Apple might have undone the macOS Tahoe menu icons decision, but this wasn’t the only contentious iconography issue in their ecosystem.

On his blog, Jim Nielsen writes how Apple filed away so much expression by forcing rigid icon bureaucracy in macOS. Nielsen focuses mostly on distinctiveness; previously, you could make the icon unique by its general shape or the shape of its contents, but one of these two levers has now been taken away:

This over-emphasis on “systems” design seems endemic to modern software. Systems prescribe rules because they are the easiest attributes to document, enforce, and automate — “All icons must use this shape, this lighting, this stroke.” Excellence, by contrast, is harder to systematize. It requires judgment, taste, care, experience, and a sensitivity to context — all in service of meaning and purpose, not superficial similarity.

However, one also can’t help but notice how ugly and amateurish the Creator Studio icons are, so it all feels absolutely like a net negative – the new system took something away and the proposed replacement feels low quality:

Elsewhere, on Rogue Amoeba’s blog, Paul Kafasis straight up asks Apple to undo the 2025 decision to contain macOS icons inside squircles:

Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it. Apple could, and should, once again allow icons to take on a wide variety of shapes.

Both these prompted me to think a bit of Apple’s app iconography as a system.

Let’s start with iOS:

• I believe the rigid squircle shape of app icons starting with the first iPhone was to make them look like a grid of buttons, and also to establish apps as a new primitive, particularly with the subsequent arrival of the App Store. (Similarly how over time “a face in a circle” became recognizable as a “personal avatar,” a user proxy primitive.)
• Soon, the rigid shape also helped when custom Springboard wallpapers arrived in 2010 – it reduced the likelihood of apps blending with the background.

• Recently, a new option has been added to remove names of apps, which is another way to disambiguate them.

• Also recently, Apple’s generally unpleasant-looking theming options (color tinting and glassification) reduced color coding as a way to recognize a particular icon.

At the same time, iOS is still highly spatial. Most apps have a specific physical place on a specific page of the Springboard, or inside a specific folder. I believe that this helps a lot even if shape coding, color coding, and name disambiguation are failing or turned off to begin with.

Now, for MacOS:

• The original Mac OS X followed in the footsteps of the classic Mac OS and allowed arbitrary shapes, allowing for more flexible shape coding, although with some guidance on angles and styling:

• However, more recently, the iOS squircle shape has been first strongly suggested (in 2020) and then rigidly enforced (in 2025) for macOS as well.

But then, the usage of app icons in macOS is different than in iOS.

First of all, macOS isn’t nearly as spatial as it used to be, and I would say not as spatial as iOS. Even Dock is more malleable compared to the memory palace rigidity of the Springboard, and its overflow section with suggestions and hand-off is very fluid. ⌘Tab is completely non-spatial and just like the Dock doesn’t upfront identify apps by their names. App icons also appear in more fluid contexts like Spotlight, Finder, and the right side of the menubar (I know iOS has some of those as well, but I would imagine they’re getting much less use overall). This all increases the pressure on icons to be easily distinguishable.

At the same time, there are fewer issues with custom backgrounds on macOS. Most icon surfaces have opaque backgrounds and while you can keep your apps on the desktop or put backgrounds in Finder windows, I don’t think that’s very common.

I’m probably missing some other aspects, but this would be my summary of where we’re at:

• Apple has not done a good job shepherding their app iconography system. The system feels too rigid, and some of its ostensible benefits (dark mode, color tinting, glassification) have been executed poorly. You could imagine a better tinting system that doesn’t feel like a cheap CSS filter applied to the icon, or (my dream!) a way to tint individual app icons. I personally love when apps – here Raindrop, Bear, and Retro – give you a lot of icon options in various colors, so I can invest in color coding:

• People’s trust in Apple’s skillset has deteriorated after the unveiling of horrendous icon redesigns in 2025’s Tahoe, and more recently in the abovementioned Creator Studio (the 2026 updates are nice, but very minor). This is in some contrast with other controversial visually-motivated changes appearing at the same time. Say what you want about Liquid Glass, but there are moments it looks absolutely gorgeous (see the video below for perhaps my favourite Liquid Glass surface). Forced menu icons felt similar: embarrassingly naïve as a system, but with icons themselves executed well (which you can still appreciate when perusing SF Symbols). But the app icon changes seem to have been assigned to the team that delivered on neither good visual craft, nor good systems thinking.

