Matt's Design Blog

From a usability design perspective, and from a product lineup perspective, the new iPads and iPad Pros are a lesson that even companies with prestigious design pedigrees can swing and miss at times.

If the AI cannot be empathetic itself, then we as creators and supervisors can ensure that the training sets that the AI learns from are sufficiently broad and diverse.

Polestar, a subsidiary of Volvo, uses matter-of-fact Scandinavian style almost ironically. It's almost a joke how straightforward and literal Ikea directions are - and this Swedish company similarly prints the names and materials of various components directly... onto the components. It's not just for marketing materials - the seat, headlights, fascia, and many other parts of the car literally have the component name, materials, and/or use case directly printed onto them. Perhaps a bit over-the-top, but it's also brilliant marketing once the Polestar 3 SUV is purchased and used in the real world.

Brilliant move by Tumblr to capitalize on the ongoing chaos at Twitter. Twitter's blue check marks set the trend for the rest of the industry - their design signifies authenticity. The recent kerfuffle on Twitter with fake accounts and spam now looking "believable" has led to many users leaving the platform, and Tumblr is happy to have them. Great design choice, especially when you realize you can gift them and have, like, 12 check marks after your name.

I think it's just important to remember there are some companies that have such an obsession not just with design, but with their design process. Apple is a great example of this - someone at Apple said "no pizza box is good enough. We need to take designers off of the iPhone and put them on pizza boxes. For just our cafeteria. Yeah, that's right: we're not selling this to anyone else." Another great example is Tesla - a company that seems obsessed with "speedrunning" the basics of design and manufacturing from a first-principals perspective because they want to do it all themselves, even if it means relearning old lessons.

Ikea has a reputation for entering product categories and delivering adequacy and affordability in a modern-ish package. That's exactly what they're doing with their Swedish House Mafia partnership - cheap chic - but I can't help but love this turntable design. It's so simple and elegant, and provides a confident presence that is opinionated but won't stand out too much on someone's shelf. Plus, its outputs and controls clearly communicate their usefulness without trying to be ostentatious.

Belgian artist and multi-instrumentalist Stromae's fashion line Mosaert is inspirational - it features visually striking and opinionated pieces, yet it's all made with a focus on the environment and ethical manufacturing. Great example of design being incorporated not just in how something looks, but also how it;s made, used, and ultimately disposed of.

I find the intersection of architecture (designing something you put humans in) and industrial design for personal computing (creating something that humans put in their pockets) very fascinating, and this feature from Wallpaper* speaks to just how much considerations in one field can impact the other. The new headquarters for OPPO, a major phone manufacturer based in China, will reflect this intersection in a very beautiful way.

Apple's SF Symbols are both well-designed as individual icons, but also as a concept itself - many developers lack the internal resources to have an entire graphics team. Great way to provide a diverse set of system-level symbols that can be tweaked for a particular use case while preserving visual cohesion with the rest of the operating system.