the tooling we choose has a profound impact on the work we do, and, in the best case scenario, becomes a standard for how we build products. This is why we put so much care into even the tiniest details in Linear.

Even when doing concept work, you often need to focus your efforts. The design concept should feel like an exciting evolution of the product.

I didn't adhere to a specific method during the exploration phase, but typically, each day I designed a complete set of screens and flows. One day might be dedicated to designing the Inbox view, while the next day I could focus on the roadmap and projects. Other days, I explored upcoming product features. During this process, I experimented with different iterations of the sidebar, visual styles, and colors, and then linked the screens together as a prototype to assess their functionality.

Through this process, I generated hundreds of screens and was able to narrow down a few major directions that resonated most. Around this time, I began sharing the screens with other designers and people within the company to gather feedback and additional insights.

Ultimately, we settled on the main design direction, and I created a few views to showcase it

We started with the concept design Karri had originally imagined, but it wasn’t fully figured out and needed some additional design work. We didn’t know how we would bridge the previous UI design with the new style or if the new design could support all of our application states and options. We were able to make some changes off the bat, such as updating the color system, while other changes had to be punted to later on, such as the different headers you come across while navigating the app.

It’s easy for the scope of UI redesign projects to blow up. Before we got too far down any one path, we needed to get some confidence on the right option to keep everyone focused. So we ran some stress tests (or crash tests if you want to be dramatic) before going into implementation and iterating with engineers. We tested three main focus areas: the environment, the appearance, and the hierarchy.

Our app runs on Electron, so our navigation needed to work not just on macOS and Windows as a native app but also in any browser. That meant that previous/next navigation buttons, history, and tabs needed to be easily removable to work with browsers. We tested a lot of options, from very condensed to more spacious configurations. I often relied on Apple standards, which also helped get close to the feeling of a native app.

I also spent time aligning labels, icons, and buttons, both vertically and horizontally in the sidebar and tabs. It was definitely a challenge given the amount of UI elements we have on this tiny surface. This part of the redesign isn’t something you’ll immediately see but rather something that you’ll feel after a few minutes of using the app.

Karri mostly worked with opacities of black and white during his explorations, which really helped him get results quickly and helped me understand the relationship he had in mind between the elements and their respective elevation and hierarchy. As our system relied on a set of variables, I worked with Andreas on our software engineering team to polish and iterate on both the core variables and the operations we apply to them to generate our aliases for surfaces, texts, icons, and controls.

A while back, we rebuilt the system for generating custom themes in Linear, using the LCH color space instead of HSL. LCH has the benefit that it’s perpetually uniform, meaning a red and a yellow color with lightness 50 will appear roughly equally light to the human eye. This makes it possible to generate more consistently good-looking themes, regardless of which base colors are used.

Yes, the theme generation system also supports a contrast variable which defines how contrasty a theme should be. This allows us to automatically include super high-contrast themes for users who need it for accessibility reasons.

Linear relies on a set of structured layouts that support the navigation elements and content. It integrates additional headers to store filters and display options, side panels to display meta properties, as well as the actual display: list, board, timeline, split, and fullscreen.When I joined the project, Karri had already gathered most of the app's views and their respective states, so I was able to run all of my tests quite effectively. I mostly worked by type of view (list, board, split, etc.) as I found it easier to focus and ensure that every decision worked in all cases.

We divided the project into five milestones:Stress tests: Following the series of explorations made in November 2023, we tested if the direction felt right in the main views of Linear: Inbox, Triage, My Issues, Issues List, Project, Cycles, Roadmap, Search.Behavior definitions: As the direction was refined, we documented and defined the behaviors of the main components of the app: sidebar, tabs, app headers, and view headers.Sidebar and chrome refresh: We implemented the first bits of the refresh on the sidebar, tabs, and view headers. We also improved the appearance and contrast of our theme for light and dark modes. We used a feature flag to allow for internal testing at this stage.Private beta: We started rolling out the new design in Private beta to get initial feedback. Once we felt comfortable, we began rolling out the changes to a percentage of workspaces each day.GA: We released the new UI to all workspaces.

We knew that in order to move quickly and ship our work successfully, we needed to dedicate time and team resources to it. We couldn’t treat it as a side project.

