Joe Russell

An email from Nintendo. Soak up the summer fun! Whether you're heading to the beach or staying cool indoors, we've got a few suggestions to help you make the most of your summer. Free summer wallpaper. Get yours.

Mario ‘summer’ wallpaper from Nintendo. Mario is riding one of those dolphins that is a playable character in Mario Kart World. I think they were enemies in a 2D Mario game. There’s an angry sun in the sky, possibly from Super Mario Bros 3.

Nintendo emailed me today and suggested I download a wallpaper featuring one of Mario’s nipples. #mario #marioNippleWatch

[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.] Ponytail: Silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochemists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars. Cueball: And quartz, of course. Ponytail: Of course. [Caption below the panel] Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.

Designers make exactly the same mistake as the XKCD geologists: they think about their stakeholders as more junior designers. And when they were junior designers, they could tell that their work was bad and the work of pros was good.

But managers aren't designers *at all.* They can't tell it's bad.

No

Looks nice! Will there be a web app?

I wrote a little blog post about the Game Boy Camera a while ago. Should probably start a blog to post it…

A screenshot of Mario Paint, played on the Nintendo Switch 2. A Yoshi stamp from Super Mario World sits on top of a shaded large banana. The background is a colourful mess of random patterns and stamps.

Probably the best banana I’ve ever drawn. Mario Paint is surprisingly great! There’s a lot of playfulness to the interface that must have influenced the wonderful Game Boy Camera.

@quiche.industries is really impressive! Arc on iOS is amazing it’s but a real shame what they’re doing now.

One dangerous effect of reading financial writing full of huge figures is becoming numb to real money, then going shopping and accidentally buying a banana for £30.

"...generative AI...is an expression of contempt towards people, one that considers them to be a commodity at best, and a rapidly-depreciating asset at worst."

An article so long it almost needs an AI summary. But this is fascinating, and scarily believable. (there’s a good summary in this thread)

Which is fun I guess!

This is pretty but what really is the point? Visual effect to export static images? Probably anyone designing for native Apple OS is working with a different app outside Figma?

Kinda mind bending how fast we’ve gone from „We‘ll be carbon neutral by…“ to „This thing will have the energy footprint of manhattan bro!“

there are so many great things about generative AI! here are some of my favorites <3

Fund war robots
or
Accept not being able to click the ‘total track length’ at the end of the progress bar to switch it to ‘track time remaining’.
That’s the Spotify or Tidal choice I guess.

Accessibility and Apple: dizziness by a thousand cuts.

in which I explain issues with Liquid Glass and current Apple betas re vestibular conditions, outline how Apple responds, and react to three types of feedback I get when writing this kind of post.

reverttosaved.com/2025/07/13/a...

But actually I don’t use a mouse.

People still see ‘Product Designer’ and think this

Pretty confident Alcaraz will win this after spending his break eating a Frube yoghurt. #wimble

A name badge for the Develop Brighton 2025 conference. Joe Russell. A knitted pear is in the corner of the photo.

Went to a video games conference just down the road. Not the whole industry is doomed, it seems! #developBrighton

A screenshot of Mac OS 8.5, shown on an orange iMac. A colourful clown like theme is applied to the OS.

Don’t worry about Apple beta software. In 1998 this was in a Mac OS beta

I tried this on mobile first and thought it was cool… Now I’ve tried it on desktop and it’s amazing! Fully interactive examples of UI design over time

Revelé estas fotos para las que tuve que mirar hacia arriba. Las hice con la Olympus mju III y un film Hitchcock 250D revelado en ECN-2.

El resto de fotos de cosas que están en lo alto se pueden ver en mi blog, que es eso que algunas aún tenemos desde hace 24 años.

📸 nzrt.com/mirando-haci...

I didn’t use this but it’s cool buildui.com/recipes/magn...

Somehow it took me 20+ years of thinking Mac OS X’s dock magnification is cool to kind of replicate the effect on a website

The internet should have more echo chambers. I never logged onto point and click adventure game fan forums in the early 2000s thinking “I sure hope someone on here hates point and click adventure games, for balance.”

What a privilege to concern ourselves with these kind of things.

I might hold off a lot longer from upgrading macOS, as it looks… possibly even worse than iOS?

Great summarising collection here: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/06/30/assorted-notes-on-liquid-glass/

iOS 26 is just badly designed. That’s the sad conclusion I’m coming to, after a few weeks of using it and reading lots of detailed critique from designers more experienced than me. I’ve been reluctant to be another old man yelling at a cloud, but there are just so many problems and so few positives.