Hi friends! Here’s my quick video overview on the new changes in Mac OS and iOS announced at WWDC 2021. It’s in video form, as I think that’s the best way to quickly get through it and also show examples from the conference.

Watch it now

Non design things

Two non-design things were especially important to me. One is definitely privacy — which starts an outright war with data-driven companies living off advertising. Apple is taking no prisoners, and of course it’s all a marketing plot, but this time the user actually kind of wins (to some extent).

The other, is the possible death of…

I mostly write about design and achieving success in that field.

Moving the pixels / rectangles around is only a part of the story. There’s an often overlooked area, that is just as important to being great, as the rectangle-stacking skills of a productive designer.

Let me start you with this thought:

Morning routines are super important.

They’re what sets up your day for either a good run, or a bouncing failure — from one to the next. The routine shouldn’t be 100% set in stone — you should experiment and modify it. See what works and keep it, see what doesn’t and replace it.

…

I finally grouped all my free UI design tutorials into a single playlist. You can go through them one by one and discover some of my techniques and helpful tips to design better.

You can find the playlist here, starting with the first video on UI Hierarchy.

I also created a Twitter thread where every day I will write another tweet about another free UI video — why it’s good to learn it and what to focus on.

And if you haven’t make sure to Follow me on Twitter right now so you won’t miss it :)

This…

I went through the presentations, screenshots and videos of the new Android User Interface, and it’s quite an interesting departure from Material Design.

But why did Google release it now?

Let’s explore.

In my Aurora UI article from March of this year, I wrote:

I’d say it takes about 7 years for a design trend to start reversing (give or take). The wooden backgrounds and stitched leather of the first iPhone (2007) gave way to minimal designs of iOS 7 (2013), Material Design (2014), and 2020 started bringing the real world, organic inspirations right back.

What is Material You?

In case you haven’t heard — on…

I’ve done it! After 7 weeks I finally finished the entire Google UX Course at Coursera. I dedicated two days of every week to the course and did absolutely all the design assignments and quizzes.

I went in deep.

I wasn’t doing this course to get the certificate, or to find a job, and I didn’t expect to learn a lot from it either.

Why did I take it then?

My reason for it was simple. I teach design at a University and online, and education has become my primary job right now. Because Google had made a course and promised people a certificate, they raised…

As I’m nearing 16K followers here on Medium, I wanted to let you all know, that it’s not a one-way-communication. If you like what I write, you can always catch me on twitter:

www.twitter.com/michalmalewicz

And just DM me in case of any questions, ideas or general chit-chat. I try to respond to everyone, but it may take a while.

Important, if you want to ask me for feedback, please use Twitter DM for this — it makes it a lot easier to have it all in one place :)

And if you’re a junior designer…

I made an outline on how I can help you in…

tl;dr

As you probably already know, Figma is going to limit their free (Starter) plan on April 21st. If you’re unaware of all this, and you’re a Figma user, here’s what’s changing:

Remember how in late 2019 I wrote that first-ever Neumorphism article? The entire debate that started with over half a million readers divided the design community in half.

One half liked this idea of the New Skeuomorphism, as people are slowly getting bored with the current design trends. They wanted to explore it and see how it can be used (if at all).

But the louder, more aggressive group was the Accessibility advocates. Their concern? Neumorphism is NOT accessible. They wrote countless blog posts on just that one part, even when I clearly stated the biggest accessibility problem of that…