Not a logo, but a "seal". The distinction makes sense, since the intricate design would not work well as logo I think. I found it beautiful, but obviously it's only "news" because of who created it.
Logo has to work in many more contexts. You probably aren't going to be embroidering a seal on a polo shirt, for example. A seal will go on your website and marketing pamphlets, but that's about it.
My next question would be is there an economic value of a seal? I would think slapping a logo on everything works all the same. Or am I wrong to think most (everyone except the creator?) people would not know or care about seeing a seal vs a logo.
A seal conveys a specific certification/endorsement while a logo is identifying a company/product/service/etc. For example, if you're a Microsoft Certified Solutions Engineer, slapping a Microsoft logo on your website doesn't convey that (and surely won't be appreciated by Microsoft).
As such, there is an argument that a seal refers to a physical object with physical imperfections, which are hard to reproduce. Note that the article is about the "design" for the seal, as distinct from the seal itself. Maybe the plan is to manufacture a physical seal off the design (complete with manufacturing imperfections) then use that to make impressions?
A complete tangent, but the design reminded me of one of the most beautifully illustrated children’s books I have ever read: Trouble for Trumpets. It was written in 1982 and still looks futuristic. Even at 40 I can leaf through it joyfully.
Thank you for reminding me about this book. It captived me as a young child. I must have seen it in a library. Unfortunately it seems impossible to aquire now, for less than a few hundred pounds.
Not a fan, seems derivative and low effort, the foliage diapering surely obscures the text too much to make a good seal (I guess with a proper depth mask it could work). The circumferential motto is standard seal/coin design, of course.
It's relatively good on austerity, mainly carried by the strong display type, or would be in the right colouring -- but not as a [wax] seal.
Should be more emblematic IMO. That doesn't mean it can't be intricate fwiw.
The deconstructed 7-ring version has some cleverness, I'll give you that. The rest is really generic and lacks overt symbology of historic [royal/government] seals IMO.
It doesn't matter though, they got what they wanted, Ive's name attached to provide publicity.
Not sure he's done yet. Good new fonts are a rare thing and he might be on to something.
With hdpi now very common, typography for screens can evolve. The stark minimalist typography of early computers was very much driven by the necessity of having very limited resolution, contrast, and dynamic range. Sans serif fonts like Helvetica, and its many derivatives, with its straight lines & simple curves were optimal for that type of screen. Serif fonts, with their fiddly details are a lot harder to render in a pleasing way on such screens.
However, with modern screens, those problems are addressed to the point where there is little practical difference in resolution between print and screen. So, making the most of modern screens through design becomes a challenge. Serif fonts are still popular for print for a good reason: they are pleasing to the eye and it helps readability. If you work from first principles to address such a challenge on a modern screen, you'd start with a font and a serif font would be not such a strange choice as it used to be.
Just my opinion, but both font and logo strike me as rather beautiful.
The fonts burned into CGA, EGA, and VGA bioses all had serifs. The default UI fonts on many X Window systems UIs, including CDE, were serif fonts. The 80-column card in the Apple IIe had a serif font.
There was really only the first-generation home computer (and arguably first-gen PDAs) that widely shipped strictly sans-serif fonts; a blip in the history of personal computing.
I cant wait for the serif revival. Soon we are going to return to much more intricate, embellished, and ornate design, just like the seal in the article. As you say, the new displays are gonna make it feasible.
Google is going to have to change their logo again!
One thing I always respected about MongoDB is they use a serif font for their logo in a time and age when virtually no startup would use such a thing. And then a sans-serif font for their products under it, so it really pops.
I think design in the early-90's has a chance of reemerging. Just lots of fonts being aggressively used and lots of serif fonts. Things that would make David Carson proud.
I changed my system font to IBM Plex Serif, my desktop theme to the old revered Motif-like style, and my colors to the pastel orange and teal palette of CDE. Never did it look so pleasant before.
The lead designer of the Apple Car joined LoveFrom earlier this year. Ferrari has a hybrid car. Apple's ID team doesn't just design the objects they design the manufacturing machines too - and have been able to reduce a lot of materials waste. Would expect their relationship to extend into things like electric vehicles and manufacturing techniques.
You need to warn people before posting this. I saw it when it popped up on HN and now I'm like Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense: I see dead butterflies, all the time. It changes a person.
Yeah, I think my partner is tired of me me mentioning it when we read our 15-month son picture books. (Some of the best that I remember are in the book Little You.)
Basically just that 95% of butterflies are drawn in unnatural stretched out death poses used by collectors to take better pictures for books. But that has become the reference material so they are drawn in poses that they can't do in life.
Butterflies feeding in the sun may fold their wings up to look like a sail, but other times you see them with wings stretched out.
Now, it’s true when you see a group of butterflies they are not uniformly in one position. But some of their positions coincide with those of pinned butterflies. It’s also true some pinned butterflies spread out their wings in extreme positions but not all are pinned like that —at least not by amateurs.
We have swarms of butterflies here every end of the summer and I can confirm that it is true. Plenty of those sitting with spread out wings, folded wings and all kind of in-betweens.
