Raja

Designing an App Icon That Feels Like an Album Cover

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, I had the chance to collaborate on creating an icon for Denim, an app I love. It is built around the idea that playlists are not just lists of songs, but acts of personal curation people want to give a visual identity to. Lumy, the app I make, lives in a very different world… light, atmosphere, skies, seasons, and time. Ashwin shared the idea of a playlist grid magically transforming into artwork, inspired by a user review describing Denim as a “magic wand for playlists.” I loved the idea. But for weeks, it just sat there in my head, not going anywhere.

Then I watched “Top Gun: Maverick” during its IMAX rerelease. I’m still not entirely sure why, but when I got home, I opened Sketch and started working on it.

The thing that had been stuck for weeks finally started to move. That’s what a movie, a song, a photograph, or anything soulfully made can do to you. Something about it rearranges your thoughts, and suddenly the thing sitting motionless inside you begins to move. To explain how it finally moved, I have to start with album covers.

Album Cover Logic

Think about some of these famous album covers. A baby underwater swimming after a dollar on a hook. A banana presented like fine art. All logically strange. But emotionally inevitable.

I design apps for a living, and the logic there works almost the opposite way. Every pixel has to justify itself. “Why is this here?” always has a logical answer, or it doesn’t ship.

But most of the album covers I admired earn meaning by refusing to explain themselves completely. Maybe this is why I got stuck. I kept looking for the logic when what I really needed was the feeling.

At the center of this new icon design was “a magic wand for playlists.” A wand is a lovely thing to build an icon around. But the first thing my brain did was worry about how a wand would rest on a table. Maybe that’s the mechanical engineer in me refusing to leave completely. Give it some flat faces so it doesn’t roll away. A few flat faces later, the wand had quietly turned into a prism.

And where have I seen a prism used like this before?

“Dark Side of the Moon”

An Ode to the Prism That Escaped Physics

I am not a Pink Floyd fan. I grew up on Ilayaraja and Rahman. But I’ve seen this design since my childhood. The first place I remember seeing it was on the t-shirt of a construction worker laying bricks in my neighborhood. I believe most of us in my neighborhood had never heard of the words “Pink Floyd”. Most likely, that t-shirt once belonged to a rich kid who wore it, grew out of it, and whose mother later passed it to a woman working in their home. She eventually gave it to her son. That’s a strange yet familiar journey. Somehow, the prism kept traveling. From a record sleeve in 1973, to a dorm wall, to a rich kid’s wardrobe, to the mason in the heat. And the meaning changed each time it moved. To one of them, it meant music becoming light. To the other, it was simply a t-shirt. Something to wear in the heat. Same prism. Two completely different lives.

Anyway. The point is, this prism graphic stayed with me all these years. Technically, it is a physics illustration of refraction. Light entering glass and splitting into colors. That’s all it is. It should belong only in a science book. But somehow it drifted beyond physics… into album covers, dorm rooms, and wardrobes.

I think that’s what happens when something made with care moves through enough human lives.

Take a favorite song, for instance. The moment it leaves the studio… it stops belonging only to the artist. It becomes someone’s bus ride home. Someone’s college years. Someone’s late-night drive. Over time, the original meaning becomes just one layer among many.

Just like music, design can also travel beyond its original culture and become an emotional object. Like how this prism traveled farther than its creators could’ve imagined. [[spiral: It’s strange how many people recognize this prism without knowing where it came from. At some point, the symbol escaped the album and started living its own life.]]

Light Becoming Music

Background

Light Dark

So that’s how I ended up using a prism as a wand. Lumy on one side: the sky, the sun, the light. Denim on the other: the playlist grid, the track lengths, the music. A prism between them, helping light become music.

In Dark Side of the Moon, the prism is scientific. Light goes in. Colors come out. Here, the prism isn’t performing an optical experiment. It’s performing a transformation.

So I made it frosted instead of clear.

Slide to compare the two.

Frosted Clear

The mystery felt more right than staying true to the physics. It felt closer to a playlist. Tracks go in. Emotion comes out. No physics. Just memory, nostalgia, taste, mood, and all the fuzzy things that make it personal.

There’s a “Parental Advisory” sticker that reads “Contains Sunshine,” because album covers are allowed to be a little silly. Once you’re into album-cover logic, you might as well commit.