• I think it’s fair to look at Creator Studio specifically, and fear Apple is following in Microsoft’s and especially Adobe’s unforgivable footsteps in prioritizing abstract corporate identity goals over both functional and visual aspects of app iconography. Adobe’s product icons used to be beautiful and distinct before they got all shoved into the same “uppercase + lowercase letter” framework that became a canonical example of a system that took something away from the user but didn’t really give anything in return:

• I also feel this feeds right into another fear of Apple’s actions steamrolling over particularly indie app developers where being able to express one’s identity via the app icon feels much more important than it would be for a huge company.
• I don’t see Apple abandoning their stance on the rigid, distinctive app icon squircle shape. It’s possible that iOS apps will start appearing on touchscreen Macs outside of screen mirroring. Even without that, it just simplifies things for them, even if the jobs for macOS app icons are not the same as those for iOS app icons.
• At the same time, I could see Apple allowing the app icons to stick out of the basic squircle shape, like some macOS apps did in between 2020 and 2025; I believe it would even be possible to detect programmatically if the basic squircle shape is still there in the background. This would improve shape coding, and give icon designers some clearly much-desired flexibility. The icons below still register as squircles to me – why not allow this as an option? (For both macOS and iOS.)

• I wish Apple standardized app icon changing UI on iOS. Right now, each app offers their own interface in a different place – you could see that above – and rarely links to that place from the Springboard’s long-press menu. But imagine if you could nicely change app icons in situ in the same flow when you’re customizing the Springboard itself! (And then, the same for Dock and macOS.)
• I think it would also be a nice gesture to allow to rename iOS Springboard apps to whatever you want the same way you can rename folders, to give some users an opportunity to disambiguate by that if everything else fails.

Before I say anything, I’d recommend you just visit the site of a new little app called Liquid Radius, click around, and see how you feel (don’t install it, though!):

So. One of the design memes surrounding macOS 26 Tahoe from last year – the one with Liquid Glass – was this screenshotted quagmire of mismatched rounded corners:

The tool, Liquid Radius, promises a solution, and then goes to strange lengths to accomplish it.

Fixing the mismatched radii is, apparently, much harder than for example something like Lickable Menu Bar, which many of you have spotted me using via various Unsung screenshots. To get Liquid Radius to work, you have to take a pickaxe to deep recesses of your operating system in order to disable some of Apple’s protective measures – stuff like FileVault (which you have to turn off momentarily) and System Integrity Protection (which you are never allowed to turn back on). The installation requires friendliness with command line and a stomach for multiple reboots, including some of a kind you might have never actually done before.

Then, there’s the website you’ve just seen: elaborate, with nice “before and after” animations, and a fun landing page. I thought the installation steps, given the complexity of the effort, were exemplary and even educational. There’s also a page listing all the apps confirmed to work, and a “How Liquid Radius limits its blast radius” (ha) section, revealing the author is clear-eyed about their work being a hack, and even the dimensionality of its hackiness. Even within the tool there are nice design details.

But, as I was exploring the site, I kept switching between “this is ridiculous!” (laudatory) and “this is ridiculous!” (derogatory) in my head.

At some point it all started feeling like… overkill. Is this really worth all this effort? Are there people who pay for and install this, lowering their system’s overall security and installing unknown code by unnamed developers? Do the ends justify the means? How much do rounded corners matter?

I’ve also seen many products that were a lot more complex, but came with smaller landing pages and fewer snappy taglines. At some point I even had this thought that if you wanted to make The Onion-style joke describing how designers can get incredibly self-serious and obsessed about some teensy detail, the site is exactly what you would do. You’d just never build the actual app.

(Caveat: I didn’t buy or install Liquid Radius for reasons that are probably obvious – nor would I recommend you do so – so I cannot fully discount this actually being an incredibly sophisticated practical joke.)