Each afternoon, we divided the coding portions into groups of two engineers while designers iterated on other parts of the project, building a pipeline for us to work from. This daily back-and-forth between designers and engineers helped us get the first working version of the new UI by the end of the week

Next, we worked on the Inbox. We redesigned notifications to be more centered around the notification type and emphasized the faces of your teammates. We simplified headers and filters to improve the overall navigation. We also reviewed comments alignments and harmonized the look of our buttons with the new themes.

We started using Inter Display to add more expression to our headings while maintaining their readability and kept using regular Inter for the rest of the text elements.

The challenges start from the fact that it's never a good time to do a redesign. It's hard to make it a priority. It's difficult to calculate the ROI on it. And if you run your product with A/B testing, every global redesign will tank the metrics in the short term.

The real need for redesigns often comes when you have created a successful product and it has evolved with the market and users over time.

We ship small changes daily, and something major almost every week. Every year, it's almost like a new product. This incremental way of building the product is hugely beneficial, and often necessary — though it unbalances the overall design, and leads to design debt. Each new capability adds stress on the product's existing surfaces for which it was initially designed. Functionality no longer fits in a coherent way. It needs to be rebalanced and rethought.

If your product evolves fast, you should be paying this debt every 2-3 years. The longer you wait and the more successful your product becomes, the more you will have to untangle.

Slowly the user sentiment and perception might start turning negative and you might start looking like a dinosaur incumbent. This leaves an opportunity for some nimbler player to come along and compete in your market. Companies often try to address this with brand refreshes, but if you don’t refresh the product, nothing truly changes about the experience.

While the design debt often happens in small increments, it’s best to be paid in larger sweeps. This goes against the common wisdom in engineering where complete code rewrites are avoided. The difference is that on the engineering side, a modular or incremental way of working can work as the technical implementation is not really visible. Whereas the product experience is holistic and visual. You cannot predict which path the user takes. If you update just one module or view at a time, the overall experience becomes more disjointed. Secondly, if your goal is to reset and rebalance the whole product UI and experience, you have to consider all the needs simultaneously. An incremental approach doesn’t let you do that.

I’ve never seen redesigns successfully executed without the CEO behind it. While design might have a seat at the table generally, they are usually not able to convince everyone around that table. Only the CEO can push through all the excuses and give the latitude to a project touching all of the surfaces the product needs.

The way to get the CEO involved is to tie a design reset into a larger company shift or directional change. For example, if a company is looking at a new product, or major new feature, a redesign project can be a way to imagine how it might look or feel. This can be the justification for why you need to spin up the team (and at the same time, you can make a case for updating the rest of the product experience).

Organizations are often quite stuck in their views and ways of doing things, making them less enthusiastic about something new. When I was at Airbnb, the mobile redesign project was a way to shift the company to become mobile-first. It set the tone and got the message across to the whole company that mobile was happening and that it was happening now. While it looks like an obvious change in hindsight, there were many arguments against it at the time and it took a lot of convincing. Switching to think about mobile meant the design and features had to be rethought to work in that platform.

While Linear is a smaller and younger company, we’re also undergoing a shift. The product vision has widened from a simple issue tracker to a purpose-built system for product development. We are now moving into planning workflows that naturally come before the building or execution phase of building products. This product evolution creates new future needs from the product design, and we have to make space for it.

When you realize that a design reset is needed for your product, how do you actually get started with the project? You start with a standalone team to explore the new concept design and create something the company can rally around.The auto industry has a practice of building “concept cars”, where they explore the next version of the car freely and boldly without considering practicality. A concept car sets the direction, but usually is not expected to land in production because it’s too impractical or costly to manufacture.

A secret I've learned is that when you tell people a design is a "concept" or "conceptual" it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That's the power of visual design.

Tulpa is a concept originally from Tibetan Buddhism and found in later traditions of mysticism and the paranormal of a materialized being or thought-form

The Theosophist Annie Besant, in the 1905 book Thought-Forms, divides them into three classes: forms in the shape of the person who creates them, forms that resemble objects or people and may become ensouled by nature spirits or by the dead, and forms that represent inherent qualities from the astral or mental planes, such as emotions.

The Slender Man has been described by some people as a tulpa-effect, and attributed to multiple people's thought processes.

These days hate has roughly the same role in popular culture that original sin has in traditional Christian theology. If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.

