Honestly, does it matter what kind of designer you are as long as you have a good visual aesthetic and understanding of usability and how people will see, interpret, feel, and use your product from end-to-end? Isn't "graphic designer" just a pigeon-hole limiting title that doesn't really mean squat when thinking about product design at a high-level?
Apple, in the past, has gotten things right because they thought about product correctly at every level. I don't see why we should think they will change this habit.
The most interesting subtext to this entire story to me is that Jony Ive, under Jobs, was a hardware designer.
In Job's biography we see that Ive's "design studio has foam cutting and printing machines, and the windows are tinted." (1) - hardware is what he's done, that's what he's won awards for
His aesthetic is unimpeachable w/hardware IMO, but I am so curious to see how his talents translate to software and usability.
He is an industrial designer by training (I read the title and said to myself "of course - he's an industrial designer"). Physical products are what industrial designers generally do. Foam cutting and printing machines are a common tool of the trade.
There are, however, few organizations which strongly value industrial design enough to employ a serious team of them. Young industrial design graduates have a very hard time finding work in the field.
In some ways the question becomes how much Jobs he can channel..
What I mean is that he likely (obviously?) has a very good design instincts and aesthetic sense with respect to hardware. But can he lean on and lead a team to something innovative and new when he might not be the hands on designer he's been in the past. I think there's always a question how well "design" translates across various design disciplines.
How much discussion of the iOS design overhaul, based on fourth-hand accounts of what somebody might have seen once as they walked past an office, will we have to endure over the next month? It's driving me nuts. Roughly nobody knows what it's actually going to look like, but everyone seems to think they're still very qualified to comment.
I don't mind the discussion as long as there's some hint of intelligence to it. My problem is that people are so stuck in this "here and now" mentality that they can't think outside of the box even a little bit. Example: the banter about the "flat" UI. Did anyone even consider that a design can not be skeuomorphic and ALSO not be flat? The flat interface is Google's and Microsoft's thing -- why would Apple copy it directly, ESPECIALLY when there are well-documented UX issues with flat interfaces?
The fact that people have already 1) claimed to know exactly the path that Apple is taking and 2) have already made opinions about said path is what is entirely frustrating.
So long as people click on those pages, everyone with even the most minute point will write to their hearts' content. I'm surprised that this page didn't have a million ads on it
"Touch" screens with styluses have been available since the 90's if you will, but they were a completely different beast than the first iPhone, and what we have today.
Yeah, and Windows Mobile devices with touch screens had been around for quite a while before the iPhone came out...
Ex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard
I call those ‘poke’ devices, not ‘touch’ devices. On resistive displays, you really need to press hard for the device to register your action. That gets tiring, so people would use a stylus to poke at it instead. Anoher reason for the stylus was that the interfaces often weren’t made with fingers in mind, so the targets were way too small.
His employer has done absolutely nothing to either make him the face of the brand or mention him a lot, unless you consider a couple of obligatory press releases as being a media blitzkrieg. Your perception comes from people theorizing about the situation a lot on the Internet, which is very different from anybody marketing anything.
He is a UX/Visual designer, of course the design is going to be more than skin deep. Skeumorphism impacts everything about UX. Think about the desktop model, from that we got folders, which had files in them.
Compare that to throwing out the desktop model. Now you have an image gallery, you select an image. You do not dig through folders of images, instead you look by context. Maybe that context is dates, maybe it is locations, or maybe it is whose faces that were auto detected in the images.
Things like auto-tagging location and faces are features that stem largely from the abandonment of skeumorphism, skeumorphism is a metaphor and as with all metaphors it is designed to make thinking about a new concept easier, but at the same time it is also limiting because all metaphors are limiting and imperfect.
Note that I have a very encompassing view of what UX designers do. The lead UX designer I work with oversees everything from physical hardware design to software, and indeed having integration between the two is very important. (Something Samsung could learn, if I had a dollar for every time my phone got put into Mute mode on the way into my pocket the phone would have long since paid for itself!)
"When the iPhone came out, nobody used touch devices. The signaling benefits of skeumorphism were very useful, especially since most iPhone buyers were buying their first iPhone."
I would hope so, the iPhone _was_ the first iPhone. It was not the first touch screen device, or the first smart phone.
The point was two-fold: first, existing touch-screen devices had tiny installed bases. He didn't say there were no touch devices, just that (approximately) nobody was using them. Second, people buying iPhones now are often existing iPhone users, and so they are already familiar with the way iOS works. Obviously, that wasn't the case in 2007. Both of these factors contribute to skeumorphism having been useful in the first iPhone and less useful now.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html?pagew...
Fair. I was more referring to the quote in it's entirety:
“The very fact that we’re talking about who’s going to design the icons, who’s going to design the applications and the operating system is a little bit of a concern. Because that’s not innovative,” she explains. ”What I’m interested in is not so much what they’re going to do about skeuomorphism, and those awful leather book pieces and daily planners, but a couple things that Apple didn’t hit the ground running. Like for today, Wii and Microsoft own gestural.”
