Category: Design

I promise this is not from The Onion, but rather Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz at The New York Times:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces on Tuesday with an order halting the State Department’s official use of Calibri, reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Mr. Rubio called a “wasteful” sop to diversity.

While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.

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Apple Newsroom:

ISSEY MIYAKE and Apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket. Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth,” its singular 3D-knitted construction is designed to fit any iPhone as well as all pocketable items. Beginning Friday, November 14, it will be available at select Apple Store locations and on apple.com in France, Greater China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, and the U.S.

iPhone Pocket features a ribbed open structure with the qualities of the original pleats by ISSEY MIYAKE. Born from the idea of creating an additional pocket, its understated design fully encloses iPhone, expanding to fit more of a user’s everyday items. When stretched, the open textile subtly reveals its contents and allows users to peek at their iPhone display. iPhone Pocket can be worn in a variety of ways — handheld, tied onto bags, or worn directly on the body. Featuring a playful color palette, the short strap design is available in eight colors, and the long strap design in three colors.

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Paul Kafasis has looked into the abyss of Tahoe icons:

On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail.

While Apple had previously urged developers to use squircle icons on our apps, they’ve now taken things much further to ensure compliance. It’s a shame.

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Steven Aquino, writing at Curb Cuts, bouncing off my post about the new Clear/Tinted toggle that appeared in this week’s betas:

Hackett notes Apple’s placement of the Liquid Glass control is surprising as he believed “a control like this would land in Accessibility.” However a logical presumption, it’s not really a hardcore accessibility feature. Here’s the thing about accessibility features, on iOS or Android or anywhere else: they’re a discrete, specialized—and admittedly esoteric—suite of settings intended to meet highly specific needs. While it’s true “accessibility is for everyone” for the most part, the majority of the options under Accessibility are decidedly opinionated in their target demographic.

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If you go to Settings > Display and Brightness on iOS, or System Settings > Appearance on the Mac, you’ll find a new toggle that lets you swap between two looks: Clear and Tinted. Clear is the look of Liquid Glass since iOS 26 launched, while Tinted adds opacity and contrast.

Here’s how the options look on the Lock Screen and in Photos:

This toggle being in the display settings with things like Dark Mode is interesting to me. I would have thought that a control like this would land in Accessibility…

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After seeing my buddies at Studio Neat launch an amazing new patch, I fell down the rabbit hole that is the NeXT logo.

Dan and Tom linked to this video, which shows Paul Rand delivering his work to Steve Jobs and his team at NeXT. I hadn’t seen this before, and boy, I wish it were longer than a mere 80 seconds in length:

Rand did powerful and authoritative work when it came to corporate logos, as reflected upon by Jobs in a 1993 interview:

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Nick’s long column on Apple’s new design language is probably the best thing I’ve read on the subject. This line about the glass material switching from light to dark as content scrolls behind it really jumped out at me:

It is Apple’s clever solution to a problem Apple created.

I like a lot about Liquid Glass, but there’s no arguing that there are issues that still need work, and I think Nick is pretty fair about what those are.

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Rakhim Davletkali has written a delightful blog post, reviewing macOS releases in reverse:

Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple’s first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people.

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512 Pixels reader Brian sent me a screenshot they took way back on Mac OS X 10.0, showing that Apple’s current struggle with transparent user interface elements isn’t anything new:

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I spent a large part of my weekend making over 150 screenshots, just for you.

I mostly like Liquid Glass on iOS and iPadOS, but it feels like macOS got a lot less time in the oven than the mobile operating systems did. For example, toolbar buttons still really stick out, and I wish app icons weren’t all in squircle jail:

Like previous years, I have various sections of screenshots for you to check out, but with a new addition this year: Icon & Widget Styles.

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Identity 4 has had a Macintosh Plus for years, but was unhappy with its bulk and heat generation, so they did something wild:

I ought to make a rack-mounted version of this computer so it can fit cleanly in my studio rack cabinets along with all my other conveniently packaged gear. I will even give it a sleek look and a clever name, something like Racintosh Plus… Hahaha yeah that’s pretty funny.

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I’ve been running iOS 26 for a while now, and there’s something that has been bugging me. The Messages app in CarPlay is a disaster:

I took some time to edit my friends and family out of this screenshot, but the layout and conversation names are exactly as they appear in real life.

Here are some of my issues:

• It’s great that CarPlay’s Messages app now respects pinned conversations, but displaying them in anything but the 3-across grid from iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS breaks muscle memory in the one context where muscle memory is the most important.
• Truncated names look terrible. I understand it on the Apple Watch, but even on the 7-inch screen in my Tacoma, there should be room to see first and last names. Making the favorites larger — and preserving their order — would help fix this.¹
• The unread badges should be in a consistent location. CarPlay shows badges for favorites to the upper-right of the image, whereas conversations in the list below have them on the left. This is something done only in CarPlay; every other Messages app shows unread dots to the left of the conversation name.
• The “Messages” label at the top of the screen is off-centered.

All of this adds up to an interface that feels mostly forgotten. Messages should be consistent across platforms, and I hope Apple takes some time to readdress this before shipping iOS 26 this fall. Right now it looks like an Android phone app that got installed on a tablet.

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