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'Halide' Co-Founder Sebastiaan de With Joins Apple's Design Team

This is spectacular news. He is a world- class designer. As others appointed out, this could not come a moment too soon as the design of the new icons, make your dock so ugly I cannot believe it to say nothing of all the other terrible design decisions in the 26 family of updates. Here’s to hoping that they fix it quickly.
 
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Eric_WVGG said:
de With is a brilliant designer, and also a quality thinker and writer.

In this blog post, he writes about the evolution of Apple UI since Mac OS X Tiger, the Flat Design™ era, and his post-WWDC impressions of (as he put it) "living glass." (spoiler: he was very critical of Ives-era non-obvious-buttons, and saw glass as a necessary new direction)

I think overall his optimism has not panned out, but he exhibits the kind of critical thinking that the actual designers of Liquid Glass were missing.

This is outstanding news for Apple.

[edit] interview with Jon Gruber re: Halide
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SDW is very smart and very capable, and has a respect for the past/historical designs at Apple.

He was also wise enough to not make the same mistake that Eli Schiff did, which was tell too much truth and hold incompetent people's feet to the fire. They can't take the criticism, yet somehow remained buoyed in their career fields and had power to destroy dissenters.
 
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IceCool said:
As a designer this makes me very happy.

I believe that Apple sees their design language cracking and is now truly attempting to reign it back in. With Alan Dye gone, Steve Lemay in, and now Sebastiaan de With... I am looking very forward to the future of Apple design.
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100%

I almost forgot Apple has all the designers using its products... getting some of these creatives to fix the liquid glass mess is a great, great sign. Wonderful!!
 
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ZeroInspo said:
Also before Liquid Glass came out he wrote that essay on what he imagined the UI would look like and his mockups are 1000x better than the crap Apple put out. I wasn’t expecting the real thing to be that good, mockups are one thing and a real UI is another, but I was so disappointed that the interface was not even close to what he envisioned. Hopefully he gets the chance to realize that vision now.

Hopefully he starts with MacOS which sorely needs it more than any of the other platforms.
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1000%. I posted a link to his essay from the Halide blog about his concept of LG a couple of months ago. It's really excellent and gives me hope for a LG reset. He refers to it as Living Glass. The essay is a really nice survey of Apple's UI design and culminates in his guess of what LG could be. Definitely worth a read.https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/
 
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Eric_WVGG said:
In this blog post, he writes about the evolution of Apple UI since Mac OS X Tiger, the Flat Design™ era, and his post-WWDC impressions of (as he put it) "living glass."
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It was actually pre-WWDC and although he basically predicted Liquid Glass, seemingly he hadn't actually seen it firsthand (although plenty of it was foreshadowed already).
 
This is good news. Hopefully he will have the influence to refine things enough so we can actually see what we're looking at (his buttons in his blog have way more clarity) and reduce the liquid blur to more of a frosted look again for clarity. The current 'light' i.e. white, appearance is currently almost pure white which means you cannot see any of the highlights that are meant create depth and clarity. The UI needs to take a step back from its current 'whiteness' so the highlights and shadow have more punch. This alone will improve things dramatically and de With knows that. 'Light appearance' for me currently is too blinding and the buttons are almost invisible; try it on a HDR screen and its migraine inducing!
 
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Not his biggest fan, I found him to be a massive fanboy sheep on twitter and glazed iPhone after iPhone like a massive brown nose.

Pretentious as well.

His renders were nicer than the official ones regarding iOS 26 tbs, now he's deleted them I wonder if we'll see it more refined in iOS 28.
 
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I wish him well and hope his brilliance is not smashed by corporate group think. I, too, enjoy Hallide and fear for its future.
 
ZeroInspo said:
Also before Liquid Glass came out he wrote that essay on what he imagined the UI would look like and his mockups are 1000x better than the crap Apple put out.
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That's not true! His mockup looks almost the same, and looks really horrible. He shares all the main priorities, overlaying UI over user content, transparency and light/color effects, and achieving a "dynamic, glassy look" (his quote).

Check out the reactions here, when he put out his mockups: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/04/ex-apple-designer-living-glass-ios-concepts/ Mostly negative, as you'd expect. So this is a bad omen for what Stephen Lemay might do next.

Some of De With's mockups are even less legible than real Liquid Glass. Like this one, look at the light gray text.
 

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