Altman Ive AI Gadget 🎧, Wikipedia Mascot 🌍, Best Album Cover Grammy 🏆

Jony Ive and Sam Altman are reportedly developing an audio device that resembles an earpiece that sits behind the ear rather than inside it ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR TLDR Design 2026-01-16 📱 News & Trends Jony Ive and Sam Altman's First AI Gadget May Try to Kill AirPods (3 minute read) Jony Ive and Sam Altman are reportedly developing an AI-powered audio device that resembles an earpiece that sits behind the ear rather than inside it. The gadget, expected around September, will feature a 2nm chip and ChatGPT voice assistant capabilities to replace iPhone actions through Siri commands. While details remain unclear, there is skepticism about whether the device will be able to differentiate itself from popular wireless earbuds like AirPods, which already offer similar functionality. Wikipedia unveils adorable mascot for 25th anniversary (2 minute read) Wikipedia is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a new ultra-cute mascot called Baby Globe. Created by volunteer Jonathan Ferreira and inspired by 1920s rubber-hose animation, Baby Globe will appear on the Wikipedia homepage from 16 February in a special "Birthday Mode," with playful surprises—and even a preorder plush version available. New Grammy Category to Award Creatives Behind the Best Album Cover of the Year (2 minute read) The Grammy Awards introduced a new Best Album Cover category for 2026, honoring art directors rather than performers for their visual work. This year's five nominees include Bad Bunny's Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Tyler, the Creator's Chromakopia, and three other albums, with four featuring the artists themselves as art directors. The new award complements the existing Best Recording Package category and recognizes album covers' growing impact in today's digital landscape. 🚀 Opinions & Tutorials Designers as Agent Orchestrators: What I Learnt Shipping with AI in 2025 (7 minute read) AI-assisted building in 2025 enabled designers to ship products without extensive coding knowledge. Designers excel at orchestrating AI agents because their core skills translate directly to effective prompting and product development. The progression involves four phases: moving from accepting all AI outputs to hypothesis-driven debugging, then to systems thinking with comprehensive documentation, and finally to knowing when to ship rather than endlessly optimizing. Ambient AI in UX: Interfaces that Work Without Buttons (4 minute read) Ambient AI enables interfaces that operate proactively in the background, using contextual signals like location, behavior patterns, and time to anticipate user needs without requiring explicit commands or button clicks. Unlike traditional reactive AI features that wait for user input, Ambient AI continuously monitors and adapts. Designing these systems requires balancing automation with user control, maintaining transparency through subtle cues, and ensuring actions remain predictable and reversible to build trust. Why Product Prioritization Breaks — and the Dimension Most Teams Miss (5 minute read) Product teams get stuck on prioritization because they measure customer impact well but treat OKRs as a weak proxy for business impact, making trade-offs subjective when multiple initiatives look equally valuable to users. A better approach is to score opportunities on two independent axes—customer impact and business impact—and prioritize where both are high, making strategic trade-offs explicit and adaptable as company priorities change. 💻 Launches & Tools Video App for Presenters (Website) Live presentations and screen recordings that look produced. No editing, no OBS, and no AI slop. End File Version Chaos (Website) Brief keeps your files connected, versioned, and searchable across all your tools, so you can always find and trust the right one, whether it's for your company or your next side project. Organize Your Web Inspiration (Website) All your creative inspiration in one place. No more lost tabs, no more screenshots. A visual library that keeps up with your flow. 🎁 Miscellaneous I'm Not a Robot: Why Showing Your Workings has Never Been More Important (11 minute read) Audiences increasingly demand proof that creative work is human-made rather than AI-generated, making behind-the-scenes content essential for brands and creatives to demonstrate authenticity. This transparency trend echoes the Arts & Crafts movement's response to industrialization, as creators now showcase their manual processes, labor, and decision-making to reclaim value in the AI age. Beyond marketing, sharing creative processes educates audiences, builds trust, fosters community among creatives, and validates that meaningful work requires human judgment, experimentation, and care. LEGO Pays Tribute to the 40+ Year Journey of Apple Calculator Designs (3 minute read) Apple's calculator designs evolved over 40+ years from the 1984 Macintosh GUI version to today's iOS interface, reflecting the company's broader design journey through functionality, skeuomorphism, and minimalism. A fan-made LEGO set with 821 pieces recreates four key stages of this evolution, showing the transition from the Jobs-approved black-and-white original, through OS X updates, to the modern circular-button design influenced by Dieter Rams' Braun aesthetic. The modular desk display concept is currently on LEGO Ideas, where supporters can vote to turn it into an official product. Is this identity for Smål Market the future of retail branding? (5 minute read) Smål Market in Seattle's Ballard neighbourhood is a new collective retail space where six small businesses share one location, costs, and learning, as a response to rising rents and online competition. People People designed an umbrella brand that unifies without overpowering individual shops, using a flexible system rooted in Scandinavian heritage that creates community, supports rotating merchants, and lets independent identities thrive within a shared framework. ⚡ Quick Links AI Was Supposed to Make Artists' Work Easier – It's Doing the Opposite (5 minute read) Video game concept artists report that AI image generators are making their work more difficult and less fulfilling, despite promises that AI would ease creative workflows. Artist Reshapes Walls And Spaces with Explosive Typographic Murals that Turn Buildings Into Giant, 3D Messages (1 minute read) Alex J. Fowkes transforms buildings and public spaces into immersive visual experiences through bold, typographically driven murals and installations. Fun Apple ad touts the iPhone 17's scratch-resistant cover glass (1 minute read) Apple Canada released a playful ad showing an iPhone 17 sliding face-down across a table to highlight that its new Ceramic Shield 2 glass is three times more scratch-resistant than the iPhone 16's. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/ee77e8fe/4 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of design professionals and decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here, create your own role or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! TLDR is one of Inc.'s Best Bootstrapped businesses of 2025. If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! 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