June 17, 2025

Issue #699: The best interfaces we never built

The hamburger-menu icon, Think like a designer, Liquid Glass, On shaping light, Boundaries for designers, A new MVC is emerging and more.

Free prototyping for UI/UX designers - Effortlessly transform Figma designs into dynamic prototypes - run multiple interactions, refine animations, and export React code. - Phase sponsored
The best interfaces we never built - Five fictional interface concepts that could reshape how humans and machines interact. - Christopher Butler
The hamburger-menu icon today - Hamburger menus are a more familiar pattern today than 10 years ago, but the same old best practices for hidden navigation still apply. - Kate Kaplan

Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.

Think like a designer - I believe more designers need to stop waiting for permission - and start shaping the companies they wish existed. - Andy Budd
Liquid Glass - With the launch of Liquid Glass in iOS 26, we are witnessing what appears to be the next evolution of Apple's interface system. - Hardik Pandya

On shaping light - Using post-processing as a gateway to more physically accurate 3D work on top of stylization in future work will be an interesting undertaking. - Maxime Heckel
Partial keyframes - Creating dynamic, composable CSS keyframe animations. - Joshua Comeau

Writing and walking - Walking is already a choice. Writing will become a choice. - Boris Müller
State-of-the-art prompting for AI agents - At first, prompting seemed to be a temporary workaround for getting the most out of large language models. But over time, it's become critical to the way we interact with AI. - Y Combinator

Exploring Figma's Dev Mode MCP server (Video) - A quick demo of using Figma's new Dev Mode MCP server. - Joey Banks
Introducing our Dev Mode MCP server - Design context is critical for going from design to code. - Jake Albaugh

Stay hungry, stay foolish - Marking the 20th anniversary of Steve's Stanford address. - Steve Jobs Archive