Beauty and simplicity
For about a year, the thought is that simplicity can be sophistication, and that digital work should be able to show that something is organic and alive. Designers must defend beauty. People feel it when it is there, but they often fail to give it weight when it is gone. . Design should not rest on tangible metrics. We have long dismissed ethereal variables that are hard to measure and that give a design most of its value: how a product feels to see and use, what impression it makes, what it makes someone feel.
In an interface, simple means the work of cutting the extra so only the essence remains. That order can feel like beauty. The hard open question is how to keep the other kind of beauty — — in an interface, if that is possible at all.
Everyday objects
Mature design fields often honor everyday objects: . They try to make a known object better. Digital product design often tries to make something new. It often looks down on products that already exist, such as a weather app or an alarm clock. Dieter Rams and Olivetti also worked on objects that already existed. When we refuse to work on known things, we often make nothing.
A good digital object is a , not a new category invented for its own sake. We would rather solve small things, simply. A weather app whose forecast is a small paragraph. Enshittification is extra chrome, extraction, and haste on top of the thing itself. We run from that.
Design as thinking
Design is thinking. Design is . If you automate that work, you leave the intention out. Then the result is not design. You can build an application or a service by automation. You do not design it that way. Design needs awareness when you make a decision.
, such as a design system in Figma. That frees room to think: flows, information architecture, how a thing must behave, the problem in front of you, and the look you want to send. Lazy people and lazy teams will only work less. People who want to make products will use the extra time to think. The large risk is that haste, plus a wish to avoid hard work, will make products of very low quality. This is the view as things are now.
Motion
Motion is one of the most important parts of design. We , as designers and as developers. It is hard to master. For designers it is hard to understand: it takes thinking to bring the naturality, or whatever we want the design to feel. It often feels unnecessary to every part of a product team, to all the stakeholders. Motion is one of the main things that make a product feel the way we want, and one of the reasons a product is delightful. AI lowers the entry barrier. It makes motion easier to pay attention to, to build, and to use. Designers, product builders, and developers will use it more.
Natural motion is easy to predict. Familiar feels better. It approaches smoothly rather than stepping. It feels like you instead of pushing you. Fill the gaps between states so two objects read as two parts of the same thing, not a cut. In the real world, things do not move at a stable, homogeneous speed. The right motion for a morph is speed that changes along the path.
What an interface must hold
The most important things in an interface are , predictability, and care for detail.
Simple means we learn to get better by taking away. Harmony is correct alignment, proportion between parts, sameness, and coherence. Visual hierarchy is color, air, and a surface that is easy to scan. If a thing is predictable, it is easy to learn, and so easy to use. Detail is pixel-perfect care, and also the small interactions, motion, and animation that make use feel pleasant.