Maybe it’s my reaction to rounded corners in particular being its own exhausting thing in the design world – a shiny, shallow distraction of product designers in lieu of focusing on more important issues of utility, ethics, privacy, and so on. Maybe it’s the fact I’ve always been suspicious of the oft-told Steve Jobs round rect story: sure, round rects are everywhere in the world, but then so are regular straight corners. Or maybe it’s my own frustration that conversations about macOS and Liquid Glass still feel largely surface-level, on terms established by Apple at WWDC last year.

Speaking of this: timing-wise, Liquid Radius is peculiar, too. This effort was only launched in May, and graduated to 1.0 on the first day of WWDC, the same moment Apple announced they will fix this problem in the upcoming macOS Golden Gate – to audience’s applause – which renders Liquid Radius obsolete, and was an absolutely predictable outcome.

The Liquid Radius creator seemed perhaps surprised by it, and promised to keep the tool running, allowing people to continue customizing their border radii even after Golden Gate makes them all match – but that makes the product an even trickier proposition given the frightening installation steps and the very notion of anonymous, closed-source code being allowed straight into your system’s bloodstream. Besides, if you judge the tool on its own, visual-design terms…

…I don’t think you can simply straighten the corners like they’re showing in the bottom row without rebalancing it with other design changes I’m not sure the tool can make en masse for all the apps.

I know this is navel-gazing, so I will stop. I linked to some third-party fixes before, but this one is newly fascinating. I’m sharing this in part because I don’t know how to feel about it. It reminded me of the mixed feelings I had after watching Jiro Dreams Of Sushi: is Jiro a hero or a villain of this story? I couldn’t say then, and I still don’t know today.

It has been an interesting few weeks to ponder the relationship of style and substance. macOS Golden Gate announcements made me wonder: if you strip Liquid Glass of a lot of its original style via all the reactionary fixes, is what remains even worth the name? The controversial Ferrari Luce reveal not long ago was another rich entry point, especially as for Ferrari the style is a large part of substance.

I’d be curious how Liquid Radius feels to you.

Welcome to another Super Mario Sunday!

This is an 11-minute video from gruz talking about the fascinating world of South Korean bootleg Marios, such as Super Boy, Super Bros World, and Super Bio Man – existing solely because of Korea’s subpar copyright law of that era:

In short: The code was copyrighted, but the IP was not, so many companies rebuilt Mario for the dominant game console of the region, in the process stripping it of all of the original game’s actual craft – with “levels feeling assembled rather than built” and “getting the [visuals] right and missing almost everything underneath” – and as such become interesting as a reflection of the details that actually made Mario great.

However, as the time moves on, some of the bootleg games actually get better and better, and come into their own. It’s interesting to compare this to Nintendo’s own “clone” I mentioned before.

What I wouldn’t give for some oral history of what looks like an absolutely fascinating time and place for software.

This is not italics. This is not even oblique. This is a side effect of how those displays work. Instead of a whole rectangle of pixels being changed at once, the display is updated line by line, starting from the top one. As it’s moving towards the bottom, the internal horizontal position might have already advanced, the subsequent lines will be drawn slightly to the left, and it all leads to a slanted appearance. (This is in effect the same problem as rolling shutter in photography.)

The interesting thing is that it could’ve gone the other way. Twice. In English or German, we treat scrolling left to be natural, and we consider only one direction of italic slant appropriate. The first has to do with the direction of reading. I believe the second is, like many things in typography, customary; there’s nothing inherently better than right-leaning letters, except we’re used to them since those are the only ones we ever see.

But, the person putting it all together could’ve just as well done it the other way: scrolling to the right, or slanting to the left (by updating the display bottom to top – not as unusual as you might think!). Were those intentional choices, or was it a default? I’m not sure, but it points to the value of knowing this stuff, or creating a culture where this stuff is treasured. Often, more craft will require more work. Sometimes, however, you will get it for free – but only if you choose the right fork in the road.

While we’re here, how about a few other examples of delightful moments in typography where I did not expect them? These, I believe, will be all intentional. But whether you consider them craft, or even good, I don’t know.

