New Standards
Potential, Captured in an Icon
Inspiring, fresh icons for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers in celebration of Big Sur. These designs brilliantly capture that combination of abstract (in the wall of rectangles behind the Keynote podium) and the literal (in the quotations with the selection box beside the Pages pen) that make up some of the most beautiful designs of our day.
The Cleanest Toolbar You Ever Saw
Balance, contrast, and padding sing in Maps on Big Sur. This toolbar and others greet Mac users in the new update. As designers looking at this, we can confirm quite a few things from this one example. First, we know a button just needs an icon to be a button. We also know to prioritize the line version of an icon and not the fill. We know to encourage light highlights in our designs, with rounded corners, on hover. We can see a new world of sizing, padding, and proximity on display. Icons feel bigger, spacier, and yet somehow closer together. And perhaps, more than ever, all of this puts renewed emphasis on our job to select the best icons for our designs and being aware of each icons use in other system designs.
A New Layout and Highlight (Thumb)Nails It
A simple, updated design for slide thumbnails in Keynote on Big Sur. Big, balanced, and the stars of the show at any size (the sidebar is resizable, as before, and it all truly works at any size). This is a great reminder to look at our designs again and again to find ways to bring out the elements that people want to see most.
Regular, It Was Always You
In Spotlight on Big Sur: proof that we don't always need to go to Medium; charmingly small but effective icons and previews; the paddings, roundings, and font sizes that call Big Sur home; the time-honored tradition of pairing secondary content with the secondary text color.
Rounding Third, Coming Home, It's... Menu!
When we dream about new designs, we dream that something may look beautiful and stunning and be so easy to use. And soon we feel just how beautiful, stunning, and easy to use a design really is. Only every so often do our design dreams come true in this way. Seeing menu items in Big Sur sporting side paddings and rounded corners feels like one of these dreams realized.
Walkthrough of a Scale Model of Control Center
A System Preferences area is dedicated to a walkthrough and customization of Control Center on Big Sur. You might expect for this sort of editing to exist only as direct manipulation on Control Center itself, but there's something to said for adding this option to System Preferences (where everybody has learned is where you change your settings) and for breaking it down into single screens for each Control Center element.