The first half of Debbie Millman’s July 2023 interview with Alan Dye—Apple’s VP of Human Interface Design—is a gauzy look back at his career, before pivoting in the second half to his time at Apple. It reminded me that Dye started, not in user interface design, but in the world of glossy print, packaging, and brand marketing. He was initially hired onto Apple’s Marcom (Marketing Communications) team to work on iPod and iTunes marketing.

Liquid Glass is, as much as anything else, a branding exercise: it exists—at least in part—to differentiate Apple devices in print, web, and video marketing.

The back half (around the 30-minute mark) focuses more on Dye’s career at Apple, leading up to the introduction of Apple Vision Pro in June 2023. 

I was struck by this question:

Debbie Millman: You also started to expand your capabilities beyond branding and advertising. You created films, a cool paper line. You published little art books made by the individual designers in the studio that you then sold in the stores. And for those, you said that there were no boundaries, no brief and no restraints. So it gave the designers a chance to be challenged. Was that a terrifying experience? A designer with no rules?

I was hoping for an answer that acknowledged that there are always rules (of form, materials, engineering, time, etc.) even when none were stated. Instead, Dye gives a non-answer answer that sort of alludes to that but lacks real substance:

Well, rules are helpful, but I think everyone had their own set of passions. Everyone deeply understood kind of the ethos of Kate Spade and of Jack Spade and the kind of sense of humor and the irreverence. So I think because we were careful about who was in the studio, everybody contributed all these amazing ideas.

I got the sense Dye has a disdain for “rules,” relying instead on intuition and brand awareness.

The first version of Liquid Glass was a usability mess. Beautiful on a website and in videos, but not great in the real world. My understanding is that Dye (like Jony Ive before him) doesn’t have an “editor” to rein him in. He may well be operating without boundaries again. I wonder if that changes under Tim Cook—or gets worse?

(To be fair, beta 3 significantly improved legibility, at the expense of the flashier, glassier version showcased at WWDC.)

Later in the interview, Millman asks, “What does human interface design actually mean?”

So human interface design at Apple is really, our team is responsible for designing how everyone interacts with our products, the experience of using an Apple product. And so we could call it interaction design. We like human interface because that’s really what it’s all about, is how people interact with Apple products. So of course, a big part of that is how our products look and how they feel, and maybe what’s on the screen. But again, we don’t think about it at that level first. In other words, of course we care about how things look, how the interface looks, but we really are mostly focused on what our products do, first and foremost, how they work. And so the most amazing part about what it is that we do is that we not only define how a product works, but also what a product is and what it ought to do. And that’s a really privileged position to be in.

I understand he’s riffing on Steve Jobs’ quote that design is “not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works” (he touches on it a few moments earlier), and that, as designers, they look at the whole widget. But “and maybe what’s on the screen” is a hell of a thing to hear from the head of Apple’s user interface team.

Millman later asks about Dye’s involvement with the 2023 iOS 7 redesign, and what the “jump in disciplines and skills” (from graphic design to human interface design) was like:

When Jony and I took over design more holistically beyond just industrial design, but also software design, he had a really clear vision for where he wanted to take the software design, and that was to move away from the sort of more glossy 3D look and feel to something much more, I would say minimal. And so I had a great relationship with Jony. It was a very ambitious project to redesign an entire operating system in short order. So I came over and joined what was an exceptional team that was already off and running on this. Yeah, I was very lucky to be part of an amazing team.

And it was very much trial by fire because along the way, while I think I was bringing my point of view and my craft and my kind of graphic design skills to this amazing team, I was also very quickly learning about interaction design, how applications are designed, how we think about user experience at Apple. In a lot of ways, it was trial by fire, and I still had my day job […]

I was still doing the Marcom work for iPhone and the rest of it, but it was a really special time. And how lucky are we as designers that we get to learn, right?

And for me, this is a really steep learning curve, but it was an amazing time, and I learned a lot from that team.

Even though I was on the inside at the time, I wasn’t disclosed on the redesign. I remember hearing about Dye’s move over to the UI team, and the concerns expressed by several coworkers that a “marketing guy” was designing the UI. When I first saw iOS 7, I remember thinking it looked like a magazine print design.

Turns out I was right.

Main link is to the podcast’s home at PRX. It’s also available in Overcast (my podcast player of choice) and Apple Podcasts.

Quotes are from PRINT Magazine’s transcript. They haven’t been edited except to spell Jony Ive’s name correctly.