Here are some surprising small caps:

Here’s a cute depiction of a train carriage, somewhat hampered by the limitations of a similar workhorse 5×7 pixel font display:

But here’s something even better. This icon of a stadium cleverly leaned into the same limitations. It’s so delightful. These are, I believe, four characters side by side:

Here, someone added nice decoration to fill out the space:

Here, someone removed all the line height to create a fascinating vertical ligature. This is Gorton and the letters are carved into the plastic, so this required some effort!

Speaking of obliques, this NOT is too thick, and slightly too large, but you have to appreciate someone actually slanting the text rather than underlining it, or decorating in a simpler way:

Even if you underline, you can go a little… well, below and beyond:

Or, here, with maybe the most impressive, three-dimensional underline I’ve ever seen:

This I spotted on an old typesetting machine, and I would like to believe this is an intentional easter egg:

This was on a computer keyboard. You don’t expect hyphenation in this context…

…and you definitely don’t expect an old-fashioned contraction:

In last week’s post, I made an off-hand comment about Vercel’s Geist Pixel announcement, and I thought it might be interesting to turn this into more of a full-fledged critique.

I don’t think it’s a good announcement, but its flaws are pretty universal, so I want to put words to these flaws. This will extend to a lot of other writing about design, not even necessary even just about typography.

Here’s my advice that I believe would make announcements like this better:

• Write like a human being would. This is famously hard, and takes practice. Here, we see stuff like “unapologetically digital,” “a functional tool within a broader typographical system,” “the result feels both nostalgic and contemporary,” and “constraints weren’t a limitation, they were the design tool.” No one talks like this. I think people believe font releases have to use these kinds of words and phrases, as a way to bring legitimacy to the project. I do not subscribe to that way of thinking. I think it leads to writing that’s optimized only for admiration, which is not as much fun for anyone.
• Show a specific example of a problem you solved. This page hints at some things – “They don’t scale properly across viewports, their metrics conflict with existing typography, or they’re purely decorative.” – but that feels altogether too vague to be useful or even interesting. These are actually fascinating and hard challenges, yet I know as much at the bottom of the page as I did at the top.
• Show details you are proud of. Zoom in literally or figuratively. “Each glyph was manually refined to avoid visual noise, uneven weight distribution, and awkward diagonals.” I would love to see a few examples.
• Show work in progress! Show stuff you discarded. This will be hard, but why not? It’s good practice and I believe this, more than anything else, will have people appreciate what you did. Plus, everybody loves a blooper reel.
• Related: talk about struggle. But don’t just motion in the direction of challenges, or performatively announce that this was the hardest project of your life. Actually talk about something that was hard, and why. Be vulnerable. Be honest. People didn’t care that Rocky lost in the first movie, because people cared about Rocky.
• Talk about your inspiration or history. What we all do here is part of something much bigger. Why a pixel font to begin with? Why is this interesting to you? Is that because Vercel is filled with nerds, or because you got bored with bold and italic, or because it just seems visually interesting in a new way?
• Let me type! Immediately and on every relevant page. I don’t think any modern font announcement/​tester can exist without this. This is the easiest way to getting to know the font and explore specific things that matter to you. (To do this here, you have to go to the font page, switch to Geist Pixel at the top, and then scroll all the way to the bottom. This feels entirely too far away.)
• Show, don’t tell, generally. The Geist Pixel announcement feels rife for an avalanche of “show,” but has so little. I mentioned above wishing to see examples of manual refinements. There is a visual for “seamless mixing,” but it’s really a marketing photo, not a real-use example – it visualizes what, but you want to visualize what and why at the same time. I would love to see the spread of variants, specific examples of how the font is not “breaking in production” and “scaling properly across viewports.” I don’t know what is a “semi-mono approach” and I would like to learn.
• Motion is okay, but it has zero nutritional value. If you have limited resources, don’t spend it on motion. Anything interactive is better. (But again, the best interactive thing is letting you type.)
• The “Already shaping what’s next” is a narratively unsatisfying section, as it promises stuff that you cannot see yet. Either show those, or skip the tease altogether.