I also wanted the icon to feel like something you’d hold. A record sleeve with a catalog number. A small nod to the days when music literally had two sides: SIDE A / LIGHT. SIDE B / MUSIC. [[spiral: “LIGHT x SOUND” would’ve been technically accurate. But I chose “MUSIC”. I love that humans took something as elemental as sound and turned it into feeling. Light becoming music is the version I kept.]]

There’s a dark mode too. An icon about light should know when the sun goes down.

Background

Light Dark

The Last Etchings

A small fighter jet is crossing the sky. My own etching. Now, all done, I think I finally understand what a movie about fighter jets had to do with light becoming music. You don’t watch Top Gun for the plot. You watch it to feel the speed, the weight of the jets, the feeling of altitude. That’s the kind of rule album covers run on. Maybe the movie was just a reminder that certain things earn their meaning through feeling instead of explaining.

Somewhere between light, sound, memory, and symbolism, the decoding ended and the dwelling began.

Runout Groove: If you caught the “Dark Side of the Moon” homage long before I explained any of this… It’s nice to know you exist. That’s the only way these things were meant to land.

If this stayed with you and you’d like to connect on X → @rajavijayaraman

Mono no aware

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is April. Cherry blossoms all over the timeline. I saw a post mentioning “Mono no aware” (物の哀れ). Never heard this phrase before. Turns out what makes cherry blossoms special isn’t the beauty alone. But also knowing the beauty will be gone in two weeks. And the Japanese have a name for it. Mono no aware, the ache of being moved by things that won’t stay.

Wabi sabi (Beauty in imperfection). Mono no aware. Different phrases. Both built around the same truth… nothing lasts. One is about seeing beauty in what remains. The other is about feeling the ache of what’s leaving. The Japanese don’t let these kinds of feelings pass on. They go deep. Study it. Name it. Build a culture around it. They have words for things the rest of us feel but forget. Why?

Is it the geography? The earthquakes? The typhoons? The four seasons? When the ground beneath us keeps shifting, maybe we stop building things that last forever and start building for now. We start to choose moments over monuments. A tea ceremony instead of a pyramid. Because the land keeps reminding us that nothing lasts. We can’t do anything about the tsunami. The least we can do is name what it felt like to live through. And once we name it, it becomes shared. A feeling without a name dies with the person who felt it. But a name crosses time. This one traveled an ocean and a thousand years to find me.

The moment I learned about “Mono no aware” and its meaning, I recognized that feeling. I just never had a word for it.

Thousands of photos on our phones. When was the last time you scrolled back to 2020? Why do we take photos? To remember the moment or to hold on to something we already know is leaving?

We say “capture the moment.”

Capture. A strange word.

You capture something that is trying to escape. We know the moment is passing. So we reach for the phone. Just to hold on to the moment. We tell ourselves we will revisit. Nobody’s going back to those 55 fireworks photos. But we took them anyway. Our camera roll knows the truth. There’s something mono no aware about this. Or maybe just our reflex against losing those moments.

Once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere. It’s the last evening of a holiday. You’re still there in a beautiful moment, but something starts shifting. You become aware of the passing. And that awareness changes everything, including how you experience the moment. The holiday is still there. But you know it’s ending. And that knowing is the feeling.

Funny thing is… sometimes not knowing is a feeling too. Take the spinning top climax of Inception. The whole theatre is holding its breath. Will it fall? It feels like it’s starting to wobble… and then it cuts to black. The whole theatre wanted one more second. Just one more second with that spinning top. But Nolan doesn’t give it. And that ache of not getting it… is what made it more beautiful than any answer.

If cherry blossoms bloomed all year, nobody would look up. If a song never ended, it would just become noise. If a holiday never ended, it would just become another Monday. We need the ending to feel the thing. Maybe beauty doesn’t fade. It only exists because it fades.

The petal is most beautiful between the branch and the ground.

The blossoms are still on my timeline. For now.

物の哀れ。

If this stayed with you and you’d like to connect on X → @rajavijayaraman

Designing for the Aliens

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Millions of species share this planet with us.

Elephants grieve. Octopuses solve puzzles. Dolphins call each other by name. Dogs have been sleeping at the foot of our bed since the Ice Age. We love them. They love us. And we’re still guessing what they’re thinking. Usually, the guess is food.

We’ve lived together for thousands of years. And we still can’t have a real conversation with any of them.

So if we can’t talk to the species that share our own world… how could we ever talk to something from another planet?

We have no idea. But we keep trying. And for questions science can’t answer yet, there’s always art. Movies are where humanity prototypes impossible conversations. In a way, every one of these films is an attempt to build an interface for our first contact.

