Studio Missive #3

August 1, 2025

Hi friends,

No crazy intro this week. This issue my third Studio Missive. I’m starting to make it part of my routine.

Let’s dig in.

What’s inspiring me

  1. Josh Comeau wrote a quick introduction to some of SVG’s superpowers. SVG has flummoxed me for some time, and my mind was just blown by some of this. I genuinely couldn’t wrap my head around how it worked before. I am going to take another stab at the problem I encountered in 2023 and see if I can clean it up.
  2. I spend a lot of time thinking about colour. Like, a lot of time. When you do those colour accuracy tests, I almost always get a perfect score. This is a useless life skill, unless you happen to be a designer (hello), or you want to save money on a professional calibrator for your home theatre (hello again). So this article about using opacity in your design systems as an alternative to solid colours is extremely my jam, and extremely useful. I am going to use the heck out of this.
  3. Fonts In Use (one of the best websites ever) published a great read about the typography in early Black Sabbath album art. ​“Despite the ubiquity of those albums and the many design imitations they’ve inspired, the sources of their letterforms have been largely undocumented and obscured by the passage of time.” And yet Fonts In Use has tracked down their sources. (Even a couple of the comments are worth reading, in a rare surprise.)
  4. Finally, this comic from the Oatmeal captures my entire creative process perfectly.

What I’m working on

There are four iPhones in this image. The two on the left are showing an old miniplayer design on iOS 26. It's colourful, but hard to see. The two on the right are showing a new miniplayer design. It's less colourful, but it pops and it's much easier to see when using iOS 26.

I’ve spent a bunch of time in the past couple weeks redesigning web components in preparation for the redesigned versions of iOS and iPadOS. Apple’s new design and implementation of Liquid Glass has created problems for a few projects I’m working on. This week, I wrote a blog post — a small case study, truthfully — about the most interesting of these problems: an audio miniplayer.

The post is filled with example images and mockups that illustrate the problem iOS 26 introduces (especially compared to the current version of iOS) and how I fixed it. I’m pleased with how both the work and the post.

Thanks for reading! I hope your weekend is magical, and I’ll see you in your inbox again next Friday. 

– Nathan

Posted in Studio Missives

As of July 2025, I have space for only two new clients this year. Please don’t wait, or we will both be sad. You can email me, book a call, or fill out my project questionnaire.