“Apple kinda missed television and missed social,” she continues. “I’d be concerned that they’d miss natural user interfaces because they’re busy getting rid of skeuomorphism.”
I get what the author is trying to say but this post is all over the place. The conclusion does not have much to do with the ideas presented.
I agree, it's shallow to think that under Ive all we'll see is a reskin. A visual update along the lines of OSX's evolving window styles might be part of it, and perhaps the first step, but I would guess that by iOS8 we'll see big new ideas that make the OS even more intuitive.
iOS has developed a lot of cruft as new features and preferences were grafted onto the original release. Settings are a hierarchical mess and many of the default apps have inconsistent mental models that need to be reevaluated.
By advancing the touch-based UI, iOS brought a more analog (or hardware-like) type of interaction to software. I don't think that fact has been explored deeply enough, and I expect Jony Ive will bring those insights to the revamp.
Although iOS also has advances to make in inter-app communication and other areas, I expect Ive to be particularly interested in challenging the high-level HCI problems that are appearing as mobile OSs become more complex. He'll be a force for the much needed intuitiveness that has been eroded from iOS.
It will be interesting to see how Ive resolves the tension of a 21st-century digital device and its 20th-century analog interaction cues. Remember how the iPhone was the first device to have a black background in its launcher? And how when turned off it looked like a black slab? Nothing else looked like that before it came out. But then the faux leather and textures ... ugh. A reverse example would be the brushed aluminum of iTunes being used in the cartoony Windows interface.
"When the iPhone came out, nobody used touch devices... especially since most iPhone buyers were buying their first iPhone." Is iPhone already a synonym for smartphone?
Touch is very laggy on iPads. It's still eminently usable, and there's nothing better, so no one complains. But to an interaction expert like Ive, it must be really horrible - it certainly seems so to me.
In contrast, mouse-pointer movements are perceptually instant, and have been for many years.
Removing skeumorphism (and its heavy graphics) would help with this, as would the faster graphics, cpus and memory bandwidth in later iOS devices (there's surely a contribution to lag from the touch screen itself, but I don't know what it is).
So I hope this is what he's working towards. If it is, it will be something that everyone will love, without knowing beforehand that they needed it.
Touch on current devices is laggy because of inherent touch screen hardware restrictions. It has nothing to do with how much the CPU and GPU are utilized by the OS.
I don't understand this whole argument, nobody has really outed him as a designer. He's never said that he is either.
He's leading the changes, so he'd put some people to make his vision of iOS etc come true, why would he design the icons himself? Surely he has more important things to do.
You know what, this article makes more sense on What Ive is doing at Apple than any other I've read. That's why Apple is unique in the industry, because while the other guys are thinking - skeumorphic or flat - Ive is dealing with Human Experience of device/system. Everything else than that is a fad, and they come and go so fast, whereas we still have our senses and bodies unchanged.
A graphic designer is typically associated with print and advertising (typography, layout). A visual designer is typically associated with apps (icon design, look and feel, design language). Obviously there is a lot of overlap and it's not hard for a graphic designer to get a job as a visual designer (most of the ones I've worked with, and my wife, are trained graphic designers working in visual).
Now how about motion designers (visual specialty)? Or 3D model designers (visual but usually industrial or game designers in this role)? Or interaction designers (UX but not visual related)? Or visual production artists (not really design, but often done by visual designers)? Or visual designers who specialize in pixels vs. visual designers who specialize in vectors?
Can you explain the difference? There's a lot of sub-specialty naming in the field and very little in the way of standardization. I'd see those as basically interchangeable. I see a pretty big difference in UX vs. GD/VD — Boxes & Arrows vs. gradients and brand elements, but I'd love to how you divide them.
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
Apple, in the past, has gotten things right because they thought about product correctly at every level. I don't see why we should think they will change this habit.
[+] [-] namank|13 years ago|reply
This is the foundation of design (all kinds) and, what I think, the post is about.
[+] [-] aresant|13 years ago|reply
In Job's biography we see that Ive's "design studio has foam cutting and printing machines, and the windows are tinted." (1) - hardware is what he's done, that's what he's won awards for
His aesthetic is unimpeachable w/hardware IMO, but I am so curious to see how his talents translate to software and usability.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive
[+] [-] twelvechairs|13 years ago|reply
There are, however, few organizations which strongly value industrial design enough to employ a serious team of them. Young industrial design graduates have a very hard time finding work in the field.
[+] [-] vacri|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeryan|13 years ago|reply
What I mean is that he likely (obviously?) has a very good design instincts and aesthetic sense with respect to hardware. But can he lean on and lead a team to something innovative and new when he might not be the hands on designer he's been in the past. I think there's always a question how well "design" translates across various design disciplines.
