Wayland is a display protocol many Linux desktops use to coordinate how applications draw to the screen. Its “every frame is perfect” goal means users should see a complete, coherent image rather than partially updated output. Nikita Prokopov argues interface designers should hold transitions to the same standard:

A stated goal of Wayland is “every frame is perfect “.

And I think this is a goal we should all aspire to. Wayland is talking about the technical side of things (modern GPU stacks are very complex and Wayland is trying to take control back) but it could be applied to UI too.

His screenshot test belongs in design review. Stop the transition at arbitrary points and ask why each component is where it is.

Prokopov shows how a small mismatch becomes a larger trust problem:

Not the end of the world by any means, but it does create a feeling that these two components are not in sync with each other. Next thought: maybe they weren’t designed together? If so, then they might not work well together. That’s how trust is lost.

Motion can also tell the user something happened when it didn’t:

This creates a false feeling that something subtly changes when you switch between modes. And you know what? I don’t want my UI to give me false feelings. I want it to be a precise instrument, not an animated toy.

Marcin Wichary, author of Shift Happens and the Unsung essays on software craft, has been cataloging how software fails our hands for years. This new 7,700-word interactive essay has 38 live playgrounds that let you feel the argument in your fingers rather than just read about it.

Wichary’s central argument is that software keeps rediscovering a century of research into how hands actually work: overlapping keystrokes, motor memory, spring-loaded modes, dead zones. For designers, the lesson is that responsiveness at finger scale is not polish. When an interface blocks or delays the narrow timing window our hands rely on, it breaks motor memory and flow.

It turns out, fingers are time travellers. At any given moment, each one is living in a slightly different time – as one finger is moving down to press a key, another is already travelling to the next one, and your brain is thinking of a few keys in advance, visualizing your hands moving to the right place.

[…]

None of this requires touch typing. What we eventually called overlapping happens even if you reside at the awkward intersection of “hunt” and “peck.” Overlapping is a small miracle happening in front of your eyes, and it happens pretty much to everyone.

A capability of our hands and brains to treat our fingers relatively independently, and allow them to move at their own pace without waiting for other fingers (on the same hand) to finish.

The essay walks from 1960s terminal echo buffers through Chrome’s reload-button disabling trick to the moment iOS broke cardinal contracts of programming for the sake of scroll:

[…] competitors reportedly recorded the interactions with a high-speed camera to confirm they were, indeed, running at a constant 60fps.

[…]

iOS stopped running my code in the middle of a function just so it could go back to making sure scrolling was as smooth as possible. No modern programming language would ever dare interrupting your function halfway through; iOS was so dedicated to its user’s fingers that it broke cardinal contracts of programming.

That commitment, prioritizing fingers over execution contracts, is the standard Wichary is asking us to hold in design crits. He closes by turning delight away from decoration and toward restraint:

Sometimes they say that confidence is absence of confidence. […]

In a same way, I think often delight is absence of delight. In places and apps that welcome fast fingers, delight can be abstaining from a transition or something cute but deathly. Pushing for delight of the right kind can mean long fights with frameworks to reduce even one-frame delays…

The interactive format is fantastic. Experiencing painful buffers or re-experiencing how early Mac windows could be dragged around, makes the argument visceral in a way no static screenshot ever could. Start with the playgrounds; they make the timing failures impossible to unfeel.

Emil Kowalski, a design engineer at Linear, takes the case for designers who can articulate why a choice works one step further. Once you can explain it, you can hand the rule to an agent.

An engineer has never been more leveraged than today thanks to a fleet of agents. But when it comes to more visual work, like animations, coding agents don’t quite know what great feels like.

My way of getting there is to create a skill file for each aspect of the interface. If you know what great feels like, describe the rules, then give them to your agents so they can follow them.

Kowalski shows two animations side by side, one scaling from scale(0) and one from scale(0.95), and walks the reader from “this feels right” to a real-world reason why:

With enough experience, you can not only tell what feels better, but also why. By then you’ve not only built your taste, but also the ability to articulate it.

The correct animation below feels right, because it animates from a higher initial scale value. It makes the movement feel more gentle, natural, and elegant.

scale(0) on the left feels wrong because it looks like the element comes out of nowhere. A higher initial value resembles the real world more. Just like a balloon, even when deflated it has a visible shape, it never disappears completely.

This is what Ian Guisard at Uber does as a design systems lead: encoding expertise, writing agent skills, defining validation rules, deciding what “correct” means. Nick Babich’s piece on agentic product design covers what makes an agent an agent; Kowalski’s piece shows what an agent actually runs on.

That’s the why. There’s no magic involved. Almost every “taste” decision has a logical reason if you look close enough. This applies to any other discipline really.

Of course the more creative part of the job is still up to you, but the more you can package into a skill, the more leverage you can get out of your agents.

Really cool interactive playground by designer Braz De Pina to create and remix futuristic interfaces—you know, that stuff you see on sci-fi shows and movies.

If you are old enough to have watched Toy Story in theaters back in 1995, you may have noticed that the version streaming on Disney+ today doesn’t quite feel the same.

You see, Toy Story was an entirely digital artifact but it had to be distributed to movie theaters using the technology theaters had at the time—35mm film projectors. Therefore, every frame of the movie was recorded onto film.

Animation Obsessive explains:

Their system was fairly straightforward. Every frame of Toy Story’s negative was exposed, three times, in front of a CRT screen that displayed the movie. “Since all film and video images are composed of combinations of red, green and blue light, the frame is separated into its discrete red, green and blue elements,” noted the studio. Exposures, filtered through each color, were layered to create each frame.

