Issue 151

Rethinking materials in HDR

Hello, dear readers! 👋

In this issue, among other things:

• OpenAI bought John Ive's company

• What Google showed at the I/O 2025 conference

• A new AI designer who mimics the human approach to projects

• Almost two hundred examples of "social proof"

• All presentations from the Figma Config 2025 conference

• …and much more!

Enjoy reading!

🗞 News and articles

Designing for Lasting Impressions: The Peak‑End Rule

A review article about the psychological effect that has a strong effect on the impressions that people have after using the product.

The peak-end rule is a cognitive bias discovered by psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues in the 1990s. It says that people evaluate an experience based on its most intense moments, positive or negative, and its ending. Other aspects, including the duration of the experience and the exact sequence of events, usually don't matter much.

Rethinking Color Theory

Ruxandra Duru, co-author of the Color Moods service, talks on the Google Design blog about how to achieve a balance between rational and emotional when designing color palettes.

Google has released an update to its design system: Material 3 Expressive

Customization options have been expanded, bright contrasting color schemes have been added, and the animation of some elements has been made more expressive. Typography has also become more expressive through the use of variable fonts.

In words, everything looks nice and pleasant. Let's see if we can implement the update into the products so as not to increase the already overwhelming number of layout bugs.

Material 3 Design Kit is a Figma file with updated assets.

⚡️ Briefly

What exactly is HDR? A note about what "High Dynamic Range" is in photos, how it works, and why Apple doesn't allow it to be disabled.