Each one took a different direction. Some said feeling is enough. Some asked if conversation is even possible. Some went further and designed an entirely new system. I went down that rabbit hole… exploring their design choices.

2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968

Kubrick chose silence.

His alien never speaks. Not because it is arrogant. But because we wouldn’t understand if it did. The very reason we don’t explain our algebra to ants. The concept doesn’t fit inside their world. We’re their ants. Conversation isn’t just difficult. It’s meaningless.

Kubrick’s alien simply appears. Changes humanity and leaves. Which, if we’re totally honest, is exactly how our universe has interacted with us so far.

Look at the design of that alien. He didn’t imagine it to be a creature or a machine. It is just a black rectangle. No eyes. No hands. No interface. A shape so simple that if you showed it to a design client, they’d ask for their money back. Almost insulting. Insulting to a designer… Insulting to our expectations… Kubrick strips away every visual cue humans use to understand something. By removing every expected feature, he makes the alien truly alien. That’s why Kubrick is “Kubrick.”

In design, negative space isn’t empty. It’s intentional absence. The alien is pure negative space. It communicates by refusing to communicate. The absence is the message.

Kubrick’s answer was brutal. He said don’t even try. But what if someone imagined it differently?

E.T., 1982

Spielberg chose empathy.

He begins with a kid growing up after his parents’ divorce. Someone who already knows what it feels like to be alone and not understood. Then he places an alien in the same position. Separated from its family. Alone on a planet that doesn’t make sense.

Two strangers who don’t share a single word of the same language, on the same planet, trying to understand each other through a similar feeling.

For Spielberg, that was enough.

Spielberg has often said his parents’ divorce shaped E.T. So the biggest communication gap in that movie isn’t between planets. It is across the dinner table. The alien just made the distance visible.

Look at how he designed the alien as an interface. With eyes that big, emotion becomes the first thing you notice. Emotion is the data. The face is the display. Every expression on E.T.'s face mirrors a child’s emotion. Fear. Wonder. Joy. Loneliness. The design isn’t trying to impress us. It is trying to connect with us.

Spielberg practiced empathic design before the term even existed. He didn’t ask, “How should the alien look?” He asked, “How should the alien make you feel?” Form followed feeling.

Everything about his alien is built for emotional readability. The alien is just a way for us to recognize ourselves. The alien becomes a mirror.

But mirrors work only when the reflection looks like us. What if the alien has no emotions to mirror? What if empathy isn’t universal? Enter Carl Sagan.

Contact, 1997

Carl Sagan chose math.

His alien signal was built on prime numbers. Sagan believed that if two intelligences exist in the same universe, math might be the one thing they can have in common.

When humanity made its first real attempt to contact, the Voyager Golden Record, we sent a bit of everything… sounds, music, images, greetings. But the instructions for reading it were drawn as simple diagrams built using mathematics. Because we assumed numbers might be the only language any intelligence could understand.

It’s a product designed for a user that might not exist. We shipped it anyway. Talk about shipping before product–market fit.

But here’s the strange thought. Math feels universal to us… but it was still invented by humans who live with a specific gravity, specific senses, and specific dimensions. We didn’t discover math the way we discovered fire. We built it. Piece by piece. Because we needed it. To survive, measure, and understand our world. Everything starts with the need. We invented zero because we needed a way to represent nothing. A species that has never experienced absence might have no use for it.

The Piraha people in the Amazon don’t have words for exact numbers. Their math is basically “small” and “large.” Because… They never needed precise counting.

But for Us?! We need exact numbers along with calculus. Otherwise, how would we figure out how late our Amazon delivery will be?

I’m not second-guessing Sagan. Maybe math is universal. Or maybe it’s not. Honestly, I have no idea. Math and I started having some issues around the time algebra class started. Either way, Sagan made the best bet anyone could. I would have just sent Lumy’s App Store link and hoped for a download.

Math is elegant. But it’s cold. What if the alien was like me? Hated maths.

PK, 2014

Rajkumar Hirani chose touch.

Hirani placed his alien in the most linguistically and socially divided place. His answer to alien communication was the simplest one… touch.

His alien holds someone’s hand, and it downloads everything… memories, feelings, language, even the lies people tell themselves.

Funny on the surface. Fascinating underneath.

In a place where human-built systems like region, religion, caste, and class divide people, touch becomes the only honest option. Before we learned to argue, persuade, preach, or manipulate with words, humans knew how to hold someone’s hand.