At the far end of this sort of rhetoric, you get the meretricious slogan used by Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign last year: LOVE TRUMPS HATE. I hope that none of my readers are under the illusion that Clinton’s partisans were primarily motivated by love, except in the sense of Clinton’s love for power and the Democrats’ love for the privileges and payouts they could expect from four more years of control of the White House; and of course Trump and the Republicans were head over heels in love with the same things. The fact that Clinton’s marketing flacks and focus groups thought that the slogan just quoted would have an impact on the election, though, shows just how pervasive the assumption I’m discussing has become in our culture.

what happens when people decide that some common human emotion is evil and harmful and wrong, and decide that the way to make a better world is to get rid of it?

The example I have in mind is the attitude, prevalent in the English-speaking world from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, that sex was the root of all evil.

I know that comparing current attitudes toward hate with Victorian attitudes toward sex will inspire instant pushback from a good many of my readers. After all, sexual desire is natural and normal and healthy, while hate is evil and harmful and wrong, right? Here again, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that people a century and a quarter ago—most likely including your ancestors, dear reader, if they happened to live in the English-speaking world—saw things the other way around. To them, hate was an ordinary emotion that most people had under certain circumstances, but sexual desire was beyond the pale: beastly, horrid, filthy, and so on through an impressive litany of unpleasant adjectives.

Make something forbidden and you make it desirable. Take a normal human emotional state, one that everyone experiences, and make it forbidden, and you guarantee that the desire to violate the taboo will take on overwhelming power. That’s why, after spending their days subject to the pervasive tone policing of contemporary life, in which every utterance gets scrutinized for the least trace of anything that anyone anywhere could conceivably interpret as hateful, so many people in today’s world don internet aliases and go to online forums where they can blurt out absolutely anything

The opposite of one bad idea, after all, is usually another bad idea; the fact that dying of thirst is bad for you doesn’t make drowning good for you; whether we’re talking about sex or anything else, there’s a space somewhere between “not enough” and “too much,” between pathological repression and equally pathological expression, that’s considerably healthier than either of the extremes. I’m going to risk causing my more sensitive readers to clutch their smelling salts and faint on the nearest sofa, in true Victorian style, by suggesting that the same thing’s true of hate.

Hate is like sex; there are certain times, places, and contexts where it’s appropriate, but there are many, many others where it’s not. You can recognize its place in life without having to act it out on every occasion—and in fact, the more conscious you are of its place in life, the more completely you acknowledge it and give it its due, the less likely you are to get blindsided by it. That’s true of sex, and it’s true of hate: what you refuse to acknowledge controls you; what you acknowledge, you can learn to control.

the blind faith that goodness requires amputation is so unquestioned in our time.

Human beings are never going to be perfect, not if perfection means the amputation of some part of human experience, whether the limb that’s being hacked off is our sexual instincts, our aggressive instincts, or any other part of who and what we are.

We can accept our sexuality, whatever that happens to be, and weave it into the pattern of our individual lives and our relationships with other people in ways that uphold the values we cherish and yield as much joy and as little unnecessary pain for as many people as possible. That doesn’t mean always acting out our desires—in some cases, it can mean never acting them out at all

Design Engineer is the latest label we're chucking onto the pile of obfuscatory design titles alongside interface designer, interaction designer, software designer, web designer, product designer, design systems architect, UI/UX designer, UX engineer, UI engineer, and front-of-the-front-end engineer.

Throwing this extra label onto the pile feels necessary though. Design engineer captures something simple, important, and worth distinguishing: a person who sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering, and works to bridge the gap between them.

They're people who know how to run a design process to decide how something should work, look, and feel, and have the engineering chops to implement it. They can quickly iterate on ideas by cycling between design exploration, research, and live code. The skillset is ideal for prototyping, exploratory interaction design, and building robust design systems.

Most from a small set of companies like Vercel, Linear, The Browser Company and Replit, known for their attention to interface design detail and slick product interactions, who are clearly encouraging and cultivating design-engineer hybrids.

People are incentivised to only share their sexy, shiny, flawless creations, rather than their messy process or shameful failures. Some of the especially tedious and labourious work isn't easily shareable, such as advocating for robust design systems and cleaning up legacy code.

I am not under any illusions that these public works constitute the entirety of what design engineers create or spend all day making. I'm sure some spend their days “aligning stakeholders,” buried under a mountain of strategic documents and trapped by heirarchical approval chains. Say a small prayer for them.