It reportedly took nine hours to print 30 seconds of Toy Story. But it had to be done: it was the only way to screen the film.

The home video version of the movie was mastered from a 35mm print.

And then in 1999, A Bug’s Life became the very first digital-to-digital home video transfer. Pixar devised a method to go from their computers straight to DVD.

In the early 2000s, Disney/Pixar would redo the home video transfer for Toy Story using the same digital mastering technique. “And it wasn’t quite the same movie that viewers had seen in the ‘90s.”

“The colors are vivid and lifelike, [and] not a hint of grain or artifacts can be found,” raved one reviewer. It was a crisp, blazingly bright, digital image now — totally different from the softness, texture and deep, muted warmth of physical film, on which Toy Story was created to be seen.

And then digital transfers became the standard.

I will say that A-ha’s 1985 hit “Take On Me” and its accompanying video was incredibly influential on me as a kid. Listening to the struggles the band endured and the constant tuning of the song they did is very inspiring. In an episode of Song Exploder, Hrishikesh Hirway interviews Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, who originally wrote the bones of the song as a teenager, about the creative journey the band took to realize the version we know and love.

Hirway:

Okay, so you have spent the whole budget and then this version of the song comes out in 1984, and it flops. How were you able to convince anybody to give you another chance? Or maybe even more so, I’m curious, for your own sake: How were you able to feel like that wasn’t the end of the road for the song? Like, it had its chance, it didn’t happen, and that was that.

Waaktaar-Savoy:

Yeah, that’s the good thing about being young. You don’t feel, (chuckles) you know, you just sort of, brush it off your shoulders, you know. We were a hundred percent confident. We were like, there’s not a doubt in our minds.

…

…it took some time, you know, it was very touch and go. ‘Cause the, you know, they’ve spent this much money on the half-finished album. Are they gonna pour more money into it and risk losing more money? So, from Norway? Hey, no one comes from Norway and makes it. And so it was a risk for people.

Having gone to England from their native Norway, A-ha released two versions of the song in the UK before it became a hit in the US. With the help of the music video, of course.

A new record exec at the US arm of Warner Bros. took a liking to the band and the album, as Waaktaar-Savoy recalls:

And there was a new guy on the company, Jeff Ayeroff. He fell in love with the, the album and the song. And he had been keeping this one particular idea sort of in the back of his head. There was this art film called Commuter, with animation. So, he was the one who put together that with Steve Barron, who was the director.

And they made the video. And the song slowly climbed the charts to become a number one hit.

Nielsen Norman Group weighs in on iOS 26 Liquid Glass. Predictably, they don’t like it. Raluca Budiu:

With iOS 26, Apple seems to be leaning harder into visual design and decorative UI effects — but at what cost to usability? At first glance, the system looks fluid and modern. But try to use it, and soon those shimmering surfaces and animated controls start to get in the way.

I get it. Flat—or mostly flat—and static UI conforms to the heuristics. But honestly, it can get boring and homogenous quickly. Put the NNg microscope on any video game UI and it’ll be torn to shreds, despite gamers learning to adapt quickly.

I’ve had iOS 26 on my phone for just a couple of weeks. I continue to be delighted by the animations and effects. So far, nothing has hindered the usability for me. We’ll see what happens as more and more apps get translated.

Ian Dean, writing for Creative Bloq, revisits the impact the original TRON movie had on visual effects and the design industry. The film was not nominated for an Oscar for visual effects as the Academy’s members claimed that “using computers was ‘cheating.’” Little did they know it was only the beginning of a revolution.

More than four decades later, TRON still feels like a moment the film industry stopped and changed direction, just as it had done years earlier when Oz was colourised and Mary Poppins danced with animated animals.

Dean asks, now what about AI-powered visual effects? Runway and Sora are only the beginning.

I am a huge Severance fan (as evidenced by my Outie fact generator). Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the “Lumon Listens” animated sequence from the premiere of season two came together.

As a certified Star Wars geek, I love this TED talk from ILM’s Rob Bedrow. For the uninitiated, Industrial Light & Magic, or ILM, is the company that George Lucas founded to make all the special effects for the original and subsequent Star Wars films. The firm has been an award-winning pioneer in special and visual effects, responsible for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the liquid metal T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and the de-aging of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

The point Bedrow makes is simple: ILM creates technology in service of the storyteller, or creative.

I believe that we’re designed to be creative beings. It’s one of the most important things about us. That’s one of the reasons we appreciate and we just love it when we see technology and creativity working together. We see this on the motion control on the original “Star Wars” or on “Jurassic Park” with the CG dinosaurs for the first time. I think we just love it when we see creativity in action like this. Tech and creative working together. If we fast forward to 2020, we can see the latest real-time virtual production techniques. This was another creative innovation driven by a filmmaker. In this case, it’s Jon Favreau, and he had a vision for a giant Disney+ “Star Wars” series.

He later goes on to show a short film test made be a lone artist at ILM using an internal AI tool. It’s never-before-seen creatures that could exist in the Star Wars universe. I mean, for now they look like randomized versions of Earth animals and insects, but if you squint, you can see where the technology is headed.

Bedrow goes on…

Now the tech companies on their own, they don’t have the whole picture, right? They’re looking at a lot of different opportunities. We’re thinking about it from a filmmaking perspective. And storytellers, we need better artist-focused tools. Text prompts alone, they’re not great ways to make a movie. And it gets us excited to think about that future where we are going to be able to give artists these kinds of tools.

Again, artists—or designers, or even more broadly, professionals—need fine-grained control to adjust the output of AI.

Watch the whole thing. Instead of a doom and gloom take on AI, it’s an uplifting one that shows us what’s possible.