Welcome to Issue 002. This issue covers the week of May 11-17, 2026.
Quick housekeeping first: we’re starting an evergreen teardown series this week: long-form analyses of sites that get copied a lot and copied badly (Stripe, Linear, Vercel, Notion, Apple). Five pieces landing across the next two weeks. These are the “open them in a new tab, read on a Sunday” pieces.
Now this week’s work.
The week’s notable launches
Five pieces of work caught our eye. Short teardowns on each: what’s working, what isn’t, what’s worth lifting.
Notion Calendar’s new marketing site. Replaces the dated Cron-era page with something that finally looks like Notion shipped it. Roman-Muradov-style illustrations as secondary accent, type-as-illustration on the hero. The interesting move is the embedded mini-calendar in the hero: it’s an actual live preview of your week if you’re logged in, a marketing visualization if you’re not. Server-side detection, no flash. The same component doing two jobs.
Stripe Atlas onboarding, now four steps. Rumor was true: Atlas cut from twelve screens to four. The trick is defensible defaults plus a single “advanced” link per step that progressively reveals the old form. New users finish the flow in under three minutes; legal-team users still get full control. This is the right pattern for every onboarding flow that’s currently doing eight-step wizards and calling it “thorough.”
Figma’s new dev-mode landing page. Tightened up the muddy “Dev Mode 2.0” page into something that pitches the workflow rather than the feature list. The before-after of the hero copy is a useful study by itself: “Build with Dev Mode” became “Ship faster, with the spec in the file.” Same product, a 2x stronger sentence.
Cooper Hewitt’s site redesign (continued). We flagged this last week in the link roundup. After a week of poking at it, it’s the strongest museum site we’ve seen since the SFMOMA refresh. The collection browser is the headline feature: facet filtering with URL-shareable state, image-first results, sticky breadcrumbs that double as filter pills.
Linear’s pricing page got a quiet rebuild. No announcement; just a Tuesday push. The change worth noting: they dropped the comparison table for a three-column tier-card layout, then put the comparison table behind a “see all features” toggle. Conversion follow-up data would be interesting; structurally this is the right move.
If you study one with the inspector open this week: the Notion Calendar hero component. The same-component-two-jobs pattern is going to be everywhere by Q4.
Craft pattern: the logo cloud is dying
Two weeks ago we promised a piece on this and then didn’t write it. Here’s the short version; the long version is on the list for Issue 003.
The “trusted by” logo cloud (that horizontal strip of grayscale customer logos under every B2B hero) is on its way out. Three things are killing it.
It signals fragility, not strength. When every competitor has the same row of logos, the move stops being a flex and starts reading as “we feel a need to prove we exist.” Cursor, Linear, and the new Stripe Atlas page have all quietly removed theirs in the last six months. The pages don’t feel weaker for it.
The logos themselves have decayed. Half of them are five-year-old SVGs of brands that have since rebranded. The other half are companies whose own marketing has moved on. The result is a stripe of visually-mismatched marks that looks like a screenshot of 2019.
Better proof patterns have shown up. Quote pulls with named operators (“Our infra team’s median deploy time dropped from 14 minutes to 90 seconds” from a named Head of Platform), single-customer case-study tiles with a headline metric, and embedded usage stats are all doing the job better. The shift from “look who uses us” to “look what they did with us” is the right one.
If your marketing page still has a 12-logo grayscale strip and you haven’t touched it in 18 months: it’s time. Replace it with two named quotes or a single case-study tile and the page reads stronger immediately.
Starting this week: the evergreen teardown series
Five sites that everyone in this audience already knows, written about with the inspector open and real opinions:
- Stripe’s marketing site: the engineered-but-doesn’t-shout look
- Linear’s landing-page playbook (and why everyone copies it badly)
- Vercel: the gradient-monospace-grid formula and when it falls apart
- Notion’s marketing illustration: what it earns and what it costs
- Apple product pages: long-scroll storytelling and why imitators fail
These will stay as standing references. If a friend asks “how do I make our site look like Stripe’s?” send them the Stripe one and tell them to read it twice.
What we’re tracking for Issue 003
- Are skeuomorphic UI elements really coming back? A handful of small launches this week shipped with bevels, soft shadows, and even subtle textures. Could be one-off, could be a trend bottom.
- The new Vercel homepage. Reportedly a ground-up rebuild. If they ship inside the next week we’ll tear it down.
- A reader-requested teardown. If there’s a recently-shipped site you want us to analyze, reply with the URL.
Closing note
Soft cap still in effect: we’re growing slowly while we lock the format. Format feedback continues to be read carefully.
Issue 003 lands next Sunday, May 24.