“We started from a supposition of content being king, and we wanted to move the interface out of the way of the content. And that was a real rallying point when we all found a model for the UI, where we could dedicate up to 95% of the screen to image content and have the UI politely get out of the way, or be invoked as needed.” So says Phil Clevenger,
user interface designer on Lightroom. George Jardine chatted recently with Phil & engineering manager Mark Hamburg:

Phil and Mark sit down with George to talk about Phil’s role on the team and the user interface that he’s designed for Lightroom. The conversation quickly begins to wander and turn (as these conversations frequently do take on a life of their own…) to some of the broader questions surrounding Lightroom, and ends up touching on the core story and original vision for the project. This podcast also includes a description by Mark of some of his original thinking behind Lightroom’s modular design.

The podcast is available as an MP3 file via George’s iDisk (under "1127 Podcast – Phil Clevenger and Mark Hamburg"). It’s also be available via the Lightroom podcasts RSS feed, and by searching for "Lightroom" in iTunes.