Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines have been the core of the company’s design philosophy ever since the Macintosh in 1978. Apple design evangelist Mike Stern gave an overview of the ever-evolving guidelines during a Wednesday session at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
The session, entitled “Essential Design Principles,” is one of my favorites, in large part because I’m a designer myself. I’ve distilled the essential Apple design principles he talked about in the sketchnotes above.
But is this Apple back at its best, or do we need more out of Cupertino? Are fancy software updates enough to breathe new life into boring hardware? Is Apple’s new push into virtual reality and machine learning too little, too late?