How about some new wallpapers to get your desktop ready for fall and the upcoming Halloween season? We’ve got you covered! Following our monthly tradition, the wallpapers in this post were created with love by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free. Enjoy!

What if your best AI prompts didn’t disappear into your unorganized chat history, but came back tomorrow as a reliable assistant? In this article, you’ll learn how to turn one-off “aha” prompts into reusable assistants that are tailored to your audience, grounded in your knowledge, and consistent every time, saving you (and your team) from typing the same 448-word prompt ever again.

Yegor Gilyov examines the problem of over-reliance on static high-fidelity mockups, which often leave the conceptual model and user flows dangerously underdeveloped. He then explores whether AI-powered prototyping is the answer, questioning whether the path forward is the popular “vibe coding” approach or a more structured, intent-driven approach.

Creating motion can be tricky. Too much and it’s distracting. Too little and a design feels flat. Ambient animations are the middle ground — subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. In this article, web design pioneer Andy Clarke introduces the concept of ambient animations and explains how to implement them.

With digital products moving to incorporate generative and agentic AI at an increasingly frequent rate, trust has become the invisible user interface. When it works, interactions feel seamless. When it fails, the entire experience collapses. But trust isn’t mystical. It can be understood, measured, and designed for. Here are practical methods and strategies for designing more trustworthy and ethical AI systems.

As responsible digital professionals, we are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental impact of our work and need to find effective and pragmatic ways to reduce it. James Chudley shares a new decarbonising approach that will help you to minimise the environmental impact of your website, benefiting people, profit, purpose, performance, and the planet.

From competitive SEO research and monitoring prices to training AI and parsing local geographic data, real-time search results power smarter apps. Tools like SerpApi make it easy to pull, customize, and integrate this data directly into your app or website.

For too long, personas have been created with considerable effort, only to offer limited value. Paul Boag shows how to breathe new life into this stale UX asset and demonstrates that it’s possible to create truly useful functional personas in a lightweight way.