My mom was there too.

She had joined me on a trip to Japan after I was invited to speak at the inaugural Tokyo Design Forum. She wanted to see the country, and I thought it might be fun for her to experience this strange little world I spend so much time in.

During the trip I realized I hadn’t travelled alone with my mom since I was five years old.

I didn’t have many concerns about bringing her, but I was still surprised by how it all went. She met a whole group of wonderful people from all over the world. She attended the panel I spoke on, practiced her English while tasting sake at an izakaya, and yes, she came along to karaoke.

In many ways, she was with me at work, much like I had been with her when I was growing up.

Watching her interact with everyone gave me a strange outside perspective on something I’ve spent much of my adult life doing: traveling to conferences.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve gone from the freezing Arctic to the busy streets of Shibuya to participate in two very different events.

Something new is happening.

Why Conferences Matter

In an era where nearly all information is available online, it’s reasonable to ask whether in-person conferences still matter? Talks can be recorded, tutorials can be watched on YouTube and communities exist year-round on Discord, Slack and social media.

Moving yourself physically thousands of kilometers to spend a few days listening to talks and talking to strangers might not seem worth the cost, time and effort.

You can run a business, grow an audience and connect with people online.

Covid almost destroyed conferences and now it seems like knowledge is just a prompt away. So why are we seeing an increase in smaller conferences?

The Return of Small Conferences

It is increasingly clear to me that in a world that is always on, temporary shared experiences are rare.

A conference is one of the few places where a scattered online community briefly becomes real.

There’s a realness that comes from meeting your peers face to face. All of the fluff that so often surrounds online discourse falls away. There is no hype, just passion. No engagement hook, just curiosity.

Instead of making followers, you make friends.

I touched upon this last year when I wrote The Power of Community. But the past few weeks made the idea much clearer to me.

Just days before arriving in Tokyo, I was standing in the cold in Oulu, Finland, at Arctic Conference. A group of developers had gathered for the northernmost developer conference in the world, and I was invited to give an all new talk there.

It could not have been more different from Shibuya. And yet, it felt exactly the same.

People travelled long distances to be there. Not just for the talks, but for everything around them. The conversations. The shared experiences. The feeling of being part of something, even if only for a few days.

Then I saw it again in Tokyo.

Different city. Different industry. Same pattern.

I have seen it happen several times in the past few years, but back to back in two different industries made me finally realize that these aren’t isolated cases of talented organizers making great events. They’re the response to something that’s happening around us.

We’re living through one of the biggest technological transitions humanity has ever faced.

The uncertainty of where we are headed, and the speed at which we are getting there, makes people ask questions.

These conversations happen online, but the environment in fragmented communities on platforms that are designed for reach often produce more anxiety than closure.

For all the good online communities have done to our careers, I believe people crave something real. Something they cannot experience in a feed.

What we need is not more information. What we need is perspective.

Small events optimize for this. Fewer people. More conversations. Less noise. More signal. Perspective is hard to get through a screen. It is easier in a room.

We are seeing more conferences because in a fast-moving, always-online world, people crave real-world connection and shared experiences that digital spaces cannot provide.

The Conference Playbook

Seeing this pattern so clearly made me start writing some of these observations down.

Originally I thought this would just be another flarup.email post, but as I started writing I realized I had more to say than would fit in a single article. Fifteen years and more than a hundred talks at conferences across different industries start to leave a mark.

I started collecting those thoughts in a living document I call The Conference Playbook.

It’s an attempt to put words to what makes a good conference, in the hopes that we will get more of them. It’s a long read, but if you’re curious (or if you make events) you can read it below.

Watching my mom experience all of this made it even more clear.

She did not care about the talks or the lineup.

She saw something much simpler.

People coming together to make sense of the same things. To make friends.

That is why we’re seeing more conferences.

Because we’re all looking beyond our feeds for something that feels real.

It’s been a year of sustained work on the biggest gamble of my career, running alongside a high output of freelance work, pixels, and words.

With this instalment, that makes nine years of yearly recaps. (You can watch all of them here).

Here’s some TL;DW highlights from 2025:

• We ran the first three alpha waves of Dinolords and started testing with players at scale.

• I gave the opening keynote at Deep Dish Swift and taught at Creative Pro Week in Arizona.

• I designed and shipped a large body of freelance work, including dozens of app icons and several logos.

• I wrote more on flarup.email

• Dinolords was featured on the cover of PC Gamer with a 10-page in-magazine feature.

Seen all together like this, it’s clear how much of the year was shaped around one long-term bet: Dinolords.
There was plenty of freelance work, speaking, and writing along the way, and the year was packed with experiences. But at its core, 2025 was about committing to something ambitious and seeing it start to take real shape.

Thank you for following along, whether it’s been for one year or all nine.

I hope this recap is useful to anyone navigating long projects and uncertain bets of their own.

Sincerely,
Michael

Damn. Rendering error. We’ll have to restart the process.

The announcement is ready to go. We’re just missing the trailer!

Outside the window, the rural countryside of Japan whooshes by while slack tries to reconnect.

Has anyone ever delivered a video game trailer from the Shinkansen?

The team back home has been on an all-nighter putting the finishing touches on the 1 minute and 45 seconds of brand new gameplay footage that will help us announce the upcoming closed alpha for our game, Dinolords.

This game director has been feeding them comments in a flurry of increasing intensity over the last 24 hours.

It’s been a year since we last showed the game. This trailer is important.

Our publisher and press agency are ready to upload the video.

We just have to get it to them.

The internet crawls inside the metal tube hurtling 320 km/h through the mountains. At least the new screenshots made it to press.

We were meant to finish the trailer before my family trip to Japan. But recording scenes took longer than expected and suddenly I was in a Shinkansen with my wife and two kids, trying to remote-direct one of the most important videos of the project.

