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🤿 lampposts

🤿 lampposts

the new era of design at Stripe

Ridd
February 23, 2026

A few weeks ago, Stripe launched their new site and reminded everyone who the 🐐 of web design is…

So I asked their Head of Design, Katie Dill, to walk us through some of the tiny design decisions that make it so special.

But we also did a deep dive into how the practice of design is evolving at Stripe and everything they’re doing to push past the status quo.

Some highlights:

How the “call for a new aesthetic” is influencing design culture at Stripe
How their internal tool Protodash is changing the way designers prototype
The most important signals that Katie looks for when hiring designers
What the concentration of craft looks like in an AI era
+ a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH JITTER

Jitter just released Image to Video and it’s a pretty big deal.

All you have to do is upload an asset and Jitter will instantly generate a short video clip from it with the help of AI ✨

It’s an easy way to add motion and depth to static backgrounds, create little clips for brand visuals and make any scene feel more alive with subtle movement.

It’s super fun to play with and available today, just click the link to get started 👇

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

The concentration of Craft

Katie and I riffed on an idea that has been rattling around in my brain ever since…

It’s becoming clear that AI is going to give even non-designers the ability to crank out a 7/10 interface. “Good enough” is getting cheaper by the day.

So you have a choice:

do you use this technology to produce more 7/10 work, faster?
Or do you obsess over the moments in your products that deserve to be 11/10?

I’m referring to this as the “concentration of craft.” More so than ever before I don’t want to spread my efforts evenly.

Katie actively encourages designers to “identify when the status quo is holding you back”. She told a story of when the team was designing the UI for Stripe’s financial accounts product. The first pass used Stripe’s standard dashboard patterns and I’m sure they were incredibly clean and functional. But leadership wasn’t afraid to say “this doesn’t feel as magical as the product actually is” and encouraged the team to invent a new type of panel interaction.

The same thinking shows up in how Stripe uses AI-generated imagery for customer stories 👀

Katie says these images were reviewed in CRIT and every single inch was covered in comments lol. What ships is AI plus hours of manual work in Photoshop and 3D tools to get the realism right.

There's a great video from The Cultural Tutor that Katie and I both love. It compares old London lampposts to the sterile ones we build today. The old infrastructure was built with a level of care and ornamentation that made places feel good, even if nobody consciously noticed why.

Modernism optimized all of that away in the name of efficiency and clarity. Sometimes that was principled, but Katie wasn’t shy about calling some of it “laziness” 😅

Digital product design is having this same moment. As efficiency skyrockets, are we just going to let “beauty for the sake of beauty” fade into history?

Stripe definitely is not.

One of my favorite examples is how the gray dividing lines on their new website rotate on hover:

Is this level of detail necessary? Definitely not. But it’s a moment of beauty and it made me pause and smile.

And for the first time, designers aren’t reliant on others to bring this level of care and attention into the world. Can you imagine begging your engineer to make the dividing line twist on hover lol?

It’s clear AI is accelerating the way we prototype and explore ideas. But this speed should be used to raise the ceiling of ambition, not crank through more baseline work.

👥 FEATURED RESOURCE

How to get hired at today’s top startups

Whenever companies I like start hiring, they usually ping me to see if I know anyone great…

So I put together a list of the most talented designers and builders to recommend to my favorite companies (including some seriously cool stealth startups).

You only talk with companies you want to meet and the whole thing is designed to be an easy way for talented designers to see what’s out there without having to be public about it.

So if you’re open to new opportunities, take a second to claim a spot in the new talent network 💪