Look, that’s us

Look again at that dot.

The cosmos and our place in it inspires the devices and experiences I create.

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
I often try to remind myself of these things when creating a new design, especially during times like these.

Color that isn’t.

Ever wondered about reality and what you see, for example, the nacre of an abalone shell, a soap bubble containing a rainbow or a blue butterfly. What you see doesn’t actually exist. There are no “pigments” that give the Morpho butterfly its mesmerizing shimmer; instead, Morpho butterflies’ wings create the spectrum of blue and indigo by causing white sunlight waves to diffract and interfere. You witness the Universe at work.

Nature inspired the devices and experiences of today.

Many types of butterflies use light-interacting structures on their wing scales to produce color. The cuticle on these butterflies’ wings’ scales comprises nano- and microscale, transparent, chitin-and-air layered structures. Rather than absorb and reflect specific light wavelengths as pigments and dyes do, these multi-scale structures cause light that hits the wing’s surface to diffract and interfere.

California Academy of Sciences (Abi Brody)

Cross ribs that protrude from the sides of ridges on the wing scale diffract incoming light waves, causing the waves to spread as they travel through spaces between the structures. The diffracted light waves then interfere with each other so that certain color wavelengths cancel out (destructive interference) while others are intensified and reflected (constructive interference). The varying heights of the wing scale ridges appear to affect the interference such that the reflected colors are uniform when viewed from a wide range of angles. The specific color that’s reflected depends on the shape of the structures and the distance between them. This way of manipulating light results in brilliant iridescent colors, which butterflies rely upon for camouflage, thermoregulation, and signaling.

Why the talk about structural light? Many people and the media have talked about Huawei’s ‘Twilight‘ gradient color scheme of the P20 Pro Series released in 2018, a little bit after I left Huawei. Available exclusively to the Huawei P20 Pro, the shimmering finish has been discussed ever since the color was first announced. Featuring a gradient that smoothly transitions from purple to blue then to aqua works in the same order laws of physics sort colors on the visible light spectrum as described above. Using the Morpho butterfly example — underneath a premium glass back, the Twilight variant of P20 Pro. So what inspired this sublime color scheme? One needs only look out of the window and gaze at the sky for the answer.

Twilight P20 Pro Series

That‘s right; it was nature, the world’s greatest artist of all time, that inspired us. Designing both the hardware and software, we have been taking cues from nature and the best of the best design and art. For the Twilight color, we were inspired by the Tyndall effect and the Aurora Borealis, or better known as the Northern Lights.

Northern Lights Aurora Borealis

It does not take formal training for one to appreciate nature, for our ability to perceive nature as a thing of beauty is innate to all of us. Throughout history, nature has inspired countless great painters to create great masterpieces. In China, court painters through dynasties transposed their impressions of the natural landscape onto paper using ink, water, and a brush. Towering mountains, rolling hills, and narrow rivers were painted onto scrolls of paper with lively brushstrokes, dots, and ink wash. This ancient art form, known today as guohua, is considered one of the most respected in classical Chinese art. In the West, greats such as Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh were also no strangers to nature. Monet rejected the stylistic norms of his time and developed his own way to capture nature's beauty, using his observations of changing lights to encapsulate the beauty he beheld. Just like some of the greatest artists throughout history, at Huawei, we were inspired by nature. We developed the dreamy color scheme to capture the magnificence and mysteriousness of the aurora. Careful decisions were made to ensure that when the gradient effect is shrunk to a handheld device's size, the phenomenal natural intensity will retain its full glory.

Good to know

Brilliant iridescent coloring in male Morpho butterflies enables long-range conspecific communication. It has long been accepted that microstructures, rather than pigments, are responsible for this coloration. Few studies, however, explicitly relate the intra-scale microstructures to overall butterfly visibility, both in terms of reflected and transmitted. We investigated the absolute reflectivity and transmissivity associated with the single-scale microstructures of two Morpho butterflies' species and the mechanisms behind their excellent wide-angle visibility with lasers. Measurements indicate that individual Morpho microstructures reflect up to 75% of the incident blue light over an angle range of greater than 100 degrees in one plane and 15 degrees in the other.

We show that incorporating the second layer of more transparent scales above a layer of highly iridescent scales leads to very strong diffraction, and we suggest this effect acts to increase the angle range over which incident light is reflected.