Time was up. The rendering finally went through back home, and the video was making its way onto a server.

I’m coordinating between Northplay, our video editor at Arkaden, our PR agency SwipeRight, and our publisher Ghost Ship. Links are exchanged.

With 50 minutes left to go, our publisher has the video unlisted on YouTube.

We made it.

We arrived in Osaka exhausted. The video was live, and a few articles had come out featuring our announcement. However, the trailer wasn’t performing.

After a quick Konbini run, I pored over engagement data to figure out why. We A/B tested some thumbnails and seeded some conversations on Reddit hoping it would pick up.

It did.

The Aftermath

As of this writing, the trailer has been viewed 141,000+ times on YouTube (many more times natively on Reddit and elsewhere). It’s twice the record set by our teaser trailer.

We’re approaching 20,000 signups for the closed alpha and Dinolords has crossed 100,000 wishlists on Steam and entered the top 400 most wishlisted games.

This is good.

The rest of our Japan trip was luckily a lot less work-intensive and I’m now back with the team for the final push toward closed alpha. We recently released another video, a deeper dive into what we’re trying to build:

If you haven’t already, I’d love for you to wishlist the game on Steam— and if you want to help test out an early build of the game, you can sign up for the playtest on the steam store page for a chance to become a tester.

We’ll open up tests in waves, and there will be several between now and early access next year.

It’s all kind of absurd. Directing a major trailer launch from a train speeding through the Japanese countryside. But in the moment, it was just another reminder that creative work rarely unfolds in perfect conditions. You just find a way.

I’m lucky to work with some incredibly talented people who make all of this possible.

The train kept moving. So did we.

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Eleven years ago I sat in an Airbnb in San Diego, journaling my thoughts from the week. I had just finished one of my first international talks at Valio Con, a small boutique conference by the beach organised by designer (and comedian) Drew Wilson.

I was eager to return across the Atlantic to my four-month-old baby boy, but also overwhelmed with gratitude. I had spent days with legendary designers and developers I had followed online for years, and the chance to share a stage with them felt surreal.

Looking back at that journal now, it’s clear to me that this trip was a starting point for what would turn into a wonderful part of my career. Giving talks at conferences and traveling the world to connect with an ever-growing collection of amazing humans.

Last week I landed in Copenhagen after 4 days at another Valio Con. My baby boy is now 11 years old and showing me memes on the internet. 6-7.

We’d acquired a few more grey hairs, but in just 96 hours it was clear to me that the spirit of community exploded back into being at that beach hotel in Oceanside.

In fact, I have been meaning to write about this for some time.

With the decline of online design communities and ever-fragmented social media bubbles. The drama of Design Twitter™. The cultural shift from sharing fallible work in progress to the perfectly curated portfolios.

We lost something.

There was a rawness to the early web that has been optimised away. Between phpBB forums, design platforms and 2010s era twitter there existed a sense of community. An authenticity in how we shared our work with all of its quirks.

It pains me to see new creators having to find their voice in the hyper-optimised storm of modern algorithms. We’ve never had more people designing things, yet I feel we’re more disconnected than ever.

I’m sure there are many ways to fix this. But one of the most effective ways to create a more coherent and authentic community is simply to get people together. Nothing quite unravels the mysticism of the internet as sharing breakfast, listening to the same talks and having conversations face to face.

Design conferences have unfortunately largely gone extinct. Valio Con and a few others are lone beacons at the shores of the unruly sea. Interestingly enough, developers, particularly the iOS and macOS community, have been better at keeping these events alive. I have been lucky enough to speak at many such conferences and the community there is in much better health.

I think this is why Valio Con felt so special. Everyone came away with a magical glimpse into the camaraderie and sense of belonging that we could all have. I again met people that I have known online for 15+ years. OG Dribbblers. Fellow Turok fans. Rekindled friendships and made a bunch of new friends.

And let me tell you: Friendship is a powerful thing. It’s not just that it’s nice to put faces to avatars you’ve seen in your timeline. It’s making real connections and allies. If you meet people with an open mind, curiosity and kindness it will enrich your life in ways you can’t predict.

Curiously, this has happened the last two times I gave a talk: Someone raised their hand with a question afterwards and asked “if we could be friends“.

Hell yes we can be friends. I am here to make friends.

Together, friends make a community. And community is what we need to strengthen our sense of belonging and connect with the work we do. Community is the medium through which we teach, learn, and better ourselves. Community helps us weather any storm and navigate what’s ahead.

At Valio Con we had incredible conversations on our shared future with AI. How it’s already impacting the work we do and the tools at our disposal. We shared the many ways in which we are pursuing happiness in our work and our lives. We talked about the big questions of what type of society we want to live in. As a group of people designing experiences for millions of users, players and listeners these are worthwhile conversations to have outside of our respective companies. This is what a community is for.

The thing that struck me the most on my way home was how effortless it all felt. There is a reason why we’ve been drawn to each other’s work and words online. That reason becomes incredibly clear when you meet in person. It keeps surprising me how alike we all are, and yet how unique our stories unfold.

Eleven years on, I’m still learning the same lesson: community is the foundation on which everything else is built. It’s still here, waiting for us to gather around it. It’s the antidote to so much of what’s going on, and we need it more than ever.

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A few weeks before WWDC I wrote about the upcoming colourful and dimensional shift in interface design.

That post ended up on the front page of Hacker News and was read 87,000 times.

And then Apple announced Liquid Glass.

People tend to push back on visual change. With Liquid Glass, it’s important to separate knee-jerk reactions from real critique. Contrast, legibility, noise—these are valid, fixable issues. And over the past few weeks, Apple has begun addressing them in the developer betas.

It’ll be interesting to see how much gets resolved before the public release in September. (Remember: it took iOS 7 more than three major versions to iron out early flat design issues.)

