Apple's Ive brings software, hardware teams together in push for 'flat design' - Page 3

 

Inspirational...

 

That was the exact word I came up with while reading the article!

 

Also,  I had the impression that the subject of the article could have been almost anything -- it was so well presented...

 

Now, that's a UX.

Damn_Its_Hot: "not so much skeuomorphism but still some drop shadows and animation"

Isn't that called 'Almost Flat'? <-serious question

(Sorry, not sure how to partially quote)

Uh, I don't want iOS to be MORE simple. I just want to be able to upload a damn PDF file to the Internet after 6 years...

I think they mean simpler design not simpler functionality.

"iOS needs a little of this, all the shiny glass effect is getting a little old."

 

An interface should be attractive (whatever that means to you and you and you and me) as you're going to look at it every time you use the device. It should allow you to achieve what's needed in the most elegant way without getting in the way. The rest is fashion.

 

Old? The sistine chapel and the Mona Lisa are old but I don't hear people complaining! If iOS had begun flat like Android (as I believe it is not having studied one myself) or Windows phones and then they started bringing in more rounded and glossy styles then people would be saying ""iOS needs a little of this, all this matt texture is getting a little old." People on this board (bored?) have said that they may "consider a Samsung phone next as iOS is looking tired now".

 

Fashion is in. Then out. Then in. Now you can be retro cool and have what was derided 10 years ago and pay a fortune for it. At the time of course it's never fashion, it's just the way things make sense.

 

There seems to be a fashion in newer iOS apps for stripping out interface elements and using gestures. That could work as long as each app maker agrees on what all these new gestures should do otherwise it's back to the 70s when each application was an exciting path of discovery as you worked out how to quit because nothing in the previously used application would give you any guidance at all. As I recall, they had a fairly "flat" interface with no menus, mice, icons or gestures. No that's really minimal design. :)

 

Err, Command-Q

 

iPhoto, like Aperture, System Preferences and other applications have only one window and when you close that window the app quits. Safari, like Numbers, Pages and so on can have multiple windows and so closing one does not quit the application.

 

If that's what you're referring to. It's always been that way as far as I know.

If anyone wanted generic flat squares with text. Windows 8 would be king.


Ive is a hardware guy, what does he really know about software design?

Possibly neither. At least in the past, a project team would be put together for a new product of significance, pulling talent from any group necessary. The team would report to its leader, who would report directly to Jobs.

If there is no history behind them and we are not taught from grade 1 about the marvels of these masterpieces, would they still be held in such high regard?

There seems to be misunderstanding here that the foundation of flat design is primarily about removing shadows, sheen and figurative metaphors. That would be wrong.

The sistine chapel would be a marvel without pre-knowledge or history. Mona Lisa ... that's interesting one to ponder.

If flat means more grayness, then god help us. I cannot stand the finder ever since the color left the icons.

The Sistine Chapel would laughably OTT had it not been for the pre knowledge of history. It would probably be dismissed as a crazy man's work.

Hah - those images speak a million words. It shows how design is a living thing. Do nothing and it moves backwards. Aqua was awesome looking when not first came out - so fresh and errr .... NEW.

The idea that better display tech has helped shape the development of the design is interesting. It is hard to make low res minimalist design 'pop'. High res allows for definition with less use of 'effects' such as shadows and borders.

Mind you - OS - 5 and 6 were necessarily minimalist (or simplified) due to a lack of screen tech.

To even compare the Sistine chapel to an operating system... I don't know what to say. Why do we always have to stray from common grounds?

A lot of people are complaining about the look of iOS. It can't change every year, but it has to change. Trends in design and general trends change. People want stuff that is different, that's just how markets work. I have no doubt that iOS7 will be different than what it is now. I'm just impatient to see it because I'm sure it'll look great. I have a lot of confidence in Ive, who wouldn't?

 

 

 

Here are some ideas I had.

I don't see the point in emulating glass on the screen when the screen itself is made of glass. Better try and use that glass in combination with textures to give it a unified look. Until now, the UI totally ignored the fact that there is glass on the screen.

In other words, a great artist. :)

There are more pertinent usability issues other than flatness, texture or colors. On the iPad Mini, for example, text fields are too small in some cases (possibly such as that shown above). The UX could be dramatically improved if this sort of issues are taken into account and can be optimized automatically for each device. This is the type of challenge Ive is facing now that he has not confronted before in hardware design. 