It’s not about whether the wings are open or closed, it’s that the “dead” ones are drawn with the wings raised up above the head. It’s as if people were always drawn with their arms raised straight in the air -- not an impossible posture but a pretty unusual one.
Not all the “dead” one are drawn to show and highlight their wing geometry and colors. Iconic ones, yes, typically, but some are drawn in flight, feeding, and wings fanned out but not unnaturally.
Now, iconic ones, yes, typically. But it’s the same for other exemplary of iconic models. When did you last see a toilet door with a natural picture of a person rather than an iconic outline?
The same could be said of lots of things.
When we have a concert T-shirt of a performer you more often than not get a more of less straight on shot. Or political candidates. You get their headshot not a profile pic or a pic of the backs of their heads.
Why should depictions of butterflies depart from a pose that exposes more of their recognizable and appreciated features?
What about flower photography? Why don’t they use shriveled up wilted flowers for Valentine’s Day? Why do they look for perfect specimens?
Sure, I get it, “ha ha, look you idiots that’s not the natural pose of butterflies, you guys and gals have been getting fooled and I’m not”
Not all the “dead” one are drawn to show and highlight their wing geometry and colors. Iconic ones, yes, typically, but some are drawn in flight, feeding, and wings fanned out but not unnaturally.
I just did a couple of image searches.
First, searching for "butterflies", I get many different photos of real butterflies in various postures. The most common is wings open, spread out horizontally. None of the real butterflies have their wings stretched upwards in the pinned-out posture.
Second, filtering the same search with "image type: clip art", fully 99% of the results have the wings spread out and stretched up. (The 1% is detailed, realistic drawings.)
Now, whether you care about this is another matter, but it's hard to deny that that article is onto something. There's a very consistent quirk in the way butterflies in particular are illustrated.
Sure, I get it, “ha ha, look you idiots that’s not the natural pose of butterflies, you guys and gals have been getting fooled and I’m not”
I think you're misreading the tone of that article and the people citing it. It's not anger or contempt; it's sadness that real living butterflies aren't widely understood, and hope that the stereotyped depiction can be improved on.
Off topic, but I just looked that up to get around the resource limit being reached without even stopping to think that someone might have already posted it lol
not the intended take, but I'd love to see fewer dead butterflies regardless of the posing. while the patterns on their wings are beautiful, butterflies are a particularly unpleasant insect to look at for me. I'd enjoy looking at beetles or flies more; something about the proportions of butterflies makes them rather awful
I'd be happy to. Something about their very long, skinny, dark bodies, especially their proboscis, is just horrid to me. From afar it's nice to see little colorful wings flapping around, but at any level of closer examination their bodies are almost as repulsive as spiders are to most people (though funny enough, I somewhat like spiders).
I see Ive getting blamed for how the macs were designed but isn't that to be expected when you put a designer at that level of decision making? Why not blame Tim Apple for letting him go that far.
Nothing says "we love the planet" more than a mountain of old dongles, broken and cracked iphone charger cables, and unrepairable consumer electronics.
All of which could have had much longer useful lifetimes through the most basic engineering practices. Apple cables are perfect examples of style over substance. Insufficient reinforcement for a daily use item. Poor design.
agree, I thought Ive went off the deep end towards the end of his tenure at apple, Tim Cook prb was afraid to rein him in due to his seniority with apple and how close he was to Jobs.
You can see how things were "fixed" at apple now that Ive is gone and the new M1 macs no longer have alot of the design inputs he pushed for.
The Air is still pretty, the new Pros however looked off to me in the presentation. Maybe the proportions between the body and the screen are off (from the side). It reminded me of a bowl of cereals, for some reasons.
I wonder if the Air design is still influenced by Ive?
>Apple cables are perfect examples of style over substance. Insufficient reinforcement for a daily use item. Poor design.
They used to be fine though, it's when they changed the rubber to whatever they use today that starts to fray and fall apart.
My Titanium Powerbook cable is still intact and fine even today, but every cable I've bought from around 2014 onwards has frayed. I've heard they switched to a more "eco-friendly" rubber at some point, but I don't see the value in that if I have to buy 2-3 power cables over a laptops life.
A bit offtopic, but I am disappointed that the the initial "winners" of this seal [1] seem to be almost all companies that are terrible for the environment and society.
If PepsiCo (one of the companies listed) ceased production of plastic bottles immediately I would be happy. That is a serious, credible commitment to improve.
We don't have to ban them, but we definitely don't have to support and laud them either. Tolerate and shame, like we do with tobacco companies, seems like a reasonable approach.
And to disclose my own biases, I'm 100% on team "Full Sugar Soda" and will definitely choose no soda over sugar free soda every time.
For me it feels like this: if your local bus drivers have been showing up to work drunk, for years, would you:
(a) welcome a new initiative to help them tackle their addiction issues, with a commitment to move forward together, as a team, one day a month outside of their ongoing bus driving duties; or
> The following global corporations have been awarded the 2021 inaugural Terra Carta Seal in recognition of their commitment to, and momentum towards, the creation of genuinely sustainable markets. These firms have credible transition roadmaps in place, underpinned by globally recognised, scientific metrics for achieving net zero by 2050 or sooner.
