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• 2d
MUST READ, DESIGNERS: Apple just broke 19 years of UI dogma. Nobody's talking about it.
Everyone's stuck on the $1,999 price tag and the Touch ID downgrade. Fine, sure. But that's not the story if you actually design for a living. I spent last night cross-referencing the HIG diagrams instead of sleeping, and the real story is buried in there. This is the biggest interface shift since the Dynamic Island.
Here's what stood out.
The Dock just moved. 📱 Home Screen Dock. Tab bars. The Dynamic Island itself. All of them shift to a vertical side rail, on the outer screen and on the inner screen in landscape. Horizontal navigation has been gospel since 2007. Apple just quietly retired it. Every app that hardcodes a horizontal tab bar is about to break.
There's actual math behind the fold. Inner display, 1.42:1. Outer display, 1.45:1. Both modeled on ISO 216, the same ratio as A4 paper. Not an aesthetic flex. It's why content scales proportionally instead of breaking when you fold or unfold the thing. Root-two geometry, in your pocket.
The 1.42 problem is real. 77% more screen area than the iPhone 18 Pro. Sounds great until you play a 16:9 video and lose 20% of it to letterboxing anyway. Bigger canvas, same old aspect ratio fight. Nobody puts this in a keynote. It's going to define how the thing actually feels to use.
Transparency is now a variable. ✨ Liquid Glass ships with a user-controlled slider, from fully clear to fully tinted. Which means contrast accessibility now has to hold up across an entire opacity range, not just one frosted-glass default. That's a new QA category nobody's fully ready for.
Odd grids are officially a bug. 3 column and 5 column layouts straddle the hinge crease. Apple's mandating even-numbered grid columns at the OS level now. Your design system's grid just became a hardware constraint. Wild.
Foldables were never just "bigger screens." They're forcing a rethink of where navigation lives, how grids get built, even what "edge of the screen" means. Samsung patched around this problem. Apple built the fix into the OS itself.
If you're designing for iOS over the next 12 months, the vertical rail and the reserved-region grid rules aren't a footnote. They're the new baseline.
My bet: the vertical dock doesn't survive first contact with real users and gets walked back by 27.2. Curious who disagrees.
#ProductDesign #FoldableUX
• 2d
Sources for this one 👇
📖 Apple Newsroom — iPhone Duo unveiled, full specs and features: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/
📖 Apple — iPhone Duo Technical Specifications: https://www.apple.com/iphone-duo/specs/
📖 Apple Developer — "Strike a pose with adaptive layouts on iPhone Duo"...
apple.com
Newsroom
The official source for news about Apple, from Apple. Read press releases, get updates, watch video and download images.
The strongest insight here is treating fold/unfold as a responsive state, not just a resized canvas. The side-rail shift and near-continuous display ratios point to a much more intentional information architecture for dual-screen devices.
• 1d
Absolutely. The key shift is thinking about the fold/unfold interaction as a change in context, not simply screen size.
That’s where the information architecture and hierarchy really start to matter.
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Kogy — AI Companion Toy / UI/UX Design
Designed the landing page for Kogy — a plush, keychain-sized AI companion that learns, plays, and keeps you company throughout the day.
The tricky part with products like this: lean too techy and you lose the cuteness, lean too cute and it stops feeling like a real smart device. So instead of the usual soft-pastel illustration route, I let real hero-scale photography of the plush character carry the whole page — its actual texture, its little smile, its scale as a keychain — wrapped in bold, high-contrast orange and oversized type.
A small character-selector strip (Lumi, Mochi, Poppy) hints at collectibility, and a live scrolling stat ticker at the bottom (questions answered, active companions) keeps it grounded as a real AI device, not just a toy.
Genuinely one of the more fun briefs I've worked on.
The live stat ticker (questions answered, active companions) is what sells the AI-device framing here, not the photography — a plush toy with a counter reads as a running system, not a static product shot.
pretty simple and clean, looks good