 

On a separate issue, I too questioned Ive's qualifications when his new role was first announced. But here is a consideration: Ive is an industrial designer and not an engineer. Yet, his designs have to accommodate chips and other electronic components whose form factors he does not control. Somehow, he has managed to work cohesively with the likes of Mansfield and seems to be the lead on the overall hardware design. So, with humility, an open mind and an eagerness to learn, he will do fine blending all aspects to deliver a truly integrated device.

Sir Jony is a design guy. He just happens to design hardware.
Who are these "a lot of people". You have a survey? People don't like change for the sake of change. We are creatures of habit. Now if functionality dictates change, so be it.

I hope Ivy doesn't change too much with the os, honestly I like it the way it is. I don't want to see drastic change and hopefully they don't implement widgets and live wallpapers and a bunch of software features that nobody will use anyways. I like ios the way it is and they shouldn't change what their core beliefs are.

If the implication is that he could have easily been a software designer instead, I would disagree with that, very strongly. Very, very different skill sets. Doesn't mean he couldn't lead software UX design. But doesn't mean he just happened to end up being a industrial designer.

Good post.  The candy-colored seersucker look was Forstall's contribution, and while some may have liked it I think most of us are glad to see a return to a simpler motif.

 

In many ways, the current OS X is a return to its NeXT roots:  with a predominantly monochrome palette, it places emphasis on user content over OS controls.

 

In general, the current look of OS X is very much like NeXT, just lighter and more inviting (and without NeXT's gawdawfully space-wasting menu widget <g>).

Depends what you mean by "software designer". Just like with hardware, you do have to interact with the software. He may not be a coder but he can certainly say, do we need all these buttons? Is there a better way to get to this? It has to be intuitive.

 

"Taste" is a variable thing though.  One person's "tasteful" is another person's horror.  

 

If you think Ive has "taste" you should check out some of the clothes he wears sometimes and his house.  Both of which are horrors if you are a person that knows about sartorial style, architecture, or interior design.  The fact that Ive is good at Industrial design does not necessarily mean he has "great taste" (on everything else).  This is just a popular misconception that non-artists and non-designers have about life.  

I think sometimes Industrial Designers get knocked as just being stylists (someone on macrumors referred to Ive as someone whose job is to draw pretty pictures for engineers to build).  But Ive told the BBC in an interview that the design he practices is "part fine art, part engineering".  So he might not have an engineering degree but I'm sure he knows plenty about the engineering behind the products he helps design.

He's an intelligent person with an instinct (developed over years) for what's essential to a thing and what's superfluous. I think that instinct could be applied to GUI design.

What does Ive's choice in clothes have to do with anything?  Most pictures I've seen of him he's in a t-shirt and jeans. You don't need to dress like a metrosexual to have taste in product design. And not sure what house you're referring to but if its the one he bought last year who's to say he's not remodeling the whole thing?  According to this site: http://dbiweb.sfgov.org/dbipts/default.aspx?page=AddressData2&ShowPanel=BID he's applied for numerous building permits totaling $1.8M.  H many people buy a house and leave it decorated the way the previous owners had it?

 

No, it's UI design. Design begets functionality, but they're not the same.

 

You've named 2 of 0. Neither of those things are UI design. The bubble that shows up WHEN you have words selected: THAT is UI design. The method by which you bring up said bubble and the method by which the action is carried out are functionality.

 

I said design, remember.

 

Okay… I see "user interface is functionality" but not "UI design is functionality". So you're claiming I'm not standing on the railroad tracks because YOU'RE standing on the tracks and you don't see me here, when in reality you're on a parallel line. You're looking straight ahead and here I am by your side, waving at you and gesturing at where our tracks split a few yards back.

 

When you quote a post, simply move the cursor up into the quote box and delete what you don't want to quote.

Edited by Tallest Skil - 3/22/13 at 10:18am

Actually, it doesn't have to be intuitive. But that's another point for another day.

 

Many if not most industrial designers have one of two traits if not both - (1) they have some measure of artistic talent and a keen eye for geometry, particularly in 3D; (2) they are able to understand and evaluate material properties and manufacturing methods, if not actually build things themselves.

 

In the old days, most industrial designers were men and most had sketches of their dream machines (usually cars, but sometimes planes, boats or buildings) on their desk. Nowadays, of course, CAD and CAE software is de rigueur.

 

While designers are not trained in mathematical foundations of engineer, they do have to understand material properties and manufacturing method in order to design parts and products that can be machined and assembled, not to mention built economically and efficiently, as well as have the desirable durability. They also have to consider environmental factors - where/how manufacturing happens, where/how product will be used - as well as safety, often not factors that software designers need to concern themselves with.