1) Seems like they're all companies that have noble commitments.
2) They don't seem that bad (tech and banks mostly)
3) Bad companies have the biggest potential for growth i suppose.
> I've seen actual astroturfing that sounds more pragmatic than this!
Its a meaningless seal for a vague commitment to being "green". There are very low expectations here.
Any improvement is good. And framing everything as needing to be green just forces the hand of every other company.
I could care less what this seal means these companies are doing. But even a commitment to be more green that is ignored is better than no commitment and no action. At best, this creates a cohort of companies committed to and acting in global best interests, and at worst, it moves the overton window more so every other company is expected to be more green postured, which will eventually lead to more political and social expectations.
> 2) They don't seem that bad (tech and banks mostly)
AkzoNobel, a Swedish chemical manufacturer.
Unilever, lol, fucking Unilever is earning a Seal for their "commitment".
This feels almost purely a greenwashing-PR-thing than any kind of proper achievement mark.
Anyone can have noble commitments, when those commitments come to fruition then they should be lauded. Right now it just leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth, it's bullshit stamped by a Prince, that's all.
Maybe I'm being a pessimist, but I wonder what percentage of their "commitment" was calculated in dollars donated as a tax-write off to the committee's pet green charity as compared to the percentage of Unilever actually changing any of their pollutive practices?
Thanks for pointing this out. Even if it’s not green washing, when the only diversity in your flagship sponsors in their ranking in the FTSE100 then something’s up.
I would be loathe to see sustainability as yet another form of regulatory capture.
More money is spent on marketing products than on sustainability. The top wealthiest companies in the U.S. will shove money into offshore bank accounts and refuse to spend it on the U.S. The largest tech companies provide the least funding in education, and heavily target schools and students to gain significant profit.
Sustainability, like every other issue, is based on socioeconomic ability. Being "Green" is expensive as an individual. The best way we resolve that issue, same as many others, is a mass rewrite of education, funded by private companies. This will not happen so long as there is a surplus of skilled work. We can easily demonstrate the surplus by how little these companies invest into getting skilled workers.
>This will not happen so long as there is a surplus of skilled work. We can easily demonstrate the surplus by how little these companies invest into getting skilled workers.
Interesting, isn't there a shortage of talent going on (suppossedly)?
I'd say, yes. The US is just consuming talent from the entire world and it works because tech jobs in the US have really competitive salaries. But this talent is missing elsewhere, so I don't think it's sustainable in the long run.
No. If there were these companies have so much money they could build a massive university in every state just for themselves and lose very little money. They don't, because they don't have to. Unfilled positions are "nice to have's", not a requirement of their work. They will not lose money over that position not being filled, not to the amount they believe matters.
> The top wealthiest companies in the U.S. will shove money into offshore bank accounts and refuse to spend it on the U.S.
"Shove money into offshore bank accounts" makes it sound like they're moving money from inside the U.S. to offshore in order to hide it. I don't think they're exporting money from the U.S. As I understand it, they're stockpiling foreign-earned money outside the U.S. and not importing it.
Arçelik is a prime exception. The most notable thing they do is recycle & re-use almost all water in their factories, so that their annual fresh-water use is just 1000L.
When people, particularly designers, say something is "too intricate" or whatever, it's usually just a signal they wouldn't have the skills to make something like it.
Late 2000's/ early 2010's there was a rush of college students wanting to pursue app/ web design. Colleges had no faculty to fill that, so they just took print design professors and they shoehorned print philosophy into interaction design and we ended up with a generation of designers who don't have the first idea about depth hierarchy, affordance, etc and everything looks like a scrollable poster now.
In software design[1] if I say too intricate it does not mean I don't have the skills to do it, it means the typical user (the developers working with the system) will have difficulty in working with the component.
Simple and functional design is considerably harder . I don't see why other design streams are that different. I would be worried if a civil/mechanical engineer said a bridge is too intricate .
[1] Technical/ Systems design not Graphic/UX design.
Scrollable poster. That's how every 'modern web' site feels to me. Case-in-point: lovefrom.com. Makes me want to maximise the browser window on my 30" monitor and still doesn't seem enough.
Awesome. Sometimes, when I'm waiting for a build to finish, I doodle the Flower of life. And, if its a particularly big build, it expands to a Metatrons Cube. Anyway, its nice to see Ive using it in a refreshing way.
Pretty, but kind of exemplifies the problem the world is facing.
Exquisitely beautiful marketing and that's it, nothing behind it.
We all know the beautiful environmental ads the worst polluter companies are making (like oil companies).
Or luxury companies creating "come to us with your damaged bag and we'll repair it for you instead of throwing it out, because we care about the environment" programs, but at the same time having a policy of slashing and throwing away unsold merchandise (https://www.newsweek.com/coach-accused-deliberately-slashing...)
>Or luxury companies creating "come to us with your damaged bag and we'll repair it for you instead of throwing it out, because we care about the environment" programs, but at the same time having a policy of slashing and throwing away unsold merchandise
Very cynically, the first program would also help stamp out any market for repairing their bags outside of their control. Which just further reduces the value of slashed merchandise without proof of purchase.