I know the elephant in the room here is “how big companies do things.” A lot of redesign announcements and font unveils exist chiefly to make the execs who championed them happy, and perhaps as fodder for future promotion – I bet the whole “Already shaping what’s next” section isn’t really written for external audience – and they get chewed by the big PR machine that often files away whatever personality and quirkiness might have been there. Your job is to fight that machine! But I acknowledge that it might be hard.

However, I’ve also seen all this seeping into personal font announcements, which is unfortunate. (I don’t want to link to specific examples, since that’d be punching down.)

Also, this is not just about the joy of reading or some general notion of “craft” – although they are important, too. This is also purely informational. I feel I haven’t learned enough from the Geist Pixel announcement for the amount of time I spent with it. I don’t understand “multiple variants for different densities and use cases” or “semi-mono approach” or what stylistic sets are included. (My general goal is to write in a way that people can learn something new from any design announcement, even if they don’t have any prior context, and if they never actually use the font.)

It‘s a shame, because the work itself seems thoughtful and excellent, deserves a better intro, and could help others interested in typography as a jumping off point, particularly because this feels like a typeface off the beaten path.

Just to round up this post, some recent counterexamples:

• Fran Sans announcement post by Emily Sneddon (complements the font page) – personal, distinctive, talks about the process, shows interesting artifacts.
• I feel that every small essay from David Jonathan Ross’s Font Of The Month Club teaches me something new – pick a font you like on that page, then click Notes next to it.
• Departure Mono font page by Helena Zhang doesn’t use a lot of words, but still says a lot.
• Shantell Sans process post by Shantell Martin (complements the font page) – already talked about it before.

I generally avoid think pieces about AI because a) a lot of them are boring, and b) they rarely match the pragmatic posture of this blog.

But this essay on a new No One’s Happy blog was really interesting to read, and feels different in a few ways.

First, it examines what happens as AI slop spreads in the context that is less discussed – in a workplace:

This is a new form of slop, and it is more expensive than the public kind, because the people producing it are being paid a salary to do so. […]

The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about.

A lot in the essay feels pertinent to Unsung as real craft is not feelings or fluffiness. Real craft is deep expertise:

Generative AI can produce work that looks expert without being expert, and the failure arrives in two shapes. The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce, faster or more advanced than their judgment. The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. The two failures look similar from a distance and are not the same. Research has mostly measured the first. The second is what it is missing, and in my experience it is the riskier of the two.

The term for this new challenge is, apparently, “output-competence decoupling.”

Other parts of the essay come back to a topic – toxic velocity – we covered before:

The current generation of agentic systems is built around the premise that the human is the bottleneck — that the loop runs faster and cleaner without the awkward delay of someone reading what is about to happen and deciding whether it should. This is, in a great many cases, exactly backwards. The human in the loop is not a vestige of an earlier era; the human is the only part of the loop with skin in the game. Removing the H from HITL [Human In The Loop – eds. note] is not an efficiency. It is the abandonment of the only mechanism the system has for catching itself.

And one last thing that differentiates this essay from many others is the last “what to do about it” section.

I linked to this opaquely on Thursday, but it deserves its own entry. Michael Bierut’s 2005 essay called “On (design) bullshit” is one of my favourite design essays:

It follows that every design presentation is inevitably, at least in part, an exercise in bullshit. The design process always combines the pursuit of functional goals with countless intuitive, even irrational decisions. The functional requirements — the house needs a bathroom, the headlines have to be legible, the toothbrush has to fit in your mouth — are concrete and often measurable. The intuitive decisions, on the other hand, are more or less beyond honest explanation. These might be: I just like to set my headlines in Bodoni, or I just like to make my products blobby, or I just like to cover my buildings in gridded white porcelain panels. In discussing design work with their clients, designers are direct about the functional parts of their solutions and obfuscate like mad about the intuitive parts, having learned early on that telling the simple truth — “I don’t know, I just like it that way” — simply won’t do.

So into this vacuum rushes the bullshit: theories about the symbolic qualities of colors or typefaces; unprovable claims about the historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard-headed business goals. As [Harry G.] Frankfurt points out, it’s beside the point whether bullshit is true or false: “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” There must only be the desire to conceal one’s private intentions in the service of a larger goal: getting your client it to do it the way you like it.