Glass has been part of interfaces for decades. Aqua had gloss. Aero had translucency and blur. Liquid Glass feels like something else. It bends light, moves with content, and brings depth in a new way. It might look like we’ve been here before, but we haven’t.

It’s easy to dismiss Liquid Glass if you’re only looking at the surface. But this shift has been a long time coming. We need dynamic, dimensional systems that scale across screens, platforms, and spatial environments.

Future interfaces aren’t static. They’re layered, content- and context-aware. Eventually gracefully morphing with the environment in a mixed reality world.

People who only see the light bending into a prism flare along a refractive edge will lament the frivolousness of such nonsense visual flair. These people do not see where we are heading and how computing surfaces will have to adapt. To them, Liquid Glass is discarded as a useless gimmick.

People who don’t understand how modern GPUs work, complain about performance.

These effects are GPU-accelerated, composited in real time, and built into the OS rendering stack. If the beta feels slow, buggy, or battery-hungry, it’s not because of the design. It’s because early betas run extra diagnostics, lack performance tuning, and don’t yet have optimized power management. This happens every year, and it always gets better.

This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint. It’s a foundational shift toward a multiplatform future—one that will eventually extend into the real world.

I encourage people to watch “Meet Liquid Glass” from WWDC. There’s thoughtful, joyful vision underneath.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not.

New things rarely are.

Is there engagement to be mined in hating anything new from Apple? Absolutely. Through the noise, we’re left with considering all the nuances of how this new future will impact the surfaces around us and the work that we do.

Glass App Icons

Liquid Glass is going to have huge implications for app icon design. It’s just one area of this new paradigm, but one that is very close to my heart. The glass treatment is automatically applied to all apps across all platforms. Using the new Icon Composer, you can control the effect on layers, except the base. Every icon will rest on a pane of glass.

With iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS 26, icons are now, for the first time, shared between platforms. Liquid Glass is attempting a unification of the design language across all of these platforms (but curiously not VisionOS).

This also means that the Macintosh now shares the constraints of these other platforms. For the first time on the Mac, icons are imprisoned in Squircle Jail.

It ends a decades-long tradition of expressive, frame-breaking icon design, where transparency allowed for odd shapes, soft edges, and the occasional rebellious detail that reached beyond the grid. That era ends now.

To add insult to injury, the new Tahoe icons are mostly a downgrade. They are less clear, not as well crafted and arbitrarily restricted.

With Liquid Glass, iOS gains personality and macOS loses some of its soul.

While I mourn the loss of transparency and unique app icon shapes on the desktop, I also fear that applying a single visual effect consistently across a big system is problematic.

One of the reasons the new Tahoe icons can feel “blurry” is the uniform specular highlight applied across all layers. On lighter backgrounds, it reduces contrast and muddies detail.

In time, most of this can be fixed. But I have always seen the Macintosh as the bastion of great icon craftsmanship. It’s been driving a good chunk of my freelance career for 20 years and I wrote a book about it.

Now that heritage is being absorbed into a broader, unifying design language.

But design has always lived inside constraints.

It’s what we do with the canvas that matters.

There’s a certain aesthetic playfulness to Liquid Glass that is going to define this next era of visual design. And while I might disagree with some of the compromises they’ve had to make for it to span the platforms, I do celebrate the direction.

I’m excited for a more dynamic, tactile future of UI.

Let’s see what’s through the Liquid Glass.

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Those aren’t my words. They’re Brian Chesky’s, CEO of Airbnb, after what can only be described as a landmark redesign of the platform. A redesign full of whimsical, animated, 3D icons and warm, tactile surfaces.

It’s always hard to pinpoint when a paradigm shift happens. Usually, you only recognize it in hindsight. iOS 7 in 2013 was one. These past few weeks have felt like another. The pendulum is swinging again.

Some of us worked toward this shift for years, so I’ll just say it:

We’re so back.

I told you so.

But if we’re really entering a new era of visual design, we need better language for it.

Redefining Dimensional Design

I’ve never liked the word skeuomorphism. A skeuomorph is when something digital borrows the concept of something physical—like a trash can icon that looks like a real bin, or a book app that flips pages like paper. But over time, skeuomorphic became a catch-all for any design with depth, texture, or lighting—and that’s a mistake. A bin icon, even as a flat glyph, is still a skeuomorph. It’s metaphor, not material.

I’ve been looking for a better word.

Something that captures the dimensionality we’re beginning to see.

Lately, I’ve been using the word Diamorph.

It’s not meant to be a grand rebrand of design. A completely invented word. A working title for a style that embraces depth, texture, and light. Not to mimic the real world, but to create something that feels native to the screen. Something expressive. Playful.

Diamorph (adj.): dimensional design that embraces depth, light, texture, and hierarchy—native to the screen, expressive by intent.

Diamorphism (n.): a growing tendency toward intentional dimensionality—layered, tactile, digital-first, and full of character.

Maybe it sticks. Maybe it doesn’t. But it’s been helpful for me to give this shift a name while we figure out where it’s heading.

If skeuomorphic design is performative, and flat design is reductive, maybe Diamorph is something else entirely—less about illusion, more about belonging.

Whatever you call it, it’s clear something is shifting. We’ve felt it building for a while: Big Sur icons, the many -phism experiments, playful micro-interactions, richer lighting models—it’s been building in waves. But now it’s breaking through.

And with it, we finally get to move past the tired flat-vs-skeuo binary. It’s time to make space for something new.

I won’t be surprised if WWDC in a couple of weeks introduces some kind of material injection into the digital surfaces Apple controls.

How AI Is Accelerating Diamorph Design

There’s also an interesting side story here, one that might help fuel the adoption of this new paradigm—and yes, you guessed it: AI.

After Airbnb showed off their redesign, the internet exploded with soft, dimensional, highly detailed icon sets prompted into existence using generative AI tools.

