TLDR Design 2024-06-18

Apple CarPlay's next-generation in-car UI system will enhance the driving experience by integrating both infotainment and instrumentation screens and any third or fourth display if one is available. The company also plans to incorporate dynamic data, including navigation data, ADAS information, and TPMS data. OEMs will also be able to show specifics, such as the car's name or image, on the screen.

The web is buzzing with innovation. New CSS and UI features are reshaping how we create beautiful and engaging web experiences. Highlights from Google I/O 2024 include scroll-driven animations, view transitions, and anchor positioning, each offering exciting possibilities for web development. These advancements can simplify complex interactions, boost performance, and elevate the user experience.

Dinamo, the Berlin-based type foundry, has designed a new custom typeface named Spotify Mix in collaboration with Spotify's in-house creative team. The font aims to enhance Spotify's brand identity and user experience. This versatile, variable font blends geometric, grotesque, and humanist elements, symbolizing the diversity of Spotify's content. It is set to appear across all its platforms and marketing materials.

Establishing solid foundations and comprehensive design systems is crucial for digital organizations to adopt emerging technologies like AI, ensuring consistent user experiences, scalability, and efficiency. Forward-thinking organizations that have successfully integrated AI into their design systems have seen increased user engagement and sales.

The new AI features showcased at Apple's WWDC conference stifle creativity rather than promote it. The tools offer gimmicky solutions that lack inspiration like Lensa-style AI image generation, ChatGPT-powered email writing, and handwriting correction. Rather than empowering creativity, Apple Intelligence appears to standardize and homogenize user output, contradicting the company's original "Think Different" philosophy.

Designers should focus on solving problems and effectively communicating their solutions to stakeholders, emphasizing how their designs address specific issues. Success comes from creating user-friendly designs that solve real problems, articulating these solutions clearly, and reframing problems as actionable challenges.

UIImagine lets you create and generate user interfaces by describing components or adding screenshots. It supports iteration with preferred design libraries and AI models and outputs code.

Bordly enables rapid prototyping of design systems. It can generate style guides for typography and color schemes in just a few seconds.

The Color Dot Font is a unique typeface where each Latin character is replaced with a colored circle. Available as a TTF file, the font can be installed and used on any computer operating system.

Building confidence in product opinions quickly is crucial for effective decision-making. Discovering personal methods is a shortcut to building this confidence. Focusing on one or two methods that match personal strengths — such as qualitative customer info, product experience, or internal data — is more efficient than mastering all methods and allows for quick iteration and further refinement.

The success of a product is influenced by organizational structure, research value, resource allocation, and balancing business development with marketing. Companies should prioritize product focus while avoiding bloat, use cross-functional teams effectively, and apply the Pareto Principle to maximize customer value.

Working with physical media is rewarding. Quirks of the medium show up in ways that would require a large effort to reproduce digitally — the edges that aren't straight, the lines that aren't perfectly even. To make it work, designers must know how their layout will flow, use a flatbed scanner, be mindful of color contrast, and incorporate some randomness.

Ryan Todd committed to drawing daily for a year to foster spontaneous creativity.

Using rem units in CSS improves accessibility and scalability as it adapts to user settings, making web designs more responsive and user-friendly, especially for those with visual impairments.

While it might seem handy, State-based UI is often overcomplicated and less resilient than traditional DOM manipulation or Web Components.