So Microsoft released Fluent 2…

I’ll defer to this comment on Hacker News that sums it up nicely:

It’s too bad that Microsoft as an organization doesn’t care about good design. I don’t look at Satya Nadella and think of a man who has taste. And Microsoft doesn’t have a Chief Design Officer, as far as I know.

Instead, Microsoft has VPs. So there’s no one person at the helm saying, “This is the vision and where we’re heading.”

As a result, I suspect there are actual good designers at Microsoft trying to start movements from within, and those have bubbled up to what we see today as the progression of Microsoft’s design through Fluent from Metro and prior.

But because there’s no one at the helm, these efforts will always be isolated.

There will never be anyone saying, “Let’s carry these efforts across products and down to the UI.” “Let’s deprecate and discontinue all of these fragmented UI frameworks. Moving forward, Microsoft will only create UI using Fluent UI.”

Worse yet, even if someone tried, Microsoft has tried and failed again and again and again so why would you bother? It’s clear Microsoft’s UIs are shifting sand compared to Apple’s platforms or even Linux desktops!

As anyone who has worked in tech knows, Minimum Viable Product (MVP) solutions are the popular approach for launching new products. But after a decade of worth in in the industry, I think that releasing products in an MVP state to your customers is generally a mistake.

No customer wants to feel like they’re paying to use something incomplete. And releasing products in an unfinished, lacking state is problematic not only to your customers but the perception of your company as a whole.

You can really only make your first impression once, and you will be fighting an uphill battle to prove the value of your product the moment after you release it.

via Variety:

As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationallly. It’s only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Jurassic World Dominion” and “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

It is always remarkable reading through the reviews of films like this: super mid reviews, talk of plot holes, etc., yet they still manage to draw crowds in.

This disconnect between online noise and reality has really stopped being surprising at this point. You can see the same thing happen with major yearly releases of video games (Madden, FIFA, Call of Duty), where the reviewers will point out how the game is more of the same, does nothing special, isn’t worth the money, and yet those are always the top grossing games every year.

Just a small shout-out to News Minimalist, for giving me what I actually want out of a news aggregator: simple summaries of what happened today with the ability to see more.

Apple products have a remarkable tendency to survive the drops that seem like they would break them, only to completely shatter on a very minor looking fall. ⌚️

Verified is to Twitter as cosmeticstrim packageshats are to

How long until there is a Twitter cosmetic store?

User story as haiku ⛩️

Persona with needs,
Desires met by product’s deeds,
Joyful outcome, seeds.

Who is out there subscribing to individual news outlets? I struggle to think of a single publication that can justify the high cost when there are so many alternatives to read. Apple News+ offers access to multiple sources with just one subscription, but it begs the question: why aren’t there more options like this available?

via Tobias van Schneider:

Not all designers are artists. In fact, most designers aren’t artists and that’s perfectly fine. But the best designers are indeed artists. And that’s the difference. For the most talented, successful designers in the industry, art is the secret ingredient that takes their work to the next level.

This echoes my own feelings about recognizing the best designers.

Their approach to problem-solving is often rooted in their personal expression and creativity, and this humanity is apparent in their work. Artistry requires comfort in ambiguity, and those who are not confident in that space tend to rely solely on data to guide their decisions. This approach can result in underwhelming final products that lack the spark and personality of designs created by more intuitive and imaginative designers.