6. The speedy update cycle.

The team at Arc have the huge advantage of following a lean development cycle. Arc is updated every Friday with the speed and excitement of a sugar-rushed toddler at a birthday party, while Chrome is leisurely strolling through a Sunday market.

Arc is due to venture into the world of mobile in 2024, and I’m tremendously excited to see how they rethink mobile web navigation. A touch-optimised Arc for phones and tablets would be a game changer for casual and serious browsing alike.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, then you should probably try Arc. It’s available for free for MacOS and Windows.

Alternatively, if you’ve read this far and found this post to be a Snoozefest McBoringtime, absolutely let me know in the poll below. My writing is an experiment, and there will be some duds along the way.

Thanks for reading, and best wishes,
Tom 🐢

Last week (well, this week, as I write these on Sundays) I attended The Design Council’s ‘Design For Planet Festival’, which, let’s be honest, is a jazzy name for ‘eco-conference.’ But there were loads of interesting speakers covering some really great topics - here are two of my favourite bits:

“Don’t build a sports car if a bike can get you there.”

I loved the talk from Nicolas Paries of Heylow, a sustainability driven digital studio. They presented their 10 principles for Low Carbon Web Design deck, which was insightful, engaging, and beautifully designed.

My favourite parts were:

• 🏋️ Set up a webpage weight budget.
  Generally I’ll aim for ‘as small as possible’, when it comes to the size of web pages, but setting a hard limit globally across a site is a step further. This approach would certainly distribute my time more evenly, as a bloated ‘About’ page undoes the savings of an optimised homepage.

• 🍕 Keep it like pizza.
  Everyone likes a margherita, even the marinara purists. But add more toppings, and you’re diving into anchovy territory. Yuck.
  In other words, simple design speaks volumes, and you don’t need to overcomplicate your message. Y’know, like using a pizza metaphor 😶

• 📊 Benchmark your work.
  I have shout-outed… shoot-ooted… out-shat(?) websitecarbon.com — a method of benchmarking the carbon emissions and performance of websites. But the Heylow talk suggested the fantastic Ecograder. It presents much more detail, organised into actionable steps to reduce the carbon impact of your website, even if you’re not especially code-savvy 👇

Heylow’s presentation seems to be part of their paid (but budget friendly) Low Carbon course. I covered the potential carbon impact of my personal site’s optimisations a few weeks ago, for those that are new here👇

“Please don’t buy our phones.”

It’s not the marketing strategy you’d hear from Apple. This was the opening keynote from Fairphone, the Dutch smartphone company that specialises in modular, repairable phones with environmental and socially responsible manufacturing.

While I sense that it was a good opportunity for them to plug their recently released Fairphone 5 (Europe only), this was certainly balanced by their attitudes towards sales. “The most sustainable phone is the one you already have”, argues founder Bas van Abel, reminding the audience that Fairphone don’t really want to sell phones - they want to change consumer mindsets.

But if your phone truly has sent its last hedgehog emoji, Fairphone have a compelling offering. The fifth iteration of their repairable phone boasts software support until 2031. Break that price tag (£649/€699) down into equivalent annual payments, and it makes the ‘sustainability tax’ a little more manageable.

Conclusion

The Design for Planet Festival is free and rolls around every year. While many attendees are User Experience or Product professionals, the talks are suitable for anyone interested in discussions surrounding environmental and social business practices 🦔

Thanks for reading,
Tom 🐢

Do you ever get those crappy mobile game ads on YouTube? You probably know the ones — a paid shill excitedly exclaims “Wow, the graphics are amazing. It’s so addictive!” in the sort of tone that seems to conveniently forget what addiction is. Or when you fire up a streaming service and it pushes the latest ‘binge-worthy’ series in your face? This slow shift to the normalisation of harmful behaviours is pretty concerning to me, so I looked into the ethics of the product frameworks that seek to make addiction the new norm.

Addiction is great… if you own a casino.

