mac-design-studio

Design beautiful, varied, authentically native macOS app UIs and app icons from scratch — full mock windows (HTML/CSS or token-precise spec) and 1024pt icon designs (SVG or Icon Composer layer spec), each committed to a named aesthetic direction drawn from a catalogue synthesised from 135 curated macapp.supply apps and 134 icons, grounded in Apple's macOS 27 UI kit (control ladder, type ramp, label tiers, chrome metrics) and the HIG. Routes native correctness to the macosify HIG library and craft/variation/polish to design-craft and ux-craft, audits every delivery against a 10-point native-tells audit and 14-point quality rubric, and enforces variety discipline so consecutive designs don't converge to one template. Every design declares one signature element and one justified aesthetic risk (with an AI-default calibration guard on the looks generators overuse), directions are calibration not a closed menu (hybrids and novel directions welcome when the subject earns them), and an incorporated fluid-interface motion layer (springs, interruptibility, materials-on-web, optical typography, reduced-motion floor — from Apple's WWDC design corpus) covers interactive mocks and ships a motion spec with static ones. v1.2 adds the essence layer: references/mac-essence.md distils the eight convictions of great mac app design from the corpus + UX canon (familiarity-as-canvas, restraint-as-confidence, the surface's single question, states-are-the-quality, words-as-load-bearing, forgiveness-over-interrogation, the keyboard, invisible completeness) plus a yield table where design-craft/ux-craft web-first rules bend to mac grammar (cursor, targets, casing, toasts); the build step now designs states-not-screens (ideal + empty rendered, full state matrix specified with real unhappy-path copy), writes the real words per macOS copy grammar, names keyboard behaviour, and delivery adds the essence test (name the question, the signature, and the worst state's behaviour); ux-craft is elevated to a standing dependency. Recalibrated for current-model behaviour (Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 prompting guidance): the AI-default calibration now works at the type level as well as the direction level (Space Grotesk is the face this model reaches for when told to be distinctive, which makes it the opposite of distinctive — a font you can defend in one sentence is a choice, a name you arrived at before you had a reason is gravity); the delivery audit opens the render first-person (serve, crop at DPR 2-3, read each crop asking 'what is wrong with this?' — rendering a screenshot is not seeing one, and looking is cheaper than reasoning about what you would see); and the delivery note is length-calibrated so the token table an implementer needs isn't buried under restated rationale. v1.4 rebuilds the icon practice on evidence: a bundled 532-icon corpus (the 500 most recent macosicongallery.com icons, 2022-2026, plus 32 ground-truth macOS 26 'Tahoe' captures of Apple's own system set), every icon vision-analysed per-icon with a cross-corpus synthesis; icon-directions.md gains the Tahoe gel-glass grammar (nine tells: cushion tiles, porcelain-vs-saturated ground registers, poured/frosted glyphs, white-as-material with ground-hue bleed, authored overlap blends), a rewritten current-era direction with three sub-registers, eleven new subject-mining devices, and a ten-point failure anti-checklist from the 500-icon evidence; and icon commissions now produce a variation set, never a single take — one shared spec rendered through three engines (a hand-authored layered Icon-Composer-ready SVG master, a media-gen-pro Arrow vector take, and media-gen-pro GPT-Image raster takes steered by corpus reference images), judged on a 1024/128/32/16 contact sheet.