Facebook engineer Jason Barrett Prado answers the question What was it like to help develop Paper?
Paper was designed on a principle: content should be respected. Facebook is supposed to be like a glass through which you can see its contents. This has been an aspirational goal for a long time, but in reality many of the pixels on the screen in our products are not content, they are chrome.
If we are trying to respect content, we should minimize chrome in a radical way. Everything on screen should be a user’s content, whether it’s their picture, their name, their posts, or their photos. Paper has almost nothing on screen except for user-generated content.
[…] Facebook can be beautiful, but I feel that the design of previous Facebook products does not inspire users to create and post beautiful content. I hope that Paper does.
Don’t miss the details on Facebook vs. Apple culture, the team’s experiments with organizing content, and the challenge of rendering animations on multiple threads.