Emmy mainstays like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Better Call Saul” and “Succession” have all ended their runs, and the newer Emmy parvenus, such as the comedies “Abbott Elementary” and “Jury Duty,” while excellent, harken back to an earlier, mass-market era of television that was dominated by sitcoms and hourlong procedurals.

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back.”

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man.

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

Describe things that someone can explain to someone else, or you'll miss out on word-of-mouth growth. Imagine you wandered into some party and met an investor/donor/customer named Emily. Even if you're the most persuasive person ever and she walks away from the conversation energized and excited, your time is wasted because Emily can't explain to her coworkers/friends/legislative-body what specifically she's excited about.

If Emily is a potential customer and all she heard was nothing-language, then you've gained no information. She might be interested! But that interest might only be in something she's imagined — not what you're actually making.

Nothing-language is describing your product as "an investigation into how we generate dispersed intimacy, signify alliance, and physical representations of our digital coordination praxis"1 instead of saying you're an investment fund. If you're going to "revolutionize", "create the operating system for", "build at the intersection between", "empower", "democratize", "individually flourish", or "be interdisciplinary", the universe should pause, rewind, and let you explain again. It's kind and wants you to succeed.

Be boring. Say you're "plaid for messaging apps" or "a figma plugin that generates svg icons from gpt-3" or "chrome extension that adds cmd-k to every website".

Ewan speaks with a chilling certitude, addressing an audience of Logan’s progeny and hangers-on too shamefaced to intervene. It’s an impossible act for any of the Roy kids to follow: Roman (Kieran Culkin) chokes up on stage and gets barely a word out, revealing himself before all as the broken little boy he’s always been; Kendall (Jeremy Strong) delivers an eloquent but vacuous paean to capitalism that’s the closest he can manage to a defense of his father’s legacy; Shiv (Sarah Snook) is unable to avoid discussing how Logan undermined her, just as he undermined every woman in his orbit. Ewan’s stark moral judgments are unanswerable, and everyone knows it, but in the end they aren’t going to change anything—and to suggest they come too late is to imply they ever could have. Who has time for morality these days?

While much of the pleasure of the show came from watching the wealthy insult each other against luxurious backdrops, the writers made sure to remind us again and again that the Roys do real harm to working people. In the pilot, Roman taunts a caretaker’s son with the possibility of a $1 million check if he hits a home run, and tears the check up in front of the boy and his parents when he fails. At the end of the first season, Kendall gets high on ketamine and accidentally kills a waiter in a Chappaquiddick-esque car accident, which he and Logan spend much of the second season covering up. In the second season premiere, Logan orders the staff at his Hamptons estate to throw out a lavish steak and lobster meal they’ve labored over. Toward the end of the second season, Shiv intimidates a witness to a horrific sexual misconduct scandal on the Roy family’s cruise ship line into silence. None of this was subtle; the viewer was permitted to enjoy the Roys’ nasty little quips and expensive wardrobes but not to forget the human stakes of their actions. And there were a few minor recurring characters—Ewan, for one, but also the Bernie Sanders stand-in Gil Eavis (Eric Bogosian)—to suggest alternatives to a society run by Roys.

This sort of audience divide, not between those who love a show and those who hate it but between those who love it in very different ways, has become a familiar schism in the past fifteen years, during the rise of—oh, God, that phrase again—Golden Age television. This is particularly true of the much lauded stream of cable “dark dramas,” whose protagonists shimmer between the repulsive and the magnetic. As anyone who has ever read the comments on a recap can tell you, there has always been a less ambivalent way of regarding an antihero: as a hero

a subset of viewers cheered for Walter White on “Breaking Bad,” growling threats at anyone who nagged him to stop selling meth. In a blog post about that brilliant series, I labelled these viewers “bad fans,” and the responses I got made me feel as if I’d poured a bucket of oil onto a flame war from the parapets of my snobby critical castle. Truthfully, my haters had a point: who wants to hear that they’re watching something wrong?