If you own a mobile game with loot boxes, or want to increase the watch time on your streaming service, then it’s obvious — addicted users make more money. But in the world of product design and UX, it’s given another, less immediately sinister name:

‘Habit-forming’ products.

Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products seems to be on every product designer’s bookshelf. Inside, we’re introduced to the Hooked model, which goes a little like this:

🚨 Trigger — The event or feeling that makes a user want to do something. They’re often emotion-driven, like feeling bored, anxious, lonely, or #FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out, if you were born before the year 2000). Or they’re environmental triggers, like seeing an advertisement or being pressured by others into joining a social network.

👆 Action — Once they have that spark of inspiration, the user takes some form of action. This could be scrolling TikToks, maintaining their Duolingo streak, or quickly ordering their favourite coffee. The Hooked Model suggests that the easier the actions are to perform, the more likely someone can be ‘hooked’ (addicted).

🎁 Variable Reward — You’ve probably read about mobile phones and dopamine. Like giving your dog a treat, rewards are essential to enforce habits. But the most important part of the Hooked model is varying the value of the reward. It creates unpredictability. Will the next TikTok I post ‘blow up’ with loads of views? What kind of power tool is Lidl selling this week? What new shows will I find on Netflix?

⏳ Investment — Retention is really difficult. If you have a native app, you can expect only 5% of users to still be giving precious Home Screen space to your product after 30 days1. Getting the user to invest their time, effort, or money significantly increases the likelihood that they’ll come back again. Take Amazon, for example: while they don’t require a profile picture from you, suggesting that you create a profile, make wish lists, or even become a Prime member, creates a sense of investment in the ecosystem.

This model gets lots of praise. Many people are quick to recommend it as “the best way” to ensure a new product’s success, but my unsubstantiated hot take is this:

Product Advice isn’t UX Advice.

When it comes to UX, shouldn't the 'U' stand for 'User,' not 'Upping Revenue at every opportunity'? In fairness to ‘Hooked’ in book-form, it does caution that the model should be used responsibly. But is it ever truly responsible to encourage the formation of addictive behaviour?

Hooked prioritises user engagement at all costs, sometimes even to the detriment of the user’s mental or emotional well-being. To me, UX and Product designers should have a strong ethical compass that asks not just “Can we?” but also “Should we?”

Conclusion

As gloomy as this may first appear, reading ‘Hooked’ has given me some optimism for the future. While the post-lockdown UX boom has receded somewhat, the emotions and well-being of users are still increasingly prioritised by ethical and sustainable businesses.

By appreciating the mechanics behind the ‘habit-forming’ products we use, anyone with a stake in the digital world can be better equipped to use these principles responsibly. Users can find joy in products instead of addictions, and we’ll find satisfaction in knowing we made that happen.

Thanks for reading,
Tom 🐢

The climate crisis is a distressing and complex issue that seems to permeate into every aspect of our lives — including my work as a UX/UI designer.

The agency I currently work with focuses on low-carbon and sustainability-driven web designs. But it begs the question: What can we, as individuals, do to make a meaningful impact?

Here are five things I do outside of my day job:

1) Improve the User Experience.

Let’s be honest — you know that improving the user experience should be at the top of your priorities anyway. But did you know that most UX tweaks can also lessen a product’s environmental impact?

Reducing the number of steps, clicks, and screens has the potential to make a massive change. If you cut down the user journey by 30%, you reduce your page-load emissions by the same percentage. It’s a win-win, as you get happier users too! 🥳

2) Honey, I Shrunk the Images.

Every website element has a 'weight,' and the heaviest of these—ones my frail, nerdy arms could hardly lift—are unoptimised images and practically any form of video.

What do I mean by ‘unoptimised images’? Think about the formats you’re uploading. Does your adorable photo of a turtle need to be an uncompressed PNG if it lacks transparency data? Could it be an optimised JPEG or WebP instead? Maybe you could even upload an SVG illustration of a turtle?
By following that process, you’ve reduced your turtle from megabytes to kilobytes.

Plenty of tools out there can help you slim down those pesky images. I’m a fan of ImageOptim (macOS), and various online WebP converters that can help to create much smaller files.

