Designers

Today, Darrington Press, Critical Role’s tabletop role-playing game publisher, announced it has hired Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins, two of the lead designers for Dungeons and Dragons who recently departed the company. Perkins and Crawford will now serve as Darrington Press’ Creative Director and Game Director, respectively, according to an announcement on the company’s website.

This is a massive shakeup for the TTRPG world. Critical Role, known for its livestreamed games of Dungeons & Dragons played by high-profile voice actors, launched Darrington Press in 2020. While the company’s first projects were Critical Role adjacent, this year it released Daggerheart, a standalone role-playing game designed to compete with Dungeons & Dragons and other similar games. The cast is currently in the midst of a mini-arc using the game system, and fans have speculated the company might intend to move away from D&D entirely one day.

Daggerheart, the tabletop role-playing game from Critical Role, is a system that uses dice and cards to tell stories in a fantasy setting.

By bringing on Crawford and Perkins, Darrington Press’s pedigree increases significantly. The two have worked at Wizards of the Coast for many years (Crawford for 18, Perkins for 28), and are considered two of the primary architects behind Dungeons and Dragons’ extremely popular fifth edition and its 2024 overhaul of that ruleset. The designers were public spokespeople for the brand as well, appearing in videos to explain new books or playtests and even clarifying rules on social media. Shortly after the new books were released, however, Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford each announced they had decided to leave the company.

Their jump to Darrington is an unexpected move, to say the least, but it seems Wizards of the Coast was aware of the transition, making a point to congratulate the move on Bluesky. The pair also did an interview with The Los Angeles Times explaining their decision process and generally praising the Critical Role team.

The two will be “developing novel game concepts as well as expanding the games [Darrington has] released so far,” according to the announcement. This likely involves additions to Daggerheart, which launched a few weeks ago. For more Daggerheart and its inspirations, you can read our interview with its lead game designer, Spenser Starke.

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Apple’s translucent design update for iOS 26, called Liquid Glass, is now available to developers, with a public beta scheduled for next month. The refresh—Apple’s first major interface overhaul in 10 years—makes app icons, buttons, menus, and pop-ups look like they are made of frosted glass, with blurred background colors peeking through.

The sweeping software changes are not just for iPhones. This glassy look—inspired by the operating system in the Vision Pro headset—will eventually roll out to the entire suite of Apple devices, from smartwatches to iPads.

Courtesy of Apple

After the WWDC 2025 keynote concluded on Monday, many design-focused developers WIRED spoke with were impressed by the major update but had lingering questions about how this translucent look could impact readability for users.

“It’s hard to read some of it,” says Allan Yu, a product designer currently building the workplace messaging app Output. “Mainly because I think they made it too transparent.” Yu suggests bumping up the blurring or adjusting the backgrounds to make onscreen designs more readable.

“Similar to the first beta for iOS 7, what we’ve seen so far is rough on the edges and potentially veers into distracting or challenging to read, especially for users with visual impairments,” says Josh Puckett, cofounder of Iteration, which helps startups with designs. Still, Puckett is optimistic, based on Apple’s past accessibility features, that readability will improve over time.

Controls and navigation transform as you interact with the user interface.

Courtesy of Apple

Serhii Popov, a design-first software engineer at MacPaw, the company behind the CleanMyMac app, is curious to see how the new operating system will look on Macs in bright light situations, where glare already impacts visibility. But overall, Popov is enamored with this “really fresh” look from Apple. “I think it will make everything look bigger and allow you to read or interact with the UI with more comfort,” says Popov. For him, the new design and updates look especially sleek on iPads.

Beyond readability concerns, the first impression from some designers is that this new look could be unnecessarily distracting for users.

“From a technical perspective, it’s a very impressive effect. I applaud the time and effort it must have taken to mimic refraction and dispersion of light to such a high degree,” says Adam Whitcroft, a designer at Owner.com, which makes apps and websites for restaurants. “But, sadly I haven’t seen a single example of where it’s pulled off in a way that’s complementary to the broader context it’s presented in.” Whitcroft points to the dispersion and refraction of layers beneath the apps as visually distracting, especially as the user interface is changing layouts. “If you’ve designed a UI that draws the attention of the eye away from the wider context, you’ve gone down the wrong path,” he says.

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Critical Role’s Darrington Press Hires Two Legendary Dungeons & Dragons Game Designers

‘Beautiful’ and ‘Hard to Read’: Designers React to Apple’s Liquid Glass Update