From the outside, it looks like Jony Ive was only able to get away with the damaging push to flat design after Steve Jobs died, and since Ive has left Apple, beautiful skeuomorphic gradients, lighting, embosses, drop shadows, and photo-real elements, have started to return. His legacy is a deep stain on the design industry that we are only now beginning to recover from. The loss of accessibility and beauty from only using flat design has set us back a long way.
I disagree with you, I think it was a much needed reboot to the concept of design, and the future will be all the brighter for it. Accessibility is more on everyone’s mind today than ever before, and I think skeumorphism’s accessibility was more of a side effect than an intended effect.
I’ll gladly be proven wrong though, but design wise I’d absolutely hate to go back to pre 2012.
I am just glad flat designs look really dated. Skeuomorphic accessibility was very much an early design goal, the issue is it lived so far past it’s origin that people forgot why it was built that way in the first place.
I mean, in fairness, the design outlined in TFA is an intricate, 3D, embossed design, so maybe Ive himself is off the "simple and flat" train ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This. I forever struggle to persuade my remote to do what I want it to. That touch-sensitive panel is a complete PIA, and just navigating across a rectangular array of icons is fraught with detours.
If I were paranoid, I'd say it was designed to force people to use the voice-recognition system, which gives better user data.
It really is. You can’t even wake the remote from sleep without sending a keypress to the TV. And the trackpad is difficult to use accurately. Totally over engineered for no benefit.
That remote is awful, but isn't usually what I've heard people refer to as flat design. Flat design tends to refer to the more simplistic software UIs that have been in fashion over the last few years.
You may love the way it looks... but no one being honest with themselves loves the way it functions, UI is visually functional, a functionality that happens in your brain, like legibility - flat UI has very poor "legibility" if compared to something like 3d embossed win95 UI where every identification and anticipation is painfully obvious to the point that it's effortless. It's familiarity is also learned in a very short space of time; whereas flat UI continues to elude even advanced users and remains ambiguous with high cognitive load - you might not realise why, but it will feel slow, and uncomfortable for each new front end you encounter.
Designers don't like this fact because that embossed 3d look is considered ugly, but it's intuitively and obviously true.
I think all of your points are true for badly made UIs, regardless of if they are flat or not. I like flat UIs, partially because they look and behave like digital things instead of trying to resemble something else and partially just because they usually (entirely subjectively) look better. We have a deeper well of inspiration to draw from for non-flat and more experience with them (so it's easier to make them "better") but I don't think anyone can say they are inherently "better".
They’re better for accessibility for anyone less interested in learning the new technological design UIs to have their programs function, people that just want to look at something and get how it works without a manual or googling it. The functionally has never improved because of flat designs, ever.
> His legacy is a deep stain on the design industry
This is a rather extreme statement. A person's career can be long and complex, involve many projects, not all of which will be successful. We all learn.
From the outside, it seems that Jony Ive was successful in a lot of endeavors, was successful in creating a disciplined design culture, and yes, sometimes, went too far (it seems) but even that kind of exploration can be useful for how it informs future work.
Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7, which was the first flat-design iOS: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious."
In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 didn't.)
Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction."
And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products from Jobs era are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.
Consider iPhone 5c, for example, which was the first post-Steve-Jobs design. The colors were horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr.) That the 5c didn't do well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.
Don’t forget the cavernous spaceship with acoustics and privacy issues that has caused many an engineer to loathe working in it. That was his design too.
I completely agree. His exit signaled the return of flat screens rather than the terrible curved glass edges, slippery corners and the mess of designing for design’s sake. I don’t know if he was responsible for the butterfly keyboard but I wouldn’t be surprised.
It all is debatable. Apple regularly backtracked after having gone too far in one direction. See e.g. the dialling back of translucency after OS X 10.1, and of brushed metal after Panther. The break in iOS 7 was extreme, but the same people whining about Ive were whining about skeumorphism a couple of months before.
Jobs had good taste, but was not infallible either. And he could not have designed a computer if his life depended on it. Saying that Ive has nothing to do with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, Cube, PowerBooks and MacBooks is very myopic, to beat the least.
Looking back, Apple kept being Apple and not much changed when Jobs died. Well, the keynotes are less interesting now. But product development does not look too different. Occasional mistakes are still made, and occasionally fixed. It was so before both Ive and Jobs, and it will still be that way after them.
You’re seeing what you want to see. Ive tried many things throughout his career, from colorful transparent plastic all the way to deep black metal. iPhone 5c was perhaps the most comfortable iPhone iPhone to hold, and it came it a variety of bright colors that Apple overcorrected for afterwards and only recently has started to embrace again. Its poor sales were likely due to its high perceived price and lack of features, rather than its design.
I'm mostly and android user, but ios7+ flat design with translucency is way better than the old ways. Just remember, how ugly the stock buttons were! Whenever I see screenshots of old apple interfaces it makes me want to throw up.
Johnny Ive pushed design deeply into "lowest common denominator" territory, to the point that I've seen a lot of features flat out cut from products simply because the UI/UX team couldn't make enough white space on the screen to hold them all. Ives did not invent "more white space is better" but he certainly embraced it and helped push out complexity at all costs in the name of usability.