Think about the design of that idea. Language is slow. Words arrive one after another. It takes time to explain what we feel. Hirani’s alien bypasses all that. Just a direct transfer of experience from one mind to another. No progress screen. No consent pop-up.

The alien ends up understanding people better than anyone in the movie. Because he communicates without the one thing that humans keep using to confuse each other. Words.

Touch worked because it skipped everything humans built. But what if you can’t touch? What if the person you need to reach is on the other side of time?

Interstellar, 2014

Christopher Nolan chose gravity.

In Nolan’s world, beings from the far future don’t use words to talk to the past. They use gravity. The messages appear as small disturbances. Books that fall. A watch hand that ticks. None of it looks like a conversation. It all looks like a coincidence. Nolan imagines a universe where coincidence has a mechanism… and that mechanism is love. Not as a metaphor. As an actual force that guides the message home.

Technically, Nolan’s aliens are us… from the far future. Give humans enough time and distance, and we start to look alien to each other.

Think about gravity for a second. It’s actually the weakest force in nature. You defeat it every time you pick up your coffee mug. You don’t even think about it. You just grab the mug and win against a fundamental force of the universe. The refrigerator magnet easily overpowers the gravity of our entire planet. And somehow, Nolan turns that tiny force into a message that can cross time. Which makes gravity a strange kind of language. Weak. But impossible to ignore. And Nolan gave that language to a father.

For years, the daughter believed her father had abandoned her. She was angry. She stopped waiting. But the whole time, he was right there. In the dust behind the bookshelf. In the ticking of the clock.

That’s the cruelest and most beautiful part.

A message isn’t complete when it’s sent. It’s only complete when the receiver is ready to receive it. Even the universe has to wait… until someone is ready to listen.

Gravity has been speaking to us all along. A sandglass measuring time through falling grains. Leaves falling, signaling autumn. Snow settling on branches, signaling winter. An apple falling, revealing something about the universe to Newton. A tear rolling down a cheek. We’ve been reading gravity our whole lives. We just never thought of it as a language. Nolan did.

I freaking love this movie.

All the previous films tried to design a bridge between two minds. Villeneuve imagines something stranger. What if crossing the bridge changes the traveler? Somewhere along that crossing, he ruined design hierarchy for me.

Arrival, 2016

Of course, Villeneuve chose visual language. This is the director who gave us Dune. What else would his aliens use? Words?! Honestly, if his aliens had talked… I would have been personally offended.

His aliens don’t experience time the way we do. So their language is not a straight line. Each sentence is written as a circle, where the whole idea appears at once instead of unfolding word by word. Once we learn their language, something shifts… It changes how the mind perceives time. The future stops feeling like a guess. It starts feeling like a memory. Imagine learning a language and suddenly remembering tomorrow like we would remember yesterday. It’s wild.

For Villeneuve, communication isn’t just translation. It’s a transformation. We learn their language… our mind begins to work like theirs. To truly understand something alien, we might have to become a little alien ourselves.

Think about the circle as a design choice. Every human writing system moves in one direction. Left to right. Right to left. It always has a start and a finish. This one doesn’t have a clear starting point. Because it is meant to be understood all at once.

As a designer, I spend my professional life creating hierarchies… what the eye sees first, where the finger goes first. I never imagined designing without it. Their language feels like it has no hierarchy. Everything seems equally important. The whole idea of “first” disappears. It makes me feel like the hierarchy in our design is less of a principle and more of a human limitation.

Hang on… is experiencing everything at once really an alien-only thing?

Maybe we do feel something like that sometimes. In moments of awe. Think about being awestruck by a beautiful sunset. There’s no hierarchy in a sunset. We don’t notice the sun first, then the orange, then the clouds. It all arrives together. For a brief moment, the brain stops prioritizing things. Nothing is “first.” Nothing is “background.” We simply stand there and absorb it.

Maybe that’s what awe is. We design our entire lives around hierarchy. What matters most. What comes first. What’s urgent. And then a sunset shows up and our brain just… stops sorting. For a few seconds, nothing is more important than anything else. That might be the closest we get to thinking like this alien.

Sorry, like Villeneuve’s language… My mind usually wanders in circles. Let me circle back.

The design here isn’t decoration. The shape of the language is the philosophy of the species.

Also, each one asked how we might talk to aliens. Villeneuve asked what happens… when we do.

Closing Thought

Every filmmaker projected something human onto the alien. Kubrick projected our insignificance. Spielberg projected our loneliness. Sagan projected our logic. Hirani projected our contradiction. Nolan projected our love. Villeneuve made me question my design thinking.

