Hello Reader,,

There's plenty of client work on my plate right now, but I didn't want to miss the second round of Fable, so I've rebuilt my site (yes, again). It's live now, top to bottom, still a few quirks I'm chasing. If you know me by now, there'll probably be more edits in the coming days and weeks...

But first some fresh writing.

A founder reached out a few months ago about a new wealth management product. He was looking for a founding designer, I was booked, so it stayed a conversation. But the reply I wrote him kept coming back to Summer Health, and it wasn't the healthcare angle, it was the structural similarity between the two. In pediatric telehealth you're asking a parent to trust you with their child's health at eleven at night when they're scared and exhausted. In wealth management you're asking someone to trust you with the money they've spent a whole career building.

Two products that share almost nothing on the surface, doing the same job underneath. That comparison is what pushed me into the rest of the piece.

We keep saying AI-built products lack taste, and I've written that too, but the more I sit with it the more I think taste is only half of what's missing. The other half is trust, and it's the piece a tool can't fake. Ask AI to make something feel trustworthy and it'll slap a lock icon on the header and call it done.

​Designing for trust →​

Speak soon,
Anton

Five Four things

1. ​Coming back to center by Natalie Armendariz.
2. ​Sahil Bloom on the seasons of your life.
3. ​Dense by design. Matthew Ström-Awn at Config 2026.
4. ​Teaching agents product design at Vercel. The direction serious design orgs are heading.