There is something deeply antihuman about flat design. It's hard to describe exactly how, because it sounds silly when it comes out of your mouth, but I really believe this is true on some deep, pre-verbal level. They make me feel mentally and spiritually harmed somehow.
Humans see in 3d, and we use 3d cues from the world around us to assess everything. Taking these cues out of design is absolutely antihuman. And we know it's bad, especially for older populations, where nothing looks like a button or clickable, so folks click on things until something works.
EVERYTHING beautiful is skeuomorphic. The page turn in iBooks, page curl in maps, cover flow, the shred animation in older versions of Passbook, the date picker (all in iOS 6), rotating settings gear (when updating iOS 6), the Time Machine interface in older versions of OS X, photo borders and shadows in older versions of iWorks documents, etc.
This is not surprising, because our sense of beauty comes from the physical world.
So what is the problem with skeuomorphism?
Tech enthusiasts would like their phones to look like something from the future, not something from the past. But ordinary everyday people prefer for it to look like things they are already familiar with, or can relate to.
Tech enthusiasts worry that the skeuomorphism was getting totally out of hand, particularly where the UI metaphor started limiting functionality (e.g. an address database that's limited to what a Rolodex can do, rather than exploiting what is possible with a computer). But this is not really true. For example, iBooks has instant search, something only possible with a computer.
Some people point out that many skeuomorphic elements reference things that a large part of Apple's audience hasn't used in a long time, if ever. True, but here's the thing: It doesn't matter whether the user has ever seen a reel-to-reel tape. What matters is whether the visuals depict a physical object that the user can model in his mind. If it is too abstract (that's the opposite of physical) then non-tech-enthusiast users will find it hard to intuit.
Some people say skeuomorphism looks tacky. This is partly true. Skeuomorphism is hard to do. When done poorly it does look tacky. But when done well it looks very beautiful.
By removing all skeuomorphism Apple threw the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't think you can make any kind of categorical statement like this about a topic as subjective as beauty. Maybe you only find skeuomorphic things beautiful, but some of us disagree.
I take it you haven't seen the new iMessage mac desktop icon. You may also be misinterpreting this as two color gradients that also came from the poisoning of flat design.
> Jony Ive was only able to get away with the damaging push to flat design after Steve Jobs died
Sadly, true.
> and since Ive has left Apple, beautiful skeuomorphic gradients, lighting, embosses, drop shadows, and photo-real elements, have started to return.
Not really. Where have you seen this return? It hasn't, not in any significant way. The damage Ive did seems more or less permanent.
Jony Ive is only part of the problem. The other problems is hatred towards Scott Forstall. Since Scott was a proponent of skeuomorphism, one way remaining Apple execs stuck it to Forestall is by losing skeuomorphism, and then opening deriding skeuomorphism during the reveal of iOS7.
The iMessage mac desktop icon, the Preview icon using real 3d elements, System Preferences keeping beautiful 3d icons, are all giving me hope that we can back out of this nightmare.
In your opinion, what would be an example of a "beautiful skeuomorphic gradient"?
I don't use Apple software (or hardware) much, but I recall a certain stitched-leather user interface for iCal that really put me off skeuomorphism in User Interfaces.
Why get a retina screen to display what like design limitations of low resolution screens?
Why do you loathe them? It’s for ease of use, in iOS 6 the notes app that looks like notes or the newsstand app that looks like a news stand it was easy to understand. What does the photos app look like now? A bunch of circular colors to mean what exactly? What about the news app? Used to be a bunch of geometric shapes, now it’s a square slanted candy stripe.
The actual content (eg pictures, videos and text) all look better on a retina screen. I don’t think people buy retina screens so that the UI elements look prettier.
That might not be why, but the UI elements looks worst, the apps are unified under uglier UI, and by the logic of content it was an unnecessary design change with less accessibility, more complications to make boring UI that needs explanation and all for no benefit to the user. Just look at the iOS 7 news stand icon or the one that’s a red candy cane stripe versus the iOS 6 news stand icon. Who designed the photos icon and what’s it represent if not just designing for design’s sake? He made it minimalist, harder to use, and forced every iOS UI to congregate under a more flawed design. Pretty elements that highlighted the Retina display’s capabilities in the are now replaced by uglier boring design that was probably a practical scaling solution for ease of designing unified UI that was more developed friendly and less user friendly.
Flat design was never about flat design but about layers and animation. The idea was to get rid of the fake 3d and instead use layered animation to create the depth.
How is it that in a land on Nokia N95 and the likes, introducing the iPhone was not revolutionary?
You are cutting short and focusing on the design of the software (which I am sure Ive had a limited say in) while ignoring decades of excellent design work.
A nice story with a bow on top, but it doesn't match reality. Flat design started at Google and spread to Microsoft and eventually Apple. It was simply the style, and now the trends are starting to change. We'll go through a 3D glossy "aqua" phase for the next 10 years, then we'll go back to brutalist flat design. And we'll have no choice but to follow the UI designers into whatever obsession they're on time after time.