Measurements using index-matching techniques yield the complex refractive index of the cuticle material comprising the single-scale microstructure to be n=(1.56 plus or minus 0.01) + (0.06 plus or minus 0.01)i. This figure is required for the theoretical modeling of such microstructure systems. (Vukusic et al. 1999:1403)

A thing of beauty

Have you ever wondered, whether your software (or product) could be as beautiful as nature and touch humans in a similar way?

What if technology could be as beautiful and meaningful like a butterfly wing, or have the depth of a night sky in the desert? Or, what if it was almost invisible and soft like balmy air if it is only your content that matters, say when you want to edit a movie or sound clip, or write your novel or research material for your memoir? These are the type of questions my team and I have asked ourselves for over 20 years when designing products for the world’s most iconic companies, typically, with amazing outcomes. For instance, when designing ProKit, a new design language for Apple, we got inspired by glow in the dark creatures living in the lightless depths of the ocean, and the dashboards of a car, because we needed to create interfaces at Apple that would only show GUI elements on demand that people would use and need when editing film in a dark editing room.

Nature inspired the interfaces of today.

At Huawei when we created the look of the P-Series and needed to update EMUI, and give it its own ‘hallmark’ look and feel — different from anything that the world had seen before — we turned to nature again and got inspired by both, nature’s palette and forms. While we ensured that the human interface would fulfill all requirements of accessibility, it turned out that our preferred and primary color palette for EMUI, with a blue hue as the primary default color and an expanded palette with both analogous and complementary accent colors was an excellent choice, both from an aesthetical point of view. and in terms of usability: the user interface turned out to be clear and robust: clear because it helps people navigate the interface with distinct calls to action. Robust, because we accommodate all kinds of users, including the color blind. We succeeded to lower the cognitive load by lowering distractions. We not only keep people’s eyes solely focused on the essential aspects of the interface, but also created delight by eliciting positive, visceral reactions.  

P-Series ‘twilight’

Often some designers are criticized for wanting to create something beautiful. As if creating something that was a delight to the senses was superficial. I am a firm believer that design should not only be functional, but also aesthetically pleasing — to all senses, the visceral senses — also known as gut reaction — included. I also think that function and aesthetics aren’t mutually exclusive. I have learned, if you intend to create a product that works well, it should feel and look good, too. And, that being said, if something appeals, it doesn’t mean it was created to appeal on the surface only. Quite the contrary is the case. A deeply aesthetic design is usually the result of an elimination process where every element or attribute has been carefully considered until it has been designed and selected as a part of the final product or experience. Many nos to one yes. I am stating these observations not only from the perspective as a designer, but also as a student of the humanities and a musician — I was formally trained in classical voice and piano for many years, before I decided to focus on design at Art Center College of Design in the 1990s which were an important decade and turning point for design from analog to digital. Back to music: as many people know from their own experience, music is not only a great source of delight, it is also virtually impossible, to have people listen to a piece that’s performed somewhat out of tune and expect them to to enjoy it. Not without reason, humans love harmony. Something similar happens when people eat or prepare food. If there are too many ingredients in a dish, or the wrong kinds coming together, something isn’t right. Yet when the right flavors are combined, sometimes in a very unexpected way, magic happens. Therefore, great attention to every detail in design matters. This is my take on design, because everything can and should be in harmony, both functionality and aesthetics, not only those that appeal to the eye, but to other senses, too.

I visited with my team the California Academy of Sciences many times to learn about the life of color and other exhibitions. The Naturalist Center is home to hundreds of specimens and hands-on activities for all. We shot a Huawei documentary at the academy while creating the look and feel of EMUI and the new P-Series device.

Meet my new site and showcase.

…meet my new site & design studio showcase. Hi. Welcome to my site. So happy to have you around. 😃 You might be curious to learn who I am and how I approach my work and what I believe. You might wonder what’s that look about the butterflies and the sky? Well, I’ve created this site to help answer all these questions — at, least I’ll try — soon.

If you want to learn why I picked a blue-white color palette for my website and other design attributes, read my colophon page.

If you haven’t met me yet: I’m Abi Brody and I help make products, services and experiences that people love. Because what matters to people, matters to business too. If you just stumbled both on my site and this blog by chance, go ahead and explore. A great place to start is my ‘about’ page, ‘work‘ and ‘studio’. Perhaps you want to launch a new venture or business for the digital age. Amazing, because I love to help people and companies who want to change the world. Maybe you are just curious about me. Great! Whatever the reason, contact me and tell me how I can help.