🍎📲💥 There’s been a wave of criticism around Apple’s new Liquid Glass UI — especially among designers.
But I can’t help but wonder: how much of it is genuine concern for accessibility and usability, and how much is performative outrage or virtue signaling?
Let’s not forget — this is a demo, not a finished product. Judging an under-construction UI as if it’s final is like complaining about a leaky roof before the roof is even built.
Yes, accessibility matters. Yes, legibility matters. But perhaps the louder concern should be elsewhere:
Autocorrect that still struggles.
Dictation that fumbles.
Voice recognition that underdelivers.
AI features that feel half-baked.
These are the core experiences that need urgent attention. Maybe it’s time we shift focus away from the gloss and toward the fundamentals.
The book is a collection of stories written in journalistic style; an enlightening read that opens a window into the lives of (extra)ordinary Europeans. No sensational headlines, just real lives marked by migration, climate hardship, identity, and hope. Ben Judah doesn’t romanticise them; he tells their often rough stories with respect, clarity, and heartfelt empathy.
This is Europe by Ben Judah
Through 23 intimate portraits, the author took me from a Rotterdam harbour pilot navigating global trade, to Romanian lorry drivers vulnerable to crime on UK routes, to Italian mountain rescuers helping West African migrants in the Alps. Each story felt genuine, profoundly honest, and eye-opening.
I highly recommend this book — it broadened my understanding of what Europe truly looks like today.
“This is Europe” is empathy-inducing read that made me reflect on the values and future of society from different perspectives.
A good hammer is valuable because it is useful, and not because it is well designed. Wait a minute. You might say, “Isn’t it useful because it was designed that way?” Yes, it was designed to be useful, but it’s valuable not because it was designed, but because it is useful. In other words, it would be valuable even if it wasn’t designed, and yet it was somehow, by accident, useful.
Assuming that the value or meaning of the object is derived from its usefulness and not from the fact that it was designed, there isn’t an immutable link between an object’s original design and its actual value.
But how about the Magic Mouse by Apple or Philippe Starck’s lemon squeezer? Aren’t those objects of design valuable because they were designed, rather than because of their actual usefulness?
If somebody came to you and claimed that their weight was a nice green colour, you would probably stop, double-check if you heard them correctly, and then wonder if that person was sane. What a piece of nonsense!
Just because something sounds like a sentence and has the structure of a sentence doesn’t mean it must automatically have meaning.
And yet, in the corporate world, we often hear busy white-collar professionals utter similar kinds of nonsense.
“Let’s dockerize the monolith to make it cloud-native.” Sure, and while we’re at it, let’s staple a horse to a spaceship to make it more agile.
Or when Mike from Innovation Labs calls for “leveraging blockchain to democratize synergy.” That’s just a pile of nouns desperately trying to form a startup pitch.
But in the entrepreneurial world of wannabe innovators, sentences like these get nodded at, printed on slides, and repeated in meetings without a hint of irony.
“We need to action this ask.” You mean… do the thing someone asked for? Why not just say that?
In linguistics, sentences like these are usually described as category mistakes (or category errors).
If you are like me, you must be familiar with that feeling of frustration when scrolling through the “infinite” list of your past conversations with ChatGPT, looking for the particular one you want to re-check again, just to realise that you can’t find it — at least, not quickly and without a significant effort. One summer afternoon, I started ideating on the concept of a better prompt archive management.
I asked myself: “How could we improve the usability of our beloved AI tool?”
There are many possible areas of improvement when it comes to software as young as ChatGPT was in 2023. This post is about of them — the better prompt archive management. I contemplated the idea of what if we gave users an option to organise their past conversations with ChatGPT somehow? Not just archive them but also group and tag them in meaningful-to-them ways.
Have you ever wondered why some logomarks resonate with customers while others do not?
We all know, that some logos are considered to be inspirational works of art while most of them are average at best. Recently, I wrote a short article on the proposition density in design and how it relates to memorability of famous logos (and other works of art).
In summary: I believe that the success of many well-known logos has a lot to do with the relationship between the elements they are made of and the meaning these elements convey — in other words, the proposition density, which could be defined as the amount of information conveyed in an object or environment per unit element.
“A well-designed product isn’t well designed if the process needed to manufacture it is unrealistic or uneconomical.”
Matthew Frederick
A brilliantly conceived alternative-fuel vehicle will not succeed without the design and implementation of a refuelling infrastructure over a large geographic area. A cleverly resolved construction detail isn’t clever if it doesn’t leave room for a construction worker to manipulate the tools needed to construct it. A bridge pier that’s well engineered won’t be built without also engineering a process to excavate earth and pour concrete in the middle of a river.
Remember, there is often design besides the design and a well-designed product isn’t well designed if the process needed to manufacture it is unrealistic or uneconomical.
“You don’t truly understand something until you quantified it. But you understand nothing at all if all you do is quantify.”
— Unknown Author
The limitation of quantitative data is that it describes what happened but not why or how it happened. As design researchers, we should seek answers to the questions of why by talking to our customers or stakeholders.
Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods is a good rule of thumb. Remember, quantitative and qualitative methods complement one another; they are complementary, not mutually exclusive.
Colour is one of the most underestimated yet critical areas of design, especially when designing with accessibility in mind.
Most designers are familiar with the colour contrast of texts on the background. However, there is much more to colours in relation to accessibility. We have rules for link colour vs text colour, focus state, adjacent colours for UI elements and interface elements that convey information, etc.
“Colour contrast is one of the areas where we designers can have a significant impact on accessibility. While accessibility is much more than that, a series of measurable variables make colour contrast one of the perhaps easier aspects to address.”
— Javier Cuello
The WCAG guidelines, while comprehensive, are not necessarily easy to follow. Luckily, we can learn from folks like Javier Cuello, who summarised the important colour-related accessibility requirements in a more digestible form.
In his article, Javier explains key considerations that designers should keep in mind when dealing with colours. The article is a good read for anyone looking for an easy-to-understand introduction to colour contrast and accessibility.