Ive would've left Apple way earlier, if someone hadn't convinced him to stay. iirc he moved to London a couple of years ago and everyone was curious if he was still interested in Apple. I'm sure they lured him to stay with the new Apple HQ.
To say that it was Steve Jobs keeping him from having too much unrestricted impact on the product is not a convincing argument. Sure, he took over software design as well but skeumorphism, gradients and huge shadows were often heavily criticized before it was cool to hate on a minimalistic flat design.
Part of the value is (apparent) exclusivity [1]. Expensive strongly correlates with aspirational value as more expensive becomes more exclusive but being expensive is not always required.
You can have normally priced goods, that are exclusive(limited editions). There are plenty of "luxury" products like sneakers/ watches or cars or graphic designed items that actually retail for (relatively)reasonable amounts but almost impossible to buy as you need to be invited to a waiting list or some other convoluted gating mechanism . Getting on the waiting list may need to you buy a ton of other less in demand products / wait for years / be popular or famous etc.
John Ive was head of design at Apple after all, apparent exclusivity from rest of us and keep commanding the premium they do is like the defining characteristic of Apple as a brand.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xqfs0/how_w...
As such, there is an argument that a seal refers to a physical object with physical imperfections, which are hard to reproduce. Note that the article is about the "design" for the seal, as distinct from the seal itself. Maybe the plan is to manufacture a physical seal off the design (complete with manufacturing imperfections) then use that to make impressions?
https://petercrossart.com/books/trumpets/trouble-for-trumpet...
Not a fan, seems derivative and low effort, the foliage diapering surely obscures the text too much to make a good seal (I guess with a proper depth mask it could work). The circumferential motto is standard seal/coin design, of course.
It's relatively good on austerity, mainly carried by the strong display type, or would be in the right colouring -- but not as a [wax] seal.
Should be more emblematic IMO. That doesn't mean it can't be intricate fwiw.
Just one dead butterfly would have done! /s
that's pretty harsh and rude. I don't get that vibe at all when looking at the design
The deconstructed 7-ring version has some cleverness, I'll give you that. The rest is really generic and lacks overt symbology of historic [royal/government] seals IMO.
It doesn't matter though, they got what they wanted, Ive's name attached to provide publicity.
With hdpi now very common, typography for screens can evolve. The stark minimalist typography of early computers was very much driven by the necessity of having very limited resolution, contrast, and dynamic range. Sans serif fonts like Helvetica, and its many derivatives, with its straight lines & simple curves were optimal for that type of screen. Serif fonts, with their fiddly details are a lot harder to render in a pleasing way on such screens.
However, with modern screens, those problems are addressed to the point where there is little practical difference in resolution between print and screen. So, making the most of modern screens through design becomes a challenge. Serif fonts are still popular for print for a good reason: they are pleasing to the eye and it helps readability. If you work from first principles to address such a challenge on a modern screen, you'd start with a font and a serif font would be not such a strange choice as it used to be.
Just my opinion, but both font and logo strike me as rather beautiful.
There was really only the first-generation home computer (and arguably first-gen PDAs) that widely shipped strictly sans-serif fonts; a blip in the history of personal computing.
Later pcs were about wysiwyg. Which given the primary medium was still paper for dtp and wordprocessing software, meant serif fonts.
One thing I always respected about MongoDB is they use a serif font for their logo in a time and age when virtually no startup would use such a thing. And then a sans-serif font for their products under it, so it really pops.
I think design in the early-90's has a chance of reemerging. Just lots of fonts being aggressively used and lots of serif fonts. Things that would make David Carson proud.
https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/
We've now made it a challenge to spot "live" butterfly depictions everywhere.
So just like school photos, then.
Now, it’s true when you see a group of butterflies they are not uniformly in one position. But some of their positions coincide with those of pinned butterflies. It’s also true some pinned butterflies spread out their wings in extreme positions but not all are pinned like that —at least not by amateurs.
Now, iconic ones, yes, typically. But it’s the same for other exemplary of iconic models. When did you last see a toilet door with a natural picture of a person rather than an iconic outline?
The same could be said of lots of things.
When we have a concert T-shirt of a performer you more often than not get a more of less straight on shot. Or political candidates. You get their headshot not a profile pic or a pic of the backs of their heads.
Why should depictions of butterflies depart from a pose that exposes more of their recognizable and appreciated features?
What about flower photography? Why don’t they use shriveled up wilted flowers for Valentine’s Day? Why do they look for perfect specimens?
Sure, I get it, “ha ha, look you idiots that’s not the natural pose of butterflies, you guys and gals have been getting fooled and I’m not”
I just did a couple of image searches.
First, searching for "butterflies", I get many different photos of real butterflies in various postures. The most common is wings open, spread out horizontally. None of the real butterflies have their wings stretched upwards in the pinned-out posture.
Second, filtering the same search with "image type: clip art", fully 99% of the results have the wings spread out and stretched up. (The 1% is detailed, realistic drawings.)
Now, whether you care about this is another matter, but it's hard to deny that that article is onto something. There's a very consistent quirk in the way butterflies in particular are illustrated.
