Patrick Torres

Airbnb with its new redesign, Google with Material 3 Expressive, and now Apple with Liquid Glass. What do these brands’ latest updates have in common? A clear desire to bring the emotional aspect of the user experience back to the forefront. As the Material 3 Expressive manifesto says: “When it comes to design, people really do prefer to feel something,” highlighting users’ preference for emotion-driven UX. In recent years, UI design has become highly standardized, focusing on extreme functionality, often at the expense of that emotional and human touch that makes a product truly memorable. However, this shouldn’t come at the cost of accessibility and usability progress. Google, for example, insists on using “color, size, shape, and containment that follow design principles and best practices, drawing attention to key elements and helping users navigate more quickly.” Can we say the same for Liquid Glass? In some of the examples shown, it struggles to meet even the minimum standards of readability and color contrast that we’d expect from a modern interface. The perspective is certainly interesting, setting the ground for a scalable Design System in immersive experiences. But for me, what was presented yesterday doesn’t quite reach the level of excellence Apple usually delivers. For now, it’s a no, but I trust future iterations will address these issues. #WWDC #Apple #LiquidGlass #Material3Expressive #Google #Airbnb

3,500

101 Comments

Award-winning creative director Diana Weisman says we're entering a new era of design where connected assets replace piecemeal efforts. “The most impactful creative doesn’t live in one asset or moment; it lives in a scalable framework,” says Weisman. She joined Brittany Doohan on In Her Direction to share how data and strategy fuel her process, why frameworks unlock more space for true creativity and how AI is reshaping design's future. Watch now: https://lnkd.in/gn2gYvTQ

121

9 Comments

Generalist designers have never been more valuable. And this week's episode with Gunnar Gray shows you exactly why 👇 My favorite way to think of AI is as an amplifier. If you have even the smallest seed of a skill, AI can 10x its value. Gunnar comes from Metalab and has a pretty impressive set of visual and animation skills... but when it came to engineering, he was (almost) starting from scratch 😅 But that didn’t stop him from learning Metal shaders and designing the entire Perplexity Voice Mode animation in code. All it took was curiosity, a willingness to learn, and a little help from Cursor. "I was just curious how it could work in a metal shader environment in iOS. Now we have the ability to do that, so it just made sense to pick up a new tool and learn it there." I don’t know about you but I find that mindset incredibly inspiring. Metal shaders still scare me a bit not gonna lie 😅 So hearing how someone without a coding background shipped something beautiful into one of my favorite apps gets me amped. AI shines a flashlight on each of us and reveals exactly how much agency we really have. Because there’s nothing stopping you from following in Gunnar’s footsteps. There's a LOT more in the full episode btw... We go deep into: ✧ Learning metal shaders ✧ Designing Perplexity's Voice Mode ✧ How AI is changing the design process Enjoy 👇 https://lnkd.in/gp9VT6XV

113

7 Comments