The kids jockey and jostle, bully and betray to take over from their father, but their strivings often feel like distractions, minor plot points of the late era. The institution evades death in the first episode, but, make no mistake, the institution is dying.What form that death takes is an open question for the show. Does the institution luridly modernize in response to a changing media landscape? In the early seasons, this modernization looked like Waystar-Royco’s acquisition of Vaulter, a Vice-like media company that Kendall (Jeremy Strong) covets, captures, and then guts. In the show’s endgame, this modernization has looked like Waystar-Royco’s acquisition by Nordic streaming giant GoJo. In some ways these versions of the end are transformations, makeovers for a company that no longer looks like itself. But these are also potentially traps. Vaulter was probably a fine company, but, like its real-life analogues, it couldn’t produce the kind of profit Waystar-Royco needed from it, and GoJo, on the other hand, feels like a bubble ready to pop. As we witness the seemingly bimonthly shuttering of real-life Vaulters by craven investors and we watch the film and TV industry struggle to figure out how streaming even works—when it’s far too late to turn back—we realize that disaster lies down every path for the Roys.

Our entire experience of the Roys’ empire in this show is one of corruption and cover-up and abuse. There was never any moral standing to erode. But in its final days, we see it exercise what power it has in order to install a demagogue in the White House, to protect its interests by destabilizing the very society it exists to serve.

Succession is about a thing that is in the process of dying. And in this final season, that flavor of mortality is the show’s top note. It’s right, I think, to extend those mausoleum tones to the media environment in which we greet Succession.

Succession is not about succession. Not really. As the critic and editor Sam Adams succinctly tweeted, “the number of people still arguing about who is going to win Succession makes me wonder if one secret of the show’s success is that it allows people to love it without understanding it.” Rooting for, or even against, any of the particular players in this game is beside the point. Nobody wins, everybody loses; everybody is a loser. Or, perhaps, there is no winning or losing at the level of corporate leadership. Logan Roy spent three seasons hanging onto his company because none of his idiot children had the killer instinct or business acumen to keep it alive. And yet it shouldn’t go beyond our notice that Waystar-Royco’s been doing great since his death. Logan’s own vision of his romantic genius is an illusion. Money, as Kendall says in his eulogy, is life. And the money keeps moving no matter who sits in the corner office.

Succession, in a certain light, seems more like a photo negative version of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. It’s swapped out Sorkin’s pious centrist liberalism with a qualitatively better, but no less pious, left anti-capitalism. And rather than fill the screen with brilliant public servants whose devotion to democracy is a kind of priesthood, it fills the screen with deviant morons whose devotion to money and power is also a kind of priesthood.

In the battle of the eulogies that played out in the show’s penultimate episode, we know that Logan’s brother Ewan (James Cromwell) carries the force of moral authority in his denunciation of the Roys, but nobody in that church claps. When Kendall responds, dissociating from his petty vulgarity and delivering a stirringly grandiose defense of greed and gluttony, the crowd cheers. Jeremy Strong is terrific, and Kendall’s fluency and inspiration in that moment are a real part of the show’s appeal. Can we applaud, not for his message but only for his performance?

Social media is the lens for a lot of the show’s biggest bits and even plotlines. It is, just as in life, omnipresent, and so, even as the show spotlights the inherent ridiculousness of the extremely online, it also understands the way social media is a deranging accelerant of everyday problems, and thus a medium of everyday life.

These are all just a bunch of funny jokes about people who are too online, celebrities whose shallow fame exists only by way of the apps, and a contemporary American culture hypnotized by the blue light of screens.

In her book The Drama of Celebrity, the scholar Sharon Marcus argues that celebrity, as we know it, is a cultural phenomenon with three distinct authors. There’s the celebrity, who expresses themself through whatever art or product they make; there are the journalists who write about and photograph and criticize and otherwise construct the celebrity’s public image; and then there’s the public, who contribute devotion and imagination, and money, and love and hate.

There was a time when Marilyn Monroe emerged as an illusion, a trick of the light produced between herself, her studio’s massive press apparatus, and an adoring and vampiric public. Today, anyone can be an illusion like this, if at smaller scale.

The show by no means wants to redeem the industry, but, this season especially, it’s become invested in exposing the lazy nihilism that can come along with seeing the worst in people. If you run into a craven, soulless industry hack in the morning, you ran into a craven, soulless industry hack; if you run into them all day, you are the craven, soulless industry hack.

