There is a particular kind of software that wants to be heard. It greets you with a tour. It celebrates with a confetti burst when you complete a checklist. It has opinions about its own dark mode, and it would like to share them in a tooltip.
Then there is software that doesn't. It opens, and you forget it opened. You do the thing you came to do, and afterwards you cannot quite recall the verb the button used. This second kind is rarer, and it is what we are trying to make.
Quiet is not minimalism
Minimalism is an aesthetic. Quiet is a posture. A minimalist interface can still shout — in stark grids, in oversized type, in the loud silence of vast white space. A quiet interface, by contrast, is one that does not interrupt the thing the person is trying to do.
The iPod's click wheel was not minimalist. There was a wheel, and a screen, and four labelled buttons, and a brand. But it was profoundly quiet. You used it without thinking about it. The interface receded so the music could come forward.
"Good design is as little design as possible."
How we try to practise it
- Default to one accent color. If a second is needed, you usually need to remove something else first.
- Read every sentence aloud. If it sounds like marketing, rewrite it. If it sounds like an apology, rewrite it. If it sounds like a person, keep it.
- Animate motion you can't notice. The best transition is the one no one screenshots.
- Leave room. Negative space is the single cheapest way to make something feel expensive.
The cost of quiet
Quiet software does not demo well. It does not produce screenshots people share for the wow. It does not win design awards on first glance — those tend to go to whichever interface has the most ambitious gradient that quarter.
But quiet software is what people keep open. It's what they default to. It's what they don't talk about, in the same way no one talks about the chair they sit in every day. That kind of trust is built slowly, in the absence of noise, and it is the only kind worth building.
We are trying to make Luminax that kind of software. Some days we get it right.
Miko Tanaka
Editor-in-chiefEdits the Luminax library. Spent a decade in print before software. Keeps a notebook of sentences he wishes he had written.