Back in the early 2000s, UI design like this had a high skill ceiling. It took years to master lighting, materials, and depth. Now? That level of craft is often just a prompt away.

I could mourn that—or I could celebrate the fact that the style I’ve championed for years is finally within reach for everyone.

In the end, I’ve always worked toward more fun and playful interfaces—and I think we’re about to see a lot more of them.

It’s surprisingly easy to get solid results when generating dimensional icons with AI. These retro consoles I grew up with were created using ChatGPT image prompts, then lightly cleaned up in Photoshop.

I’ve been crafting this style by hand for nearly two decades. These aren’t perfect, but they’re hitting the “good enough” mark for many use cases.

AI handles materials, lighting, and color surprisingly well. Perspective, proportions, and consistency across a set? Still a challenge. Most require a bit of artifact cleanup and a sanity check. (No, that’s not how a controller connects to a SNES.)

But with transparent backgrounds and a bit of finesse, they’re usable. Sometimes even production-ready. At the very least, they’re a strong base for further refinement.

It lowers the barrier to entry for this kind of design. I did a quick mockup of a game-collecting macOS app using these icons.

Like a lot of other artists, I have mixed feelings about the process. But I’ve always been pragmatic about tools. And if I treat AI as just that: a tool, not a shortcut to the final result—then there’s still a lot of room for craft, taste, and care.

In an ideal world, AI is a creativity maximiser. It lowers the bar but raises the ceiling.

I still believe core design skills matter. Maybe more than ever. The fundamentals we learned by doing this by hand: composition, lighting, depth, taste, still apply.

Tools may change, but taste is hard to fake.

We’re standing at the edge of a new visual language: one that’s expressive, emotional, and unapologetically digital. Diamorphic design isn’t a throwback, and it’s not just decoration. It’s a step forward.

And with tools like AI lowering the barrier to entry, we’re about to see more people than ever join the conversation.

Whatever we call it (Diamorph or otherwise), I’m just glad to see interfaces getting weird and wonderful again. We’re not going back. We’re going forward—with depth, with texture, and maybe even with a little joy.

The future is colourful, dimensional—and it’s already happening.

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What started as a way to organize my thoughts has become something else entirely—part documentary, part diary, part creative inventory.

It’s a tradition now. Not because I have to, but because something meaningful happens when I sit down and look at the year behind me.

I just released this year’s video.

These videos take a lot of time and they don’t reach a massive audience. So why do I keep making them?

Part of it is for me—to remember what I’ve made, to find the red thread between projects, to learn from what worked and what didn’t.

But part of it is for anyone else who might recognize themselves in the chaos of it all. Especially fellow creatives, trying to chart their own course through messy, multidirectional careers.

Making a yearly recap forces clarity. It asks: What did you spend your time on? What are you proud of?

We’re always being nudged to look forward. New goals. New projects. A constant pressure to stay ahead and chase the next idea.

But retrospectives pull in the other direction.

They ask you to slow down and look back—to acknowledge the work already done, the energy already spent. That kind of reflection isn’t just healthy, it’s grounding. It reminds you that progress doesn’t always look like acceleration. Sometimes it looks like depth, or consistency, or simply showing up again and again.

The Arc of Eight Years

With 8 of these videos done, I begin to see the outlines of a shape. A kind of arc. Not planned, not always smooth, but undeniably there:

• The early years were about exploration—taking on different kinds of work, starting Northplay, and chasing ideas because they felt fun or important.

• The middle years were full of momentum—shipping books, launching games, growing a studio, speaking at conferences, juggling everything.

• The recent years have been more reflective. I’ve gotten better at saying no. At noticing when things are out of balance. I’ve traded a bit of spontaneity for direction.

I’ve gone from being a person who said yes to everything to someone who tries to build a shape around my time. Not always successfully. But that tension—between freedom and focus—has been at the heart of a lot of this.

Why you should try it too

You don’t need to make a big fancy video. A written post works too. Or a voice memo. Or a sketchbook page.

But once a year, take stock. Revisit what you made, what you loved, what challenged you. It’s hard to see your own story while you’re inside of it—but retrospectives help pull the camera back.

And you might be surprised by what emerges.

What felt scattered might start to connect. What felt small might turn out to be the beginning of something important.

I’ll admit it: I’m probably just sentimental about all of this.

But with every passing year, I feel time speeding up.

These videos are part of how I slow it down—how I hold on to something before it slips away.

Just like the photo books I make every year for my family, or the personal video journals I keep, or the vacation movies I put together—these recaps are another piece of the puzzle. Another way of saying: this happened.

If you’ve watched any of these over the years—thank you. I really mean that.

These videos aren’t milestones on some grand plan. They’re check-ins. Quiet markers along a winding path.

Maybe that’s all a recap is: a small act of generosity toward your past self. A way of saying: I see what you tried to do.

If you feel the same pull to remember, to reflect, to make sense of the past year—follow it. You don’t need an audience. Just a bit of time, and a willingness to look.

Sincerely,
Michael

Hey there!

Today’s my 41st birthday, and I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for reading flarup.email. Whether you’ve written to me, interacted on posts, or are quietly lurking and reading along—your support matters a lot. Every time I sit down to write, knowing there’s an audience like you makes it that much more rewarding.

My last post, The Death of Design, has passed 50,000 views—which kind of blows my mind.

That’s why I love this format. Email still feels personal—no algorithms, no noise—just a direct way to share with people who want to read along.

Speaking of reading along… if you’ve been enjoying flarup.email, and you think a friend might too, I’d love your help spreading the word.

Introducing Referrals (with Perks)

All I want for my birthday is for you to share flarup.email with a friend. If you enjoy reading, it would mean the world to me if you helped spread the word. In return, I’ve got some fun rewards lined up for you!