The Other Two is about identity. It’s a flimsy, fungible thing, and it’s a trap. It’s a point of pride and a point of embarrassment. There’s the real you that we all struggle to find and to express truthfully; there’s the version of yourself that you perform for the public; there’s the version of you that others create in and against their own image.

to Levinson, emotional realism meant making the internal external. In other words, he wanted to show the extreme highs and lows of adolescence visually, even if those visuals didn’t adhere to a physical realism.

why not give a show that’s not like a realistic portrait of the youth but more like how they portray themselves

most of the time, we’re using primary colors, and I’m relying a lot on the orange-blue color contrast, which is a really basic one… We use that in night scenes, as well as in day scenes.”As the Euphoria cinematographer notes, the orange-blue contrast is a classic use of a complementary color scheme. And it is used in countless films and TV shows. But Rév cranks up the orange-ness and blue-ness of the lights, creating a contrast that goes beyond the reality of a setting.

the lighting is not completely divorced from the physical reality of the situation. The blue is motivated by the moon, the orange by streetlights. But the degree to which he leans into this contrast is what goes beyond reality and into emotional realism.

“Of course, you have party scenes and stuff, [with] basic colors. Sometimes, it’s red; sometimes, it’s blue,” explains the Euphoria cinematographer. “But we try to stick to one defined color, and not be all over the place.”

I would say the camera movement is the glue in the show, that glues it together.

With a few exceptions, the camera seems to float, giving it an ethereal quality matching the show’s mood.“When the camera is moving, it’s always on tracks or on a dolly,” said Levinson. “We do very little handheld camerawork. And probably 70 percent of the show is shot on sets.”These sets are key to the camera movement. Because the sets are built from the ground up, they are often constructed with specific camera maneuvers in mind.

Of course, this level of complexity requires a massive amount of planning, including storyboarding the camera movements.“Marcell and I sat down with Peter Beck, our storyboard artist, and we basically storyboarded the entire episode,” says Levinson. “There were roughly 700 or 800 boards, and then, in conversation with [production director] Michael [Grasley], we built all the sets from those boards.”The shot took a whopping six days to finish, a rarity in television. “Part of the nature of television is that it doesn’t usually allow for a lot of indulgence,” explains Levinson. “On this show, we made the decision in advance not to do a lot of coverage, which is unusual for television. But in deciding to shoot that way, we accepted the fact that we had to really plan the thing out to get it right.”This type of auteur-esque control is what allows Euphoria cinematography to look so striking. It’s a show which has a visual style that few other series have ever matched.

Although it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly makes all Netflix shows look the same, a few things stand out: The image in general is dark, and the colors are extremely saturated; Especially in scenes at night, there tends to be a lot of colored lighting, making everything look like it’s washed in neon even if the characters are inside; Actors look like the makeup is caked on their faces, and details in their costumes like puckering seams are unusually visible

Much like you can instantly recognize a Syfy channel production by its heavy reliance on greenscreen but not as expensive computer-generated special effects, or a Hallmark movie by it’s bright, fluffy, pastel look, Netflix productions also have recognizable aesthetics. Even if you don’t know what to look for, it’s so distinct that you’ll probably be able to guess whether or not something was created for Netflix just based on a few frames.

Netflix requests some basic technical specifications from all its productions, which include things like what cameras to use, Netflix’s minimum requirements for the resolution of the image, and what percentage of the production can use a non-approved camera.

Connor described the budgets on Netflix projects as being high, but in an illusory way. This is because in the age of streaming, “above the line” talent like big name actors or directors get more of the budget that’s allotted to Netflix projects because they won’t get any backend compensation from the profits of the film or television show.“They're over compensated at the beginning,” Connor said. “That means that all of your above the line talent now costs, on day one that the series drops, 130 percent of what it costs somewhere else. So your overall budget looks much higher, but in fact, what's happened is to try to save all that money, you pull it out of things like design and location.”

The show should be a celebration, a statement, a home run swing, and its narrative architecture reflects that ambition. Instead, its style is anonymous, ancillary, the work of a corporate author rather than an artistic intelligence.

these scenes in the 1960s and 1970s function as flashbacks, but they are also the best scenes in the show. This is partially because Tseng’s performance is easily the strongest in the series, but it’s also because it’s clear the filmmakers have given these portions of the show a distinctive look and feel to connote them as flashbacks. Vast denuded forests, new construction that already feels like it’s about to rust, the too-bright sun making the very air of cold hallways visible—it’s a tremendously compelling world, raw, sad, even darkly funny.

