How do you think thay worked? Alan Dye alome came up with, designed and somehow forced Liquid Glass into every platform? Lemay, who was his second in command had nothing to do with it? It was Alan Dye single-handedly doing it?
I am very, very curious how he reached, stayed that long at the top of the org chart and convinced so many people that this was a good direction to take.
If I were at Apple's leadership I'd consider that a major blindspot and focus deeply on fixing it.
On your first point, I don't know if Lemay merely agreed to keep his job or was an enthusiast of the vision. But it is a bit worrisome, if Bloomberg is to be believed.
On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction. Hiding essential feature on hover (notification's close icon, elapsed time on Apple Music, proxy icon, etc), poor contrast, legibility, background/foreground differentiation, was a long running process.
On your third point, I think it's possible and, if that's the case, deeply troubling.
> I don't know if Lemay merely agreed to keep his job
Again: why do you keep assigning Dye God-like powers? There wasn't just Lemay. There's no end of senior designers and senior product people, Federighi and his minions etc. at Apple.
In the end we still got Liquid Glass.
> On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction.
Indeed. Easily hundreds of people across several platforms saw this direction. Somehow we are led to believe that all of them were against this direction, and Dye single-handedly forced all the changes through.
He was VP of Design. That's as close to being design-god at Apple as you can get.
> Somehow we are led to believe that all of them were against this direction, and Dye single-handedly forced all the changes through.
I don't think that's a widely held belief. What's puzzling and scary to me is how so many people either stayed silent, failed to disagree or quit. How a deeply entrenched design culture can so easily crumble.