Here’s how it works:

1. Share flarup.email. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

Refer a friend

2. Earn rewards. When more friends use your referral link to subscribe, you’ll receive special benefits.

• Get The iOS App Icon eBook for 3 referrals

• Get The macOS App Icon eBook for 5 referrals

• Get App Icon Design Masterclass for 25 referrals

You’ll even show up on a little referral leaderboard Substack puts together (which I’ll be watching 👀).

Visit the leaderboard

Podcast Appearance

Talking Design (and Dinosaurs) on Slices

Ahead of my opening keynote at Deep Dish Swift later this month, I joined Kai and Malin for a chat on the Slices podcast. We talked about design, icons, Dinolords, and a bunch of the stuff I’ve been thinking about lately.

It was a really fun conversation—hope you enjoy it!

Listen below, or find it on Apple Podcasts / Spotify.

Catch you next time,
Michael

It didn’t go down well.

Dribbble helped grow careers. Now, designers can’t even link to a portfolio, a social handle, or an email address. It doesn’t just feel backwards—it feels like a philosophical betrayal of what made it great.

But if we’re being honest, this didn’t come out of nowhere. It feels like design communities have been fading for years.

Not because Dribbble sawed off the branch it sat on—but because design withered.

I started designing before visual design matured into the massive industry it is today. Before the proliferation of design tools. Before design became systemised at scale.

It was around 2008 or 2009. Photoshop was king. iOS had just launched. The App Store was exploding. Everything felt new, and no one really knew what they were doing—including me. But that was part of the magic.

We designed things just to see what they might look like. A calendar app, a music player, a weather app made of chrome and glass. Were they practical? Not always. But they were fun. And expressive. And strangely personal. We shared them on Dribbble, rebounded each other’s shots, iterated, and played.

I remember spending hours on the tiniest details of an interface element no one had asked for. Just… exploring. Pushing pixels for the sake of it. The tools I had didn’t dictate the results—and the community I found on Dribbble was open, curious, and encouraging.

In the early 2010’s, a new generation of designers was entering the scene—many of them coming out of design schools, trained with fresh tools and frameworks that reflected a more modern, streamlined industry. Job titles that had previously just been ‘designer’ multiplied into subcategories—UI designer, UX designer, product designer. Each with its own rules, processes, and expectations. The tools they used were faster, more specialized, and more focused on efficiency. But with that came a certain sameness. The more we streamlined the process, the more we streamlined the output. In a way, we designed ourselves into conformity.

Minimalism took over.

We stripped out the texture, the depth, the weird little quirks that made things interesting. Suddenly everything had to be flat, neutral, quiet. White space became the design. Personality took a backseat to consistency. And over time, the mess—the fun—was sanitized away.

And somewhere along the way, that kind of design—the playful, expressive, emotional kind—started to wither. It might sound dramatic to say it died—but in many ways, it did.

That spirit of design was pushed to the edges, quietly replaced by something more uniform, more predictable. Apps, websites, even branding, all started to look very similar.

To be clear, design has grown in meaningful ways. It’s more accessible, more collaborative, more inclusive than it used to be. We’ve built systems that help teams scale, ensured our work reaches more people, and embraced principles like accessibility and usability in ways the early design days didn’t always consider. That maturity matters. But in the process of growing up, we lost some of the rawness—some of the spirit that made design feel like a creative playground.

I feel incredibly lucky that I learned design in a time before the rules were written. It taught me to be curious, to take risks, to find meaning in the making. It showed me that design could be personal—that it could be play. And that play was more than enough.

I hope new designers find their own version of that freedom.

Dribbble closing itself off feels like a final, quiet confirmation of what many of us already knew: that something beautiful faded while we were busy optimising for efficiency. While we streamlined. Systematised. Professionalised.

But maybe that’s also the reminder we need.

That it’s on us to make space again—for weirdness, for personality, for joy. To choose tools that invite play. To build communities that spark creativity—not manage it.

Because if something beautiful really did die, then we owe it to ourselves—and to the next generation—to bring it back to life.

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Nice Things

• Excitedly waiting for my Analogue^3D.

• I’m kinda fascinated by the Vibe Coding Game Jam.

• Bitmap Books make some of the most visually stunning books on gaming history. I adore the ones I have and always follow their latest releases.

Thank you for reading.

I grudgingly created an account in 2006, fresh out of university. It was what you did if you wanted a job. It was what you did if you wanted to appear professional.

But I never really wanted a job. And "professional," in my mind, meant sleek suits and corporate jargon—none of which felt like me. The phrase “I’d like to add you to my professional network” sounded like satire.

I was a creative, trying to find my place. A maker. I spent my nights pushing pixels, building products, and figuring things out as I went.

Even as I landed deep in the startup world, I paid little attention to LinkedIn. I was busy doing. My work got me on television and in business publications. We built software that sold millions of units. We interviewed for Y Combinator. I worked with some of the biggest brands in the industry. I grew a Twitter following and built a personal brand in graphic design. I traveled the world as a speaker.

And yet, I never posted about any of it on LinkedIn. I’d log in maybe once a year, take a quick look around, and leave.

At the time, I saw LinkedIn as the worst of the corporate world—a place full of self-serving, performative behaviour. Beggars, posers, bad recruiters, self-proclaimed thought leaders. People jostling for position instead of doing anything worthwhile. I couldn’t imagine how it could offer me anything of value.

I was wrong.

I understood early on the value of growing an audience. But somehow, I failed to see the value of growing a businessnetwork. And I have to admit: it took me over a decade to appreciate something that, to most, is common sense.

Building a network isn’t about playing corporate games. It’s about finding allies. It’s about realizing you can’t do everything alone—that the right people and businesses can help you move faster, build better, and unlock opportunities you didn’t know existed. It’s about participating in the broader industry conversation, helping others win, and cultivating future victories together.

Looking back, every project I’ve worked on could have been enhanced—or even more successful—if I had taken this aspect of my career seriously.

So, consider this my begrudgingly late LinkedIn redemption arc. I’ll be posting more about my business journey, making connections, and—who knows—maybe even dropping the occasional unsolicited insight like a real thought leader. Feel free to follow along. Or connect. Or, you know, just silently judge from afar. I won’t hold it against you.

I'd like to add you to my...

Project Spotlight

I worked on a macOS and iOS app icon for Workbench. I really like the contrast between the pencil and the cutting mat. It’s also an interesting take on how a concept can span both desktop and mobile.

Sponsor

I've been thinking about ways to support this newsletter and I’d like to try and offer a limited sponsorship slot in each issue. If you've got a product, app or service you think my design-focused audience (~40k subscribers, ~25k opens per issue) would genuinely enjoy, this could be your chance to reach them in a meaningful way.

Each sponsorship includes an image, some friendly text, and a clear button to bring readers right to your door. Kinda like this section.

Buy a Sponsorship Slot

Nice Things

• Turn any logo or shape into Liquid Metal 🩶

• Listen to live Air Traffic Control with ambient music for perfect focus ✨

• Currently listening to Build by Tony Fadell

Thank you for reading.

A big part of why I moved away from app UI design was to escape the constraints. I wanted to work in an environment that allowed for more artfulness—where UI wasn’t just about efficiency but about expression. Game design, and especially game UI, is the perfect playground for that. It’s a space where interfaces don’t have to fade into the background. They can be rich, textured, full of personality, and deeply tied to the world they exist in.

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve always tried to skew my design work in this direction—pushing for more expressive, tactile, and immersive interfaces, even in places where it wasn’t always expected. This isn’t a sudden shift for me, but more of a natural progression toward what I’ve always been drawn to.

Working on Dinolords has been the most creatively freeing UI work I’ve done in a long time. It’s not about stripping things down to their barest form—it’s about building something expressive. Something that feels like it belongs in the world of the game. UI that tells a story just as much as the gameplay itself.

Interface design has long lived under the rule of minimalism. And sure, not every UI can (or should) be a battle-hardened medieval slab of stone, but I think it’s worth reminding people that we can do whatever we want. Even outside of game UI. We don’t have to follow the same playbook over and over. We can just make up stuff. Experiment. Push things in new directions. Design doesn’t have to fit into a neat, functional box—it can be expressive, weird, and full of personality.

I’m incredibly grateful to be working on something that reminds me why I love making things in the first place. And if there’s anything I can pass along, it’s this: chase the work that makes you feel something. Not just what’s expected.

Now, back to making buttons that feel like they belong in a medieval war room. 🔥

Sincerely,
Michael

Oh, and if you could throw a wishlist at us over on Steam, that would be absolutely incredible.

Wishlist Dinolords on Steam

As time passes and you keep at something long enough, it’s funny how the roles start to shift. At first, you’re the one soaking up advice and insights. Then, one day, people start asking you for your perspective. It’s a humbling feeling, honestly.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Mykyta Tanchuk and Sasha Kravchuk from MacPaw for a series of conversations that turned into a 6-part video series. We talked about everything from the early days of my design career to the lessons learned through failure and how I made the jump into game development.

It was a blast working through these topics with Mykyta and Sasha, and I hope you find something in these videos that resonates with you—whether you’re just starting out or have been at this for a while.

You can check out the first episode now, where we dive into how I find creative sparks in the most unexpected places.

Or you can watch all 6 episodes in this playlist. Looking forward to hearing what you think!

Cheers,
Michael

Use the code: BLACKBOOK for 25% off → flarup.shop

Ships worldwide (yes, shipping is expensive but safe and reliable). I think the book makes an excellent present for anyone into design & tech.

And no, The iOS App Icon Book isn’t on sale, because stock is now so low that I’m genuinely afraid that I’ll run out and I have no current plans on doing a reprint of any of the books.

Sincerely,
Michael

Last week I made the long and arduous journey to Logroño to speak at NS Spain— a small but important conference, deep in the valley of the Rioja region. With me I brought a 165-slide new talk that I barely had time to rehearse.

It’s a talk I’ve been thinking about since I wrote a thread about ‘40 things I learned as a creative entrepreneur’. This talk was the keynote version of that with some anecdotes from my own career.

I think it’s one of the best talks I have ever given.

If you have 30 minutes and need a little inspiration (and maybe a few laughs), then I’d love to hear what you think of it. It’s live on YouTube now.

I’ll leave you with a few shots of beautiful Spain and amazing humans.

I have been giving talks for 15 years, and I’m still incredibly humbled by how many people want to listen. Thank you for making this a part of my career!

🧃 Juice is $1 right now (down from $30): https://pixelresort.gumroad.com/l/juice

🪄 The App Icon Design Masterclass is just $49 (down from $249!)

Very limited slots: https://pixelresort.gumroad.com/l/masterclass

🛠️ The iOS 18 App Icon Template is just $29 right now (down from $49!)

Limited availability: https://pixelresort.gumroad.com/l/ios18appicon

📙 The digital editions of both the iOS & macOS App Icon Books are just $19 right now (down from $39)

Limited availability: https://pixelresort.gumroad.com/l/theiosappiconbook & https://pixelresort.gumroad.com/l/themacosappiconbook

📐 50% off at Apply Pixels

And finally use the code SUMMERSALE on applypixels.com to get 50% off any purchase, including subscriptions!

I hope you have a great summer.
Michael

I started freelancing in the early 2000's and quickly realised that I needed a website to call home. More than just a place to keep a contact form and more than just a collection of work— I needed something that tied together all the aspects of my ventures as a graphic designer.

I also needed a name. I was starting a business.

And so the first version of PixelResort was launched in 2007. Coded in HTML & CSS without any fancy templates or tools. It was a collection of freebie downloads and a small, but growing, portfolio of client work.

It's only when you get a portfolio on your own domain that you realise how important it is to have a place where you control the presentation of your work. The difference between sharing your art on external sites (like DeviantArt, Behance, Dribbble, Instagram and Twitter) and having it on your own domain is the difference between renting space in a gallery and owning one.

Since 2007 I have worked on several major revisions of the PixelResort website. They're little time capsules of how I saw myself as a designer at the time. They represented what I thought was important and how I wanted to present my work.

It's interesting that it took me 11 years to put my work on the front page. For the first 4 major iterations of PixelResort (2007-2016), the front page was reserved for a blog (and tropical branding). While I did occasionally write stuff on those blogs, it's telling that I thought of this site as an assembly of newsworthy things I was up to as a designer. A stream of updates that people might find interesting and revisit from time to time.

Maybe it's because PixelResort today more easily slots into a bigger set of activities in my career, but over the years, the role of this site has become much clearer.

Version 6

PixelResort is my one-man design studio. It has been for 18 years. The goal of this place is to serve as a window into the sort of graphic design that I enjoy doing. The type of work I present on my portfolio is the type of work I attract.

And so for this sixth (!) instalment, that is what I have been focused on: presenting work I enjoyed making. This is the largest collection of my work ever compiled, complete with independent pages for each project and supporting material, process shots, alternative renderings and videos.

I have tried to create project pages that would be interesting to explore. It has taken about a year, working on and off at odd hours, to put together. Even though it might not seem that way looking at the long project list, I have left a lot on the cutting floor.

Shoutout to Semplice for making this process bearable. Not sponsored, just a happy customer.

I have also tried to make it clear what type of outfit this is. How exactly clients should relate to my services and what I'm all about. I made a little video explainer.

My hope is that this new home for PixelResort better communicates the sort of work I enjoy doing and how I do it. I want it to feel accessible. Hopefully it'll serve as a funnel for new clients and interesting projects for years to come.

As most designers know, working on your own portfolio can be an agonising experience, but I’m relieved to finally have this new version out.

I’m proud of it.

Apple just introduced a bunch of new things we have to consider when making app icons: New sizes, native support for dark mode icons and a new user customisable tinted icon.

Particularly the new tinted icons have created a bit of controversy on design twitter. People are quick to judge, calling this new user personalisation a design abomination. My feed is full of designers up in arms with indignation.

I’ve always been a strong supporter of UI customization and I’m excited for this new era of OS-supported app icon alternates. Don’t get me wrong, I love icons and spend many hours on the ones I’m lucky to work on. But I want a future where users own the surfaces around them.

Personalization cannot be curated by the few. Let people play.

Instead of taste-making on what others do with their devices, we should rather celebrate that we just got two more deliverables to express ourselves. We can deliver cool looking dark mode alternates and I already have ideas on how variants could be optimised for tinting.

But, we need a new tool to support this so I just pushed out the biggest update to App Icon Template in 14 years. It now supports:

🌗 Light, dark, and tinted icon options
🎨 Tint & OS previews
🧰 Grids, Guides, Gradients & Folds
🪄 Auto-render all sizes

You can get the new template for Photoshop on Apply Pixels or Gumroad.

This took a complete rework of how this template works, but I'm really happy with how it now supports working on the 3 variants in the same document.

Each icon base has been extrapolated into linked .psb files, which also link to a separate OS-preview file, offering a much stronger workflow.

Tinting icons will be an interesting process, and we need proficient tools to approximate the appearance of our icons with this level of user customization.

Each .psb file is equipped with easy-to-use building blocks such as grids, guides, gradients, and folds for creating each type of icon.

Lastly, each of the three icons is automatically rendered into three separate folders with all the latest sizes, including the four new ones added in Xcode 14.

From now on, to take full advantage, every app icon will have to be submitted with their own dark and tinted variants and I’m here for it.

If you need help with a dark mode variant of your app icon, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Oh, and this year also marked another WWDC with some of my art featured on stage. Incredibly proud to have worked on Apple Design Award winner OKO App.

I hope you have a great week.

Sincerely,
Michael

We’re taking up a little too much space in the warehouse, so I’m doing something I haven’t done before: Putting The macOS App Icon Book on a limited sale. Let’s get some art out into the world.

Get 20% off the book with the code ‘DROP20’ on flarup.shop

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to add The macOS App Icon Book to your collection, then now is the time.

I hope you have a great day.

Sincerely,
Michael

We were anxiously watching the (first of its kind) Triple-I Showcase when the press coverage started rolling in. We had been planning and working towards this for weeks— and there it was. Our brand new trailer for our game Dinolords, among other fantastic indie titles from much bigger companies.

Take a look. I worked like crazy on this and I’m really proud of it.

‘Wishlists’ on Steam is really the most important metric when it comes to building and launching a successful PC game. Roughly 10-20% of all wishlists convert in week one sales. So this one number is a strong indicator of how viable a game might be at launch.

Steam’s algorithm also funnels more players to your store page when you have more wishlists.

If you’re a steam user, I’d really appreciate giving Dinolords a Wishlist and a Follow on the storepage here https://store.steampowered.com/app/2587620/Dinolords/

(I’ll keep saying this for the next year, so you might as well just do it 😂)

Dinolords is slated for early access release sometime next year, so we’ll have more press beats to hit and more wishlist milestones to reach (and a game to build!). But for now, I’m just really happy that the reception to this trailer has been this good. It validates what we’re working so hard on.

Here’s a late night shot I took when putting the finishing touches on the trailer. It was shot in-engine in Unity and cut in Final Cut Pro.

Sincerely,
Michael

I’m turning 40 today!

To celebrate, here’s 40 things I have learned being a creative entrepreneur.

1. Do what you think is fun.

Work can be difficult. Work can be hard. But it should always have an element of fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re not heading in the right direction.

2. You become what you work on.

The world has a tendency to feed you more of what you put into it, so make sure it’s something you like.

3. Creative work doesn’t follow a straight line from not-good to good.

For the majority of the process, the work looks like shit until it suddenly doesn’t. Don’t get discouraged by results that aren’t shaping up. It just hasn’t found its form yet.

4. Be opinionated about your work.

Try not to please everyone with the things you make. It’s your work. Make it reflect your taste.

5. Nothing is perfect.

Stop chasing perfect. Go for good and iterate on that.

6. Find inspiration in things you love.

Hobbies and passions are an incredibly powerful source of inspiration. It’s how we turn interests into side projects and side projects into businesses that are fun to work in.

7. Love things fiercely.

Being totally into something is admirable and a fantastic source of creative energy. Seek to expand the pool of things you love. It’ll broaden your horizon, fuel your curiosity and make connections that you can’t predict.

8. Impress your inner child (or your actual children).

Making things that the child version of you would find cool has been a surprisingly good guide for creative decisions in my life. Adults are just kids who forgot how to play.

9. Shrink the first step.

There is no perfect time to begin. If you can’t get started it’s because the first step has grown too big or too undefined for you to take. Shrink the first step into a smaller actionable task.

10. Productivity is a lifestyle, not a race.

Showing up everyday and moving the ball, even just a little, almost always wins out over bursts of burning the midnight oil. People overestimate what they can do with little time and underestimate what they can do with a long time.

11. You’re only as good as your tools allow you to be.

Human imagination is limitless but our tools aren’t. Design, development and productivity tools set constraints for what we can create. Choose your tools carefully.

12. Practise daily completable todo-lists

Todo-lists that never end is the source of burnout. Set yourself realistic goals that match the time you have available and allow yourself to ‘complete’ the day.

13. Not every day is a game day.

Creative juice and initiative ebbs and flows. Treating each day the same and expecting similar output is a recipe for disappointment. Work when you’re inspired. Take time away when you need it.

14. Exercise and good sleep will make you a better maker.

Taking care of yourself is one of the best investments you can make. Find your sources of energy and wield them as tools.

15. Own your time.

The world is ready to waste your time if you let it. Being the master of your schedule, the conductor of your distractions, is self-care.

16. In the beginning, quantity almost always wins over quality.

If you’re trying to grow a following or find clients you’re often best served with doing a lot of work and sharing as much as possible.

17. Make a lot of things.

To figure out what you love to do (and what you don’t), you have to try a lot of things. Instead of one big project, try making 10 smaller ones. You’ll learn more.

18. Sharing work is how you get more work.

In the creative business, the influx of new work comes from sharing your current work.

19. If you don’t have work to share, make up work.

If you don’t have work to share, then invent personal projects and share those.

20. Build a portfolio.

Be careful to rely too much on one social platform or network. Build a portfolio where you control the content and the experience.

21. Being busy is not the same as being productive.

Audit your busywork and relentlessly weed out tasks that aren’t getting you closer to your goals.

22. Say no to projects that don’t excite you.

Projects that you don’t love end up taking more away than they give. You’re exchanging time, attention and more exciting opportunities for something that your heart is not in.

23. Set clear expectations with clients.

It is your shop, not theirs. Let them know exactly what to expect. Prices, process, deadlines, terms. Be ready to say no when you’re not aligned. Good clients are ones you agree with.

24. If you have too much work, charge more.

Pricing is hard. Don’t shy away from experimenting with different rates and business models.

25. Freedom, not money, should be the goal.

Freedom of time. Freedom of creativity. The ability to work flexibly on something you love while living a fulfilling life is the goal. Money can be a tool in that process, but never the destination.

26. Plan for failure.

Most products don’t work out. Most games never make a profit. Hype with your heart but plan with your wallet.

27. Remember to be grateful

It’s easy to rush from one deadline or project to another. Always working towards the next thing on the horizon. Don’t forget to look back at how far you’ve come.

28. Anything worthwhile takes a lot of work.

You can work a lot on things that aren’t worthwhile, but nothing worthwhile comes without a lot of work.

29. The best way to get a job is to invent it.

If you want to work on something, chances are that there’s steps you can take right now to move closer to that work. Don’t wait for permission. Find the first step.

30. You don’t have to do everything yourself.

Surround yourself with people that augment your skillset. Collaborate. Delegate.

31. Find your community

It’s difficult to create good work in a vacuum. Seek out spaces to share, get feedback and learn.

32. Everyone struggles.

Making things is hard and everyone sails through their own personal sea of challenges and self-doubt. Don’t get dissuaded by seeing people share success. Most have shipwrecked many times.

33. People care way less than you think.

It’s easy to inflate our own sense of importance and the impact of our work. People are busy dealing with their own stuff and that fact should set you free.

34. Your sense of continuity and narrative online is overrated.

People have short memories and there’s no natural beginning and end to the stories we share online.

35. Avoid negativity

Nothing good ever comes from arguing with strangers on the internet. Learn how to gracefully disagree. Block and mute generously.

36. Making things is hard, being a critic is easy.

Hundreds of choices go into making things. Celebrate people who make. Ignore people who criticise.

37. Dare to dream big.

Modest dreams lead to modest results. Whatever the dream, the outcome can usually be improved by enlarging it.

38. Be ready to change your mind.

Firm opinions, loosely held is good advice. Creative work takes hundreds of little decisions and there’s no way you’re going to get all of them right.

39. Get comfortable with experimentation.

Long creative careers run the risk of getting stuck in certain types of projects or styles. Make it a point to break out of your comfort zone. Use new processes or tools to make your work, or try making something radically different.

40. This too shall pass.

Whatever you’re experiencing right now, success or failure, confidence or self-doubt. It’ll pass. It gets replaced with something else on this rollercoaster. Move on from the bad and cherish the good.

Thank you for reading. I hope you have a great day.

Sincerely,
Michael