 

In the old days of software, UX or UI was an afterthought. In more recent years, some software coders became UX or UI specialists. The advent of web design produced a class of UI specialists who are not coders. While this works fine for websites, it is often a serious mistake for software development, particularly when there is a real machine and not just a common computer that makes up the machine part of HMI. Why? Because only a real software developer can appreciate the layer behind the arrangement of buttons. There are factors such as latency, exception handling, security, design patterns, responsiveness (or lack of), scalability, etc. which are not common considerations in the world of industrial design.

 

All to say, Ive became an industrial designer because his passions and talents drove him there. They are very, very different from the passions and talents found in software designers, whether you are talking about software design in general or UI design.

 

Unfortunately, there is too much talk of design nowadays that it has been dumbed down to a matter of aesthetics. This makes it easy to assume that there is a large intersection between industrial design and software design. As someone else wrote earlier, that's just wrong.

Edited by ankleskater - 3/22/13 at 8:49am

 

Huh?

 

Gruber might be clever, but Siracusa is a genius!

Edited by Ireland - 3/22/13 at 11:18am

 

I was thinking the same thing last night. But then again the OS also exists independent of apps themselves. There's a lot there to clean up. I hope to God they work on Notes next. It's an abysmal use of the iPads screen in landscape, and frankly is highly unusable by Apple's standards and is butt ugly. I'd also like iOS 7 to see Apple introduce to iPad dedicated default Calculator and Weather apps. They would be highly useful.

 

He helped with the design of iOS 1.0 according to Loren Brichter, who worked on the original iPhone team. He may not have physically done it, but he definitely had input. Just like Steve Jobs didn't code or do physical software or hardware design, but impacted all of it.

 

I think design decisions are FAR more important than the actual work.

Edited by Ireland - 3/22/13 at 11:27am

Good point about OS v. app. What is Apple interested in "cleaning up" first?

 

The update does? Where?

 

Spot on.

 

Taste in music, yes, but taste in deciding how many buttons an interface must have and how they look is a different matter. Besides, most people with good taste have logical arguments for why they would like something a certain way.

Edited by Ireland - 3/22/13 at 1:29pm

The same analogy has been used by a few people on the forum. The Mac Pro isn't Apple's 'halo car'. A halo car is something that people with everyday cars desire and they tend to be sports cars. People with iPads, iMacs, MBPs etc don't want to have a large workstation. This was all talked about in the following threads where the Chevy was used as an example of the halo car:

http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/152825/future-of-mac-pro/80
http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/156051/mac-pro-no-longer-available-from-european-online-apple-stores/40

Feel free to bump those. If you check out NVidia's recent presentation, you can see them using remote servers running 8 GPUs and allowing remote sessions on MBPs as well as interactive movie quality visual effects on 100+ GPUs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFE5KU3AiIU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRdSxZtUpFk

That's something a single workstation can't achieve natively. The thing with halo cars is there's nothing better. Servers will always outclass a single workstation. It doesn't make them entirely irrelevant but the analogy being used doesn't hold up at all. It's just more noise about why Apple shouldn't change things.

To bring it more in line with the thread, Apple makes changes for the better whether it's hardware or software design. They rarely regress what they do. UIs have always been overly flashy, even unintentionally because UI elements have a purpose and the design tends to highlight that purpose and inadvertently makes it stand out. It's like the close/resize/minimize buttons. The colors are there to help distinguish their function but the colors make them stand out because they contrast with everything else.

Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. The toning down of aqua was good, the scrollbars are much nicer now. The removal of colors from the home folder icons and iTunes shortcuts was not necessarily so good because it makes it harder to quickly distinguish the folders. It does arguably look more refined though. They might make iOS look more refined and elegant at the expense of efficiency. Say they changed the red color on the delete buttons to grey. It might look more refined but it doesn't convey a sense that pressing the button is something you might want to think twice about. Colors and shapes have associations that are shared by a lot of people and without them, they can make things look nicer but take away some meaning.

I don't think they will make the decisions lightly (like 'get rid of the leather'). Some people seem to assume that Forstall was responsible for every element of bad design in iOS and Ive will right every wrong. There's no way that the entire design rested on one person so there will be elements in iOS that people don't like and that teams of people decided was ok and will continue to decide are ok.

But despite the added input, no drastic modifications to iOS are expected for the near future.


So it seems we'll have to wait for iOS 8 in 2014 to see what Ive and his colleagues have come up with. Shame really I was hoping to see the new 'flat' by Jony in iOS 7.

That's using the term genius rather lightly, with all due respect to Siracusa.