Designing for Transparent Screens
SMRTR summary
Forget everything you know about black meaning black — when designing interfaces for AI glasses, "black" suddenly means transparent. Google's Senior Visual Designer David Allin Reese reveals how his team has spent over a decade wrestling with the peculiar challenge of layering digital interfaces onto the chaotic, boundless reality we see through our eyes.
Unlike traditional design that starts with a neat container or screen to fill, AI glasses thrust designers into a world where that vibrant phone color vanishes against a bright blue sky, common fonts become unreadable, and animations can shift from subtle to overwhelming in milliseconds.
Through their work on Jetpack Compose Glimmer, Google's new design system for Android extended reality experiences, designers are fundamentally rethinking how color, typography, and shadows behave in this counterintuitive medium.
The ultimate goal? Creating what Reese calls a "truly ambient display" that appears precisely when needed and gracefully disappears when it doesn't, harmonizing with rather than competing against our lived reality.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Hacker News.
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