Cortex is a study tool for designers. 29 illustrated decks cover UX laws, color, typography, design systems and the new AI tools, and spaced repetition brings each card back right before you'd forget it. A few minutes a day.
"Designer" used to mean craft and research. Now it also means design tokens, motion, accessibility and AI, so the same title carries far more words. Engineers say "hooks," a PM cites retention curves, and designers nod along. The usual fixes don't stick: YouTube primers run long, threads disappear, bookmarks pile up unread.
Cortex is the structured version: short cards on one topic at a time, built to be remembered rather than skimmed.
Start with decks, not an empty library. Cortex began as a personal knowledge library: add any concept and AI writes the explanation and draws the picture. That's powerful once you have a library and empty on day one. The public version leads with decks someone already curated, 15 to 23 cards each, so a new user is learning in the first minute. Building your own cards is still there for later.
Every card gets a face. Each card has an illustration, generated from one locked style and palette so 29 decks read as one product rather than a stack of templates. The style and palette were tested and locked before any deck was illustrated, then stress-tested on abstract ideas like "recognition over recall" that are hard to draw.
Memory, not reading. Cards come back on a spaced repetition schedule, right before you'd forget them. Pro adds harder practice modes: Multiple Choice, Fill-in-the-Blank and Brain Dump.
The pipeline does double duty. The illustration setup built for Cortex now makes the spot art on this site, in Studio Maya's own marker-and-blueprint style.
Cortex is live at learnwithcortex.com. The first five decks are free with no credit card, and Pro unlocks all 29 plus the extra practice modes for $8 a month.