[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmrfrmrf|13 years ago|reply
The fact that people have already 1) claimed to know exactly the path that Apple is taking and 2) have already made opinions about said path is what is entirely frustrating.
[+] [-] niggler|13 years ago|reply
So long as people click on those pages, everyone with even the most minute point will write to their hearts' content. I'm surprised that this page didn't have a million ads on it
[+] [-] r0s|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_sales
By the time the iPhone was released in 2007, more than 40 million DS units had been sold worldwide.
I think it was last year the iPhone managed to beat the DS for total combined sales.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kpao|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkbent|13 years ago|reply
DS had a stylus for a reason.
[+] [-] Samuel_Michon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cateye|13 years ago|reply
Making someone the face of the brand and mentioning him a lot seems to me just some marketing trick.
[+] [-] mwfunk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocean12|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] com2kid|13 years ago|reply
Compare that to throwing out the desktop model. Now you have an image gallery, you select an image. You do not dig through folders of images, instead you look by context. Maybe that context is dates, maybe it is locations, or maybe it is whose faces that were auto detected in the images.
Things like auto-tagging location and faces are features that stem largely from the abandonment of skeumorphism, skeumorphism is a metaphor and as with all metaphors it is designed to make thinking about a new concept easier, but at the same time it is also limiting because all metaphors are limiting and imperfect.
Note that I have a very encompassing view of what UX designers do. The lead UX designer I work with oversees everything from physical hardware design to software, and indeed having integration between the two is very important. (Something Samsung could learn, if I had a dollar for every time my phone got put into Mute mode on the way into my pocket the phone would have long since paid for itself!)
[+] [-] Confusion|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmolden|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloha|13 years ago|reply
I would hope so, the iPhone _was_ the first iPhone. It was not the first touch screen device, or the first smart phone.
[+] [-] cwp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkbent|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riffic|13 years ago|reply
"What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts." — Ray Eames
[+] [-] Sevores|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyro|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkbent|13 years ago|reply
“The very fact that we’re talking about who’s going to design the icons, who’s going to design the applications and the operating system is a little bit of a concern. Because that’s not innovative,” she explains. ”What I’m interested in is not so much what they’re going to do about skeuomorphism, and those awful leather book pieces and daily planners, but a couple things that Apple didn’t hit the ground running. Like for today, Wii and Microsoft own gestural.”
“Apple kinda missed television and missed social,” she continues. “I’d be concerned that they’d miss natural user interfaces because they’re busy getting rid of skeuomorphism.”
EDIT: This is the quote from Wired that I called asinine. I don't agree with it. Wired link: http://www.wired.com/design/2013/05/what-jony-ive-needs-to-d...
[+] [-] kepano|13 years ago|reply
I agree, it's shallow to think that under Ive all we'll see is a reskin. A visual update along the lines of OSX's evolving window styles might be part of it, and perhaps the first step, but I would guess that by iOS8 we'll see big new ideas that make the OS even more intuitive.
iOS has developed a lot of cruft as new features and preferences were grafted onto the original release. Settings are a hierarchical mess and many of the default apps have inconsistent mental models that need to be reevaluated.
By advancing the touch-based UI, iOS brought a more analog (or hardware-like) type of interaction to software. I don't think that fact has been explored deeply enough, and I expect Jony Ive will bring those insights to the revamp.
Although iOS also has advances to make in inter-app communication and other areas, I expect Ive to be particularly interested in challenging the high-level HCI problems that are appearing as mobile OSs become more complex. He'll be a force for the much needed intuitiveness that has been eroded from iOS.
[+] [-] williwu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecane|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyberias|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6ren|13 years ago|reply
In contrast, mouse-pointer movements are perceptually instant, and have been for many years.
Removing skeumorphism (and its heavy graphics) would help with this, as would the faster graphics, cpus and memory bandwidth in later iOS devices (there's surely a contribution to lag from the touch screen itself, but I don't know what it is).
So I hope this is what he's working towards. If it is, it will be something that everyone will love, without knowing beforehand that they needed it.
[+] [-] kybernetyk|13 years ago|reply
There's some research done on reducing the latency. For example Microsoft's work: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=160...
[+] [-] wiremine|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbrooksuk|13 years ago|reply
He's leading the changes, so he'd put some people to make his vision of iOS etc come true, why would he design the icons himself? Surely he has more important things to do.
[+] [-] morganwilde|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylerhowarth|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|13 years ago|reply
Now how about motion designers (visual specialty)? Or 3D model designers (visual but usually industrial or game designers in this role)? Or interaction designers (UX but not visual related)? Or visual production artists (not really design, but often done by visual designers)? Or visual designers who specialize in pixels vs. visual designers who specialize in vectors?
The field is very diverse.
[+] [-] replicatorblog|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkbent|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HNLogInShit|13 years ago|reply
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