Sure, I get it, “ha ha, look you idiots that’s not the natural pose of butterflies, you guys and gals have been getting fooled and I’m not”
I think you're misreading the tone of that article and the people citing it. It's not anger or contempt; it's sadness that real living butterflies aren't widely understood, and hope that the stereotyped depiction can be improved on.
Earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013
Enough with the Dead Butterflies (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 - Dec 2019 (28 comments)
Enough with the dead butterflies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 - June 2017 (163 comments)
Just because this is not a frequent pose of butterflies doesn’t preclude it from representations, nor should it be assumed as dead because of that.
I smile for photos even though I don’t walk around with a smile all day either.
Another great seal to savor is Mughal Emperor Alamgir's https://mobile.twitter.com/mkapoorofficial/status/1095588089...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris
A tshirt, but he's limited the unsightly holes at the top and bottom for an uninterrupted design aesthetic?
I prefer macs, but some of their worst laptops were from Ive's push for absolute minimalism and thinness
Give his seniority, and the realities of office politics, i doubt it's that simple
All of which could have had much longer useful lifetimes through the most basic engineering practices. Apple cables are perfect examples of style over substance. Insufficient reinforcement for a daily use item. Poor design.
You can see how things were "fixed" at apple now that Ive is gone and the new M1 macs no longer have alot of the design inputs he pushed for.
I wonder if the Air design is still influenced by Ive?
They used to be fine though, it's when they changed the rubber to whatever they use today that starts to fray and fall apart.
My Titanium Powerbook cable is still intact and fine even today, but every cable I've bought from around 2014 onwards has frayed. I've heard they switched to a more "eco-friendly" rubber at some point, but I don't see the value in that if I have to buy 2-3 power cables over a laptops life.
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[1] https://www.sustainable-markets.org/terra-carta-seal/winners...
I guess human bodies are exempt from being considered part of the natural world.
Lobbying and advertisers have just made us think that drinking a cup of sugar is an acceptable option.
And to disclose my own biases, I'm 100% on team "Full Sugar Soda" and will definitely choose no soda over sugar free soda every time.
Still this seems to be like moving the goalposts.
(a) welcome a new initiative to help them tackle their addiction issues, with a commitment to move forward together, as a team, one day a month outside of their ongoing bus driving duties; or
(b) get new drivers.
1) Seems like they're all companies that have noble commitments.
2) They don't seem that bad (tech and banks mostly)
3) Bad companies have the biggest potential for growth i suppose.
I've seen actual astroturfing that sounds more pragmatic than this!
Its a meaningless seal for a vague commitment to being "green". There are very low expectations here.
Any improvement is good. And framing everything as needing to be green just forces the hand of every other company.
I could care less what this seal means these companies are doing. But even a commitment to be more green that is ignored is better than no commitment and no action. At best, this creates a cohort of companies committed to and acting in global best interests, and at worst, it moves the overton window more so every other company is expected to be more green postured, which will eventually lead to more political and social expectations.
Is that cynical and pragmatic enough ? :)
AkzoNobel, a Swedish chemical manufacturer.
Unilever, lol, fucking Unilever is earning a Seal for their "commitment".
This feels almost purely a greenwashing-PR-thing than any kind of proper achievement mark.
Anyone can have noble commitments, when those commitments come to fruition then they should be lauded. Right now it just leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth, it's bullshit stamped by a Prince, that's all.
I would be loathe to see sustainability as yet another form of regulatory capture.
Sustainability, like every other issue, is based on socioeconomic ability. Being "Green" is expensive as an individual. The best way we resolve that issue, same as many others, is a mass rewrite of education, funded by private companies. This will not happen so long as there is a surplus of skilled work. We can easily demonstrate the surplus by how little these companies invest into getting skilled workers.
Interesting, isn't there a shortage of talent going on (suppossedly)?
Therefore, the wheel keeps on turning.
"Shove money into offshore bank accounts" makes it sound like they're moving money from inside the U.S. to offshore in order to hide it. I don't think they're exporting money from the U.S. As I understand it, they're stockpiling foreign-earned money outside the U.S. and not importing it.
Late 2000's/ early 2010's there was a rush of college students wanting to pursue app/ web design. Colleges had no faculty to fill that, so they just took print design professors and they shoehorned print philosophy into interaction design and we ended up with a generation of designers who don't have the first idea about depth hierarchy, affordance, etc and everything looks like a scrollable poster now.
Simple and functional design is considerably harder . I don't see why other design streams are that different. I would be worried if a civil/mechanical engineer said a bridge is too intricate .
[1] Technical/ Systems design not Graphic/UX design.
Exquisitely beautiful marketing and that's it, nothing behind it.
We all know the beautiful environmental ads the worst polluter companies are making (like oil companies).
Or luxury companies creating "come to us with your damaged bag and we'll repair it for you instead of throwing it out, because we care about the environment" programs, but at the same time having a policy of slashing and throwing away unsold merchandise (https://www.newsweek.com/coach-accused-deliberately-slashing...)
Very cynically, the first program would also help stamp out any market for repairing their bags outside of their control. Which just further reduces the value of slashed merchandise without proof of purchase.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013
I’ll gladly be proven wrong though, but design wise I’d absolutely hate to go back to pre 2012.