To some extent, the animations in the game need to feel uncanny. We have to differentiate them from the reality of the show, but we also have to believe that the characters themselves can’t differentiate them from their own realities. It’s a tricky predicament for the show to figure out—what does The Real look like?—but it’s a problem they’ve largely deferred. And the visual blankness, the frictionless animated splendor of the game, seeps into the rest of the series. In the game and out of it, the visual effects on this show—many of which are meant to be literally global spectacles of shock and awe—have the chintzy sheen of the Sci-Fi Channel space operas Moore was writing against in 2003. Sights meant to elicit gasps from our characters look like demo reels from startup VFX companies, at best, and demo reels from defense contractors at worst.

One thing we learn early on about the aliens is that they cannot lie. Because they can’t lie like humans do, they also can neither produce nor understand fiction. They have a complete multidimensional understanding of the universe, but they cannot fancy it otherwise than it is. They demonstrate technical capability but no real imagination. All content, no style.

Networks and streamers want shows to look “good,” but that designation is less about quality or imaginative production design than it is about a set of visual tropes that read to well-trained viewers as “good.”

Think of the Instagram filter aesthetics of Ozark, the dark and oversaturated “Netflix look” of The Sandman, the tinned Fincherisms of A Murder at the End of the World—Peak TV prestige style can be a copy or a caricature of itself, but it’s also a wan reflection of beloved texts of the prior age. Aping the signature look of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or True Detective is a way to activate a set of coded cues for viewers to notice and approve. Such a style distracts distractible viewers from the thinness or derivativeness of the show they’re watching. If it didn’t look like that, they wouldn’t care, or worse, they wouldn’t feel that they should care.

Many of the most acclaimed series of the past few years have been distinguished by their singular televisual styles. The Bear’s fast cuts and extreme close-ups sutured to dad rock deep cuts of the mid-aughts; Shogun’s anamorphic lenses and natural light and swirly bokeh—or blur—around the edges; Succession’s nauseating handheld and gray landscapes; I’m a Virgo’s ramshackle practical effects and forced perspective; Euphoria’s loud and hallucinatory “emotional realism.”

3 Body Problem feels allergic to this kind of cohesive televisual vision. There’s so much to do, so many characters to introduce, so much science to condense and explain, so many mysteries to investigate and unveil, so many questions to ask and answers to complicate, so much book to dutifully adapt. In the moments when we notice the show making a visual or a stylistic choice, they tend to be strictly utilitarian: The scenes in Mongolia mark a transition in time, nearly every pop music cue thuddingly references what’s happening onscreen, two eyes merge into one inside the headset when the video game begins, the capillaries in one scientist’s eyeballs seize into a glowing, ticking clock that warps and deranges everything she (and we) sees. Because these scattered touches nearly all denote transitions out of the show’s present or serve to emphasize points or themes within it, that means that the show’s baseline is a kind of deliberate stylelessness, a boilerplate reality.

This show, for all its many fine performances and thoughtful narrative contraptions, feels processed, not created; professionally managed, not imagined.

Unfortunately, I have never experienced anything I'd call leadership from anyone that has called themselves a member of "the leadership team". From my friends, yes. From some serious thinkers, yeah. From "leadership", not even close. Instead, society presents us with an endless parade of people parroting nonsense ranging from the insanely over-excited ("Get shit done! Woo!") to the utterly soulless ("Continuous Improvement Playback & Strategy"). Shut the fuck up! All we do is land the output of APIs in a warehouse, guys. You sound insane.

These people are running some horrific version of leadership that consists entirely of them turning up and repeating the same tired cliches on a loop. Reduce silos. Be more Agile. We must go forward, not backwards. Can you imagine how fucked in the head you'd have to be to imagine you can hold a four hour unrehearsed session and that you expect it to be so good that you demand everyone be there for it?

I don't think leadership roles should really exist in many domains, as I've indicated earlier. Leadership should naturally flow between team members based on the task being performed, competence of each member, and psychodynamic energy (read again: vibes) on any given day.

There's complaining for fun, and then there's complaining. I'm going to be 30 this year and it is dawning on me that I don't have time to waste on these people. While writing this, I reached out to my manager and let him know I'm looking for new work, which I promised to do when I took the job (they can hate me as much as they want as long I have fulfilled all my personal promises).

Ah, to believe that people surface real issues at retros in dysfunctional organizations.