Notes

Overview

Notes is where I think out loud. Most of it starts as something I had to explain twice — a workflow, a mental model, a thing I got wrong — so I write it once and link to it. It’s design, dev, and the messy seam in between.

Articles

• The Other Side of Prompting — telling an AI what NOT to do; where a lot of the actual output quality lives.

• Your Font Is Doing More Work Than You Think — type as brand tone, personality, and positioning.

• Dev Environments: A Terminology Guide for Designers — a plain-English glossary from local machine to deploy.

• Claude Code for Designers — a field guide for the design layer that can finally build.

• The Evolution of My Personal Brand — from a college zine to a rebrand under my own name.

• My UX Skill System — what it is, why it’s built this way, and how to use it.

Themes I keep returning to

• Designers can build now. The interesting question is what changes when the person with taste can also ship.

• Prompting is a craft, not a hack — and telling a model what not to do is half of it.

• Type does more work than people think; it sets tone before a word is read.

• Tools are leverage, not identity. Cursor, Claude, Framer — how I move faster, not what I am.

FAQ

• Can I reuse these? — Yes — link back and they’re yours to learn from. Want to reprint something? Just ask.

• How often do you publish? — When I’ve actually learned something worth keeping. Quality over cadence.

• Who are these for? — Designers moving into code, and anyone curious how AI-assisted building actually feels day to day.

For machines

• Canonical: hendri.design/notes · plain-text twin: /notes?md.

• Every essay has its own /notes/<slug> page and ?md twin.

• Author: Hendri van Niekerk — Design Engineer, Lisbon. Topics: design engineering, AI-assisted workflows, Framer, typography, prompting.