UI Designer Weekly

Note

UI Designer Weekly has a new look! Check out the newsletter online to see the new color palette.

I've been getting some great feedback that some of you are enjoying the explanations and the context with each design link. I am trying to figure out the balance of each issue, but, truly I am enjoying the practice of searching for these highlights of wonderful UI designs, capturing images of them, and describing what I thought was so interesting and good to know to mix into your own work.

I hope you've had an inspired week so far and spend the rest of the week making some breakthroughs in your design tasks. I know I'm hard at work trying to establish foundational decisions and trying to predict where this design will go with my product, DetailsPro (Basically a SwiftUI WYSIWYG design tool specifically for Apple designers). I feel like I've spent three days straight thinking through the same single question, but that's the fun part isn't it? Getting totally lost in the process of design, questioning, learning, and improving?

Keep going! Don't give up! Take breaks! Rest!

And see you for the next issue of UI Designer Weekly 😊

New Standards

Parallel Layout Making It Easy Between Platforms

Fitness data presented in a similar, leading-aligned vertical stack on both the Apple Watch and the iPhone. We see here a pleasant reminder that we can and should carry over the fun, unique, special pieces of our designs.

Workout on the Apple Watch has had this simple, clear arrangement of workout metrics for a long time. And even though the iPhone has many times more space, that doesn't necessarily mean or give us any reason to totally redesign how workout metrics should be shown.

We often may have the urge to totally redesign or rethink something, especially when the existing design (like the workout metrics) may have been designed with constraints that were different then than now (originally on the smaller Apple Watch face, now on the larger iPhone). Do the new constraints open up an opportunity to make the design significantly better? Would that introduce a new learning curve for people who are already comfortable with the existing design? How much do we value people's familiarity and comfort now? All great questions to ask yourself if you reach a point where one of your designs is about to move into a new territory.

Another Primary & Secondary Button Example

A primary button on Fitness+ filled with the vibrant tint color with a secondary button below with a light fill and tinted text. This design pairing has been showing up in more places (including Books, mentioned in a previous issue) so if you find yourself needing to display two buttons where one is more of a primary action, this is a system-popular way to do it.

Creative Presentation Highlights Apple Accessibility Features

I am as interested in presentations of designs and interfaces as I am in designs and interfaces themselves. It's the one thing to design a UI, another thing to communicate what it is and how others should feel about it. This new Accessibility highlights page excels at this.