Apple TV remote is possibly the worst remote ever made.
“flat design” is a reference or common term to a graphical design style that followed skeuomorphism, not a term used for the industrial design aspect.
If I were paranoid, I'd say it was designed to force people to use the voice-recognition system, which gives better user data.
The newest is really good, in fact I think it's the best remote I've ever used.
Yup. It's awful. I shelled out the bucks for the new one, and have found it to be worlds different.
Designers don't like this fact because that embossed 3d look is considered ugly, but it's intuitively and obviously true.
But seriously, I do really love flat design. Though I do agree with some of the arguments against it.
A more varied design landscape is always better though.
This is a rather extreme statement. A person's career can be long and complex, involve many projects, not all of which will be successful. We all learn.
From the outside, it seems that Jony Ive was successful in a lot of endeavors, was successful in creating a disciplined design culture, and yes, sometimes, went too far (it seems) but even that kind of exploration can be useful for how it informs future work.
In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 didn't.)
Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction."
And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products from Jobs era are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.
Consider iPhone 5c, for example, which was the first post-Steve-Jobs design. The colors were horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr.) That the 5c didn't do well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.
Jobs had good taste, but was not infallible either. And he could not have designed a computer if his life depended on it. Saying that Ive has nothing to do with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, Cube, PowerBooks and MacBooks is very myopic, to beat the least.
Looking back, Apple kept being Apple and not much changed when Jobs died. Well, the keynotes are less interesting now. But product development does not look too different. Occasional mistakes are still made, and occasionally fixed. It was so before both Ive and Jobs, and it will still be that way after them.
It's 2-dimensional.
Come on. These were an awful trend.
EVERYTHING beautiful is skeuomorphic. The page turn in iBooks, page curl in maps, cover flow, the shred animation in older versions of Passbook, the date picker (all in iOS 6), rotating settings gear (when updating iOS 6), the Time Machine interface in older versions of OS X, photo borders and shadows in older versions of iWorks documents, etc.
This is not surprising, because our sense of beauty comes from the physical world.
So what is the problem with skeuomorphism?
Tech enthusiasts would like their phones to look like something from the future, not something from the past. But ordinary everyday people prefer for it to look like things they are already familiar with, or can relate to.
Tech enthusiasts worry that the skeuomorphism was getting totally out of hand, particularly where the UI metaphor started limiting functionality (e.g. an address database that's limited to what a Rolodex can do, rather than exploiting what is possible with a computer). But this is not really true. For example, iBooks has instant search, something only possible with a computer.
Some people point out that many skeuomorphic elements reference things that a large part of Apple's audience hasn't used in a long time, if ever. True, but here's the thing: It doesn't matter whether the user has ever seen a reel-to-reel tape. What matters is whether the visuals depict a physical object that the user can model in his mind. If it is too abstract (that's the opposite of physical) then non-tech-enthusiast users will find it hard to intuit.
Some people say skeuomorphism looks tacky. This is partly true. Skeuomorphism is hard to do. When done poorly it does look tacky. But when done well it looks very beautiful.
By removing all skeuomorphism Apple threw the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't think you can make any kind of categorical statement like this about a topic as subjective as beauty. Maybe you only find skeuomorphic things beautiful, but some of us disagree.
Sadly, true.
> and since Ive has left Apple, beautiful skeuomorphic gradients, lighting, embosses, drop shadows, and photo-real elements, have started to return.
Not really. Where have you seen this return? It hasn't, not in any significant way. The damage Ive did seems more or less permanent.
Jony Ive is only part of the problem. The other problems is hatred towards Scott Forstall. Since Scott was a proponent of skeuomorphism, one way remaining Apple execs stuck it to Forestall is by losing skeuomorphism, and then opening deriding skeuomorphism during the reveal of iOS7.
it may be a while
> Sadly, true.
Any additional context you can give here?
I don't use Apple software (or hardware) much, but I recall a certain stitched-leather user interface for iCal that really put me off skeuomorphism in User Interfaces.
A bunch of engineering effort spent just to make digital products looked like the old physical products they killed.
You are cutting short and focusing on the design of the software (which I am sure Ive had a limited say in) while ignoring decades of excellent design work.
To say that it was Steve Jobs keeping him from having too much unrestricted impact on the product is not a convincing argument. Sure, he took over software design as well but skeumorphism, gradients and huge shadows were often heavily criticized before it was cool to hate on a minimalistic flat design.
You can have normally priced goods, that are exclusive(limited editions). There are plenty of "luxury" products like sneakers/ watches or cars or graphic designed items that actually retail for (relatively)reasonable amounts but almost impossible to buy as you need to be invited to a waiting list or some other convoluted gating mechanism . Getting on the waiting list may need to you buy a ton of other less in demand products / wait for years / be popular or famous etc.
John Ive was head of design at Apple after all, apparent exclusivity from rest of us and keep commanding the premium they do is like the defining characteristic of Apple as a brand.
I get what they are trying to achieve.
But the branches interweaving the letters makes it harder to read and it feels jarring.
"I think that there is,.. therefore, a sort of .. gravity .. and authority, perhaps, in the way we tried to treat the form."