Karl Koch

I’ve released humane-functionalism, a skill for AI coding agents that applies ideas from Danish functionalism to UI and UX.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus The Many Faces Of September (2026 Wallpapers Edition) -- September wallpapers: because your desktop deserves a seasonal glow-up, not just another meeting reminder.

We’ve been hiring for a Design Engineer recently, and it’s made me think a lot about how we describe what we do.

I’m building out the design engineering practice at DuckDuckGo.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Rethinking Data Visualisation: A UX Approach To Dashboards That Actually Drives Decisions -- Ditch sterile charts; UX-driven dashboards should actually make us do something.

I’ve been polishing DuckDuckGo for iOS’s floating UI, a glass-capsule toolbar that morphs and collapses much like Safari’s.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Sterling Cooper built your UX process.

Most small interface surfaces arrive the same way: a fade and a scale.

I’ve been writing down how interfaces should feel, how HTML should carry behaviour and how AI drafts should be judged.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Building Tactile UX: Honoring Intentional Design With Lottie -- Forget flat UI; Lottie lets you build tactile digital experiences that actually feel good.

When I started turning my essays into personal skills, the obvious first version was one giant markdown file.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus The cybernetic application -- Information systems aren’t built to inform; they’re engineered to disorient.

"Make it feel polished" is an opinion, and the output stays roughly the same because the sentence doesn’t constrain anything.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Small Joys And Big Adventures (August 2026 Wallpapers Edition) -- August wallpapers: refresh your screen for work or play, no matter the adventure.

Ask a model for a card and you usually get one that looks finished in the preview: rounded corners, a soft black shadow, twenty-four pixels of padding and a hardcoded white background.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Four questions every tool should answer (even Figma) about AI training model usage -- AI tools require transparency: demand answers about training data before you click ’train’.

Interfaces teleport all the time.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus No, People Don’t Want More AI In Their Life -- Turns out, users don’t want more AI; they want solutions that actually solve problems, not just add complexity.

I wrote about semantic HTML as interface infrastructure a few weeks ago, and the response surprised me.

Most page transitions interrupt the reader.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus From Kickoff To First Concept: How To Turn Brand Strategy Into Visual Direction -- The strongest visual concepts don’t start in Figma.

Floating UI is one of those problems that looks small until you build it properly.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Why Accessibility Is An Operational Capability, Not A Feature -- Teams can generate UI faster than ever, but they still have to guarantee that what they ship is usable, secure, and maintainable.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Someone designed this -- Why bad UX is often a business decision, not a design failure.

The easiest way to make an interface harder to maintain is to rebuild the browser badly.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus One skill separates the designers who survive 2026 from the ones who don’t — AI is putting the future of UX designers in jeopardy, unless they are willing to become builders, makers, and system thinkers.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus The Impact Of Humanoid Robots On Humanity — We have officially moved past the era of humanoid robots as mere public relations stunts.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Soleio — The geometry of luck — The closing talk from Tokyo Design Forum 2026 and the first in its library series.

Falling for the implementation There is a failure mode that only exists if you both design and build, and it is the most enjoyable mistake in the job, which is exactly why it is dangerous.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Your Prototype Is Not Being Honest With Your Users (And Here’s How To Fix It) — There’s a moment in almost every usability session where a participant pauses at the login screen, types something, and glances up: checking whether they’re

Most design teams decide things in Figma, exploring and refining a direction until it becomes the plan without anyone agreeing to it.

I didn’t ask for the neck massage, which is part of why it was so good.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born — A major inflection point as the tech industry’s imperial mindset crumbles under intense social backlash that feels long overdue.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies — Andy Matuschak’s thoughtful exploration of coding agents, malleable software, and what interface invention might look like when we stop accepting the tyranny of traditional apps and prog…

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Designing Stable Interfaces For Streaming Content — Streaming UIs demand meticulous attention to detail, from layout shifts to motion preferences, to avoid user frustration.

Everyone’s tired of AI slop in design, and I get it.

People keep asking how I work.

Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary this month.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Actually, people love to work hard — Purpose, agency and trust make hard work satisfying.

Every section on this site fades in as you scroll to it, using five lines of CSS without JavaScript, an Intersection Observer, or a scroll event listener. .section-reveal { animation: section-reveal linear both; animation-duration: auto; animation-t…

Capture a thought without typing.

I use oklch for every colour on this site, including backgrounds, text, shadows, accents, borders, and selection highlights.

Using * { animation: none !

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus The first 40 months of the AI era — A comprehensive reflection on everything that’s shifted since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, worth the time to read properly.

In the vinyl shelf post I mentioned velocity gating: fast cursors should not trigger hovers.

Writing an app in isolation can feel easy because you control the syntax, logic and constraints.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus How to make sense of AI — Ruthless guidelines for keeping up with revolutionary technology without losing your mind in the process.

The WorkCard detail panel uses a circular reveal that grows from the centre of its trigger button.

🕰️ Ten Minute Focus Labor of Love: How Breanna Lynn Turned Community, Trust, and Radical Belief into Drive It Like You Stole It — Breanna Lynn rallied over eighty collaborators to create a spec car commercial with no budget.

Teaching is the best way I know to grasp something.