3) Support renewable hosting.

It’s an inevitable Thanos-snap of energy: your website or product is always going to use power. But when it does, why not opt for the renewable stuff? A good place to start is the Green Web Directory. But you never know — your current host might already be flaunting some eco-creds! 😎

4) Encourage sustainable practices from developers.

You don’t have to be a developer to be an advocate for more sustainable practices. For instance:

• Design with lazy-loading images in mind, where content doesn’t fully appear until it’s in frame.

• Recommend energy efficient Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

• Or —the best option— just get conversations started about how teams can work together to make more sustainable products.

5) Green your routine!

The time and energy you spend making something is part of the ‘carbon cost’. This can get super granular, but think about any changes you could make to your daily work to reduce the impact of the things you make:

• Buy a refurbished laptop

• Use energy efficient devices

• Work hybrid/remotely to reduce commuting

These suggestions are a little generic, because the most interesting actions you can take will be super specific to who you are and the way you work.

Is it worth it, though?

We’ve skimmed the surface of a topic that’s often exhausting and overwhelming, but don’t lose sight of the potential impact.

After making some of these changes to my personal website, the carbon footprint dropped from 1g to a teenie-tiny 0.1g of CO2 per visit. With only 10,000 annual views, this optimisation saves the energy required to make approximately 15,000 cups of tea. That could power the average British grandma for over two minutes!

Now imagine how that scales to websites that receive millions of views annually, and the numbers are staggering. Small changes, massive difference 🌍💚

If you’d like to read about sustainable art in general, by Emma Fanning has some wonderful, upbeat, and optimistic content.

Thanks for reading,
Tom 🐢

Road signs! Infrastructure! They’re ubiquitous — boring to some, but a really interesting UX case study, and a great thought experiment to practice evaluating solutions to a problem. Spoiler: some of them are terrible.

Typography makes a big difference.

For me, road signs are some of the most noticeable shifts in visible design systems when I’m in other countries. Type is a big part of this. While the Transport typeface became a global standard after its UK debut in the 1960s, there’s a world of diverse type elsewhere.

In fact, you’ll find some of Jock Kinneir & Margaret Calvert’s Transport in a huge number of road sign designs outside of its native UK, including Spain, Italy, the UAE, and even with extended alphabets in Greece and India. Cool, huh?

This has something to do with UX, I promise.

When it comes to thinking about the user experience of road signage, you’d expect the typography to generally offer these qualities:

• Legibility — Characters you can read on the road, even from a long way away.

• Readability — Words you can read quickly, reducing the time your eyes are off the road.

• Consistency — Reliable presentation that avoids confusion with other text you might see when driving.

So with these ideas in mind, would your first thought be to go for four different typefaces, different weights, and mixed-case italics? Strap in for French road signs.

Maybe it makes sense initially: use different styles of type for different contexts. You’ll see different typography used on motorways/major roads everywhere in the world. But it just doesn’t feel like a design system that’s fit for purpose. I would love to see what a modern take on these signs would look like — there is absolutely room for a well-designed and uniquely French sign system, but I’m sure the associated costs will keep it out of reach until the time that road signs evolve into something new…

Something new?!

Fast forward another 50 years to 2073. Will road signs look the same? Here are two scenarios:

The likely (but sad) one.

Physical signs are obsolete. AR and HUD interfaces are the norm when driving. There’s no need to innovate or create new real-world signage.

The exciting (but unlikely) one.

The future is now! With all road navigation handled by machines, traditional road signs have gone the way of the dodo. They’re replaced by real-time, adaptive signs that cater to drivers' specific needs. The cost of changing the design of a sign is the time it takes to upload a new design, but the real cost is initially replacing every road sign with a flashy smart one.

TL;DR

Typography is the unsung driving force (ha!) behind all road navigation, at least when viewed through a Western lens. Smart design system choices made in the 60s still hold up today.

Maybe take a closer look at the signage next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam.

Thanks for reading,
Tom 🐢

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