“I don’t know, I just like it that way” is such a tricky part of craft.

Another good post from Roger Wong thinking through Anthropic’s findings on how offloading coding effort leads to understanding less:

So the AI group didn’t finish meaningfully faster, but they understood meaningfully less. And the biggest gap was in debugging—the ability to recognize when code is wrong and figure out why. That’s the exact skill you need most when your job is to oversee AI-generated output.

Inside it, a quote from the Anthropic post that resonated with me:

Cognitive effort—and even getting painfully stuck—is likely important for fostering mastery.

I wonder if part of the appeal of AI tools is the promise of “exercise without exercise,” like the vibrating belt machines of the 1950s.

Elsewhere, I found an essay about the craft of writing by Kristie de Garis:

Writing at speed privileges what arrives first. The obvious phrasing, the familiar structure, a thought that you heard somewhere before.

Also this:

A book is not retrieved fully formed from memory, or pulled up in a full bucket from some deep creative well in your body.

The old saying goes “everyone dreams about having written a book, not about writing one.” Now we’re building software that allows people to “have written a book” and “have designed something.”

I am open (I think!) to the idea that the nature of the effort will change as tools change. But I can’t see mastery arriving without effort. And I’m worried people will start mistaking prompting mastery for material mastery.

I read Mike Monteiro’s book of pre-pandemic essays called The collected angers. The book has less to do with the subject of this blog, but I grabbed a few quotes that resonated with me and seemed relevant.

In order not to make it too reductive, I’m also linking to the original essays for those who want to follow up:

The worst feedback you can get from a client is “Wow. It looks like you worked really hard on this!” Stop using your work like a time card. If you did it right, it looks like it was effortless. It looks like it’s always existed. And the client will probably be irritated that they paid you for 30 hours of work to do something that looks like it took an hour. Which it did. They’re just not seeing the 29 hours of bad design that got you to that one hour of good design. And for the love of god, please don’t show them those 29 hours of bad design. A presentation is a shitty place for a sausage-making demonstration, and you’ll just come across as a defensive, unsure person needing validation.

—from 13 ways designers screw up client presentations. This sounds like a version of “My kid could’ve painted that” argument.

Learn how to steal. Be aware of your history. Design is the oldest profession in the world. You’re not the first person to tackle whatever design problem you’re tackling. See how others tackled it. Take the best solutions you find and improve on them. Don’t burn time solving things from scratch. Make use of what others have learned.

—from 10 things you need to learn in design school if you’re tired of wasting your money

The world needs fixing, not disrupting.

—from 8 reasons to turn down that startup job

And:

“The way you get a better world is, you don’t put up with substandard anything.”—Joe Strummer

I’m strangely conflicted about sharing this post about taste from Roger Wong:

Sensitivity is how finely you perceive—noticing friction, asking why a screen exists, catching the moment something feels wrong. Standards are your internal reference system for what “good” actually looks like. Both can be trained.

The post is great and I nodded all the way through. But I found the linked Medium post very hard to parse – like it was written by AI for LinkedIn – and I haven’t yet opened Rick Rubin’s relatively famous book quoted inside because I am worrying it might be too pretentious.

So, perhaps I can offer a rare caveated endorsement: click on Roger Wong’s post, but not sure it’s worth clicking further.

From Jeff Veen:

It reinforces my belief that teams need a culture that values attention to detail when building products. Tiny annoyances so often get neglected as we rush to ship, but the consequences accumulate, souring the whole brand. It’s not a long journey from “Ugh, these AirTags…” to “Apple has lost their way…”

But in my experience, those rough edges seldom go unnoticed by someone, somewhere, who was unable to stop the momentum of a product release for such an “insignificant” flaw. Or, even more consequentially, they did not feel it was safe to do so.

I want to quote so much of this essay, so I’m going to do just that.

I’ve always felt that culture is made of the accumulation of small acts of gracious leadership: acknowledging moments of bravery during a retro, teasing out a reticent comment during a product review, and on and on. It can come from other places too, but it is most effective when it comes from the top.

If you’re leading a team remember: Never criminalize pride in craft.