From the article:
Today we’re going to talk a little about how it came to look like that. Near the end of July 2012, the core group of Shadowrun developers/authors/management met up in Seattle to talk about a new edition of the game. At that time we had a good idea of what was on the table as far as rules tweaks and changes to game mechanics, so we spent a lot of time talking about presentation of the books themselves. How would it look on your shelf? How would it be presented in a store? How do we stay true to the Shadowrun look?