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About me and the blog

My name is Marcin Wichary. I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.

Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.

More info about Unsung

Send me feedback, tips, bug reports, and anything else:

More info about Unsung

“They did the bare minimum and moved on.”

Since the early 2000s, Mac OS X had a few orientations of icons depending on whether they were applications, files, utilities and so on:

In 2020, macOS Big Sur unified those styles and made them more iOS-like:

A few years later, Jim Nielsen revisited the icon “Big Sur-ification”, and showed examples of apps that did the transition really well, but also those where the transition felt… lazy, essentially shoving their previous icon into a roundrect.

For those, Nielsen proposes some alternatives that are delightful to see:

The Word/​Excel/PowerPoint/​Outlook explorations are particularly nicely done.