Maybe alien movies are really about… how do two minds meet when they share nothing in common?

I should probably mention something. Every time I visit a friend who has a dog, I freeze. I don’t know if it wants to play with me or wants me gone.

Some humans can’t even talk to the dog in the room… yet we’re designing interfaces for beings from another galaxy. Designers everywhere have a habit of solving problems that don’t exist yet.

I started this as a quick preamble to a movie I’m excited about. Then curiosity took over.

Anyway… back to the reason this whole thing started. There’s a new alien movie coming.

And… It is shot by Greig Fraser. I’m pretty sure I could watch a blank wall for two hours if Greig lit and shot it. Now he gets space.

So yeah… I’m so excited for

Project Hail Mary.

Another attempt at designing an interface for the unknown. And the dog is still looking at us, waiting.

Disclaimer: I’m a designer who loves movies. The observations above are my interpretations based on what I watched and things I’ve read online. So if something here makes a Kubrick scholar flinch or a Nolan fan disagree… that’s completely unintentional. Just remember, this is written out of curiosity, not expertise.

If this stayed with you and you’d like to connect on X → @rajavijayaraman

Designing a Slider for Feeling

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is this moment in the Ferrari Luce video (around 1:12) where someone turns a temperature knob and we see a small red bar appear on the right over the scale, indicating how far we’ve moved from where we started.

That bar got stuck in my head. Like, unreasonably stuck. Why a bar? Why not just show the number and move on? Why would someone go that extra mile?

The more I thought about it, that delta made sense because most of the time, temperature isn’t about destination. It’s more of a negotiation.

For most sliders, we don’t care where we started. But temperature? We’re tuning a feeling. We’re trying to land on something that feels right. That’s why showing the distance from “before” to “current” felt meaningful for me.

I loved the fact that someone cared this much about temperature control and went that extra mile to put that delta bar (that’s what the LLMs named it) there.

As someone who loves designing things… I wanted to bring that same care to a touchscreen. So I tried rebuilding it.

I kept a few things. Changed a few things and also added a few things.

Normally, this is where I’d close Xcode and move on with my life. But this time, I thought… why not drag everyone into this with me 😊

The Gradient Bar

In the Luce, the indicator bar is flat. Red for hot. Blue for cold. I wanted it to say more.

So I made it a gradient.

Here, the color shifts from the temperature we started at… to the temperature we’re heading toward. A flat bar just shows distance. But I believe the gradient can say more… the thermal band we’re crossing… “moving from cool into warm” instead of “moved some amount”.

The Knob Arcs

The knob uses two arcs. Red anchored at the top. Blue at the bottom. As we drag, one grows and the other shrinks. At the extremes, the dominant arc becomes a full circle.

We don’t need to read the number to know our zone. The color tells us at a glance. The number gives us precision. The arc gives us a feeling. The numbers are there just to confirm what the colors already told us.

The Lifted Knob

In the Luce, the temperature readout lives on a display and the physical knob sits beneath it. Input and output are naturally separated.

On a touch screen, the knob is both. Our finger hides exactly what it’s trying to change.

So during a drag, the knob lifts. It rises above our finger.

A thin line appears below our touch, anchoring where our finger is. For a brief moment, it splits into two. One for our hand. One for our eyes. Our finger knows where it is. Our eyes know what it’s doing. When we let go, they become one again.

The Scale

In the Luce, the scale sits on the right and stays fixed. That works because the physical knob is below the display. Our hand is nowhere near the readout.

On a touch screen, it’s different. Our hand is the input. And depending on which hand we use, one side is always blocked. So I made the scale configurable. It can sit on either side, depending on which hand is dragging.

I also made the thermometer indicator below change based on the temperature zone. I’m not sure it’s even needed. The knob already tells us where we are. In traditional cars, that indicator is just painted. It never changes. Nobody ever complained. It worked fine for decades.

But these are the kinda things I like to explore. If not… What’s the point of going digital if we’re not going to overthink every pixel.

There’s more I could go into, but I’ll stop here.

It’s a car I’ll never own. An interface I’ll never get to touch. This is the only way I can get close to experiencing it, by interpreting the maker’s care.

Will any of this ship? Maybe. Maybe not. But somewhere between the gradient bar and the lifted knob, this Valentine’s weekend was well spent. Designing a slider for feeling.

If this stayed with you and you’d like to connect on X → @rajavijayaraman