Jonas Downey
@jonas
Design Director @ Superhuman // Co-creator of Hello Weather. Ex-Figma, Twitter, and some other stuff. Puns always intended. he/him 🌐 🌞 @helloweather.com
I haven't talked much about this, but one of the gut-wrenching things about designing a weather app is thinking through various extremes and disasters. We designed these UI elements hoping that most people would never see them.
One of my favorite Internet pastimes is clicking NO on passive aggressive promotional upsells, to intentionally mess up the metrics for whatever dumb psychological conversion tricks the product team is trying to pull
sure, here you go! I don’t spend much time on the aesthetics of this, just try to keep it simple and low on distractions (except for Slack lol.)
Modern software needs more stuff like this. Adding a small, superfluous human touch in a few places goes such a long way. (The original Mac OS had this sort of personal character scattered all over the place, but it's been gradually squeezed out over the years.)
Small personal news: a few weeks ago I started a new job at Superhuman, as the head of design for Superhuman Mail. Had a truly wonderful time at Figma, but have been feeling the itch to try something new. Excited to work on communication tools again (it's my happy place)
We ended up running with the button-tab pattern for @helloweather.com, but used a location pin icon (to indicate "Location search") instead of a search icon. Still not convinced that was the best call, but we kinda tried to split the difference.
Hello Weather is the app of the day all over the world today! Amazing to see this rolling out globally 🥹 apps.apple.com/us/story/id1...
just started thinking about the film Metropolis for totally no reason at all
This new option (in iOS 26.1 beta 4) is dramatically better for everything and should be the default.
we put a small homage to Mac OS 8 into the new Hello Weather, and I really hope Apple is cool with it, because I love it so much
trying out a new approach for visualizing all the little stuff I do as a manager
These ultra-translucent interfaces rarely work well as a system, because the transparency introduces way more problems than it solves. It’s form over function. I’d bet that a lot of this liquid glass stuff will end up more like semi-opaque-frosted-glass in the end. But it looks cool as a demo!
ohh I love this! Not to mention some particularly great people who created it
one of the many things I love about Chicago is that it's the funniest city
sometimes I wonder what digital interfaces would look like if they degraded from usage, like physical interfaces do. for example: imagine how many millions of times the Home button in this app is tapped every single day. It would look like this: