One ongoing challenge for Orbit's art direction has been to simultaneously create a strong identity with clear separation the Spockian vibe typical for this space… while not standing out too much in the context of a host publication. Slowly annealing my way there…

In rotation…

Twitter, lend me your eyes: I'm lost in the trees! My brain reads this button sequence (Remembered; Forgotten) as "clearly backwards and wrong." Is that just my dumb muscle memory? Is there any good reason these should be the other way?

Orbit's palette tries to evoke the lush optimism of retrofuturist graphic design. Part of creating separation from existing Spockian memory systems. Making that work in an interface has been… tricky. Many, many iterations later, it's slowly starting to cohere.

One design element I’ve been iterating on is a variable type hierarchy. Prompts often have very short questions/answers, which look shrimpy and strange if presented the same as long text. So we choose from five type scales.

Much progress! Reaching out to some early authors to let them know that Orbit's now ready for to use in published work. Now for the next hard part: writing something meaningful with it.

Orbit is now open-source! github.com/andymatuschak/…

I've been working on a "notebook"-style interface for writing and editing collections of prompts, inspired by the fluid interactions of outline editors. Iterating around the tension between a continuous textual canvas and the need to delimit persistent entities with identity.

(trying/failing to contend with the scenario of displaying a list of prompts which have heterogenous colors) Reminds me of a (correct) comment Jony once made about some of my work: "a little… carnival, don't you think?"

Continuing to iterate on a list architecture inspired by textual "to-do" lists, while delimiting identity, "front/back". Two somewhat promising structures emerging… 1. Inspired by source editors, gutter delimiters. 2. Status indicators as identity/delimiter.

I spent the last week or so trying to create a continuous textual canvas for Orbit's list editor, so that you can move and select freely across prompt boundaries as if it were a "normal" text editor. Doable, I think, but just too painful to implement. I give up for now!

An unusual positive report: adding Apple Silicon support to Orbit's React Native-based macOS Catalyst app took… no work at all. Just a recompilation. Everything worked perfectly on the first try. Baffling!

Pretty funny what a modern iOS/macOS icon set looks like. That's a lot of variants!

Tough to negotiate the macOS house icon form (slightly rounded 3D tablet, hence slight diffuse gradient) with Orbit's art direction as highly graphic, poster-like (hence flat). Still, the general balance is working for me.

There's something comforting about iteration sprawl—your current design may be bad, but look how bad your ideas were last week, and the week before that!

Mnemonic PDF viewer, with per-section reviews and "peek" interaction to re-read source text when you don't understand an answer. loom.com/share/32bbc8ce…