Jony Ive's design agency launches website
lovefrom.com
lovefrom.com
It doesn’t need a contact form: he doesn’t need random queries from the internet.
It doesn’t need SEO: he’s Jony Ive.
It doesn’t need a portfolio page: he’s Jony Ive. And so on.
Criticizing this website makes as much sense as criticizing Steve Jobs’s business card. “Your business card sucks. It doesn’t even have your phone number on it! Let me instruct you on how to design a proper business card…”
People who may want to hire him won't put off by this.
It is pointless to try to generalize this website to any other context.
We don’t know what Jony Ive intended with this website, but the fact that so many here are criticising it makes me quite certain that we are not the target audience.
The concept is extremely minimalist - simple black text on a white background, with a little animation. The complexity of scaffolding is irrelevant.
People here say "he doesn't need things we usually expect from a website, like contact form or anything, because he's johny ives"
But then why make a website in the first place ?
As far as why, who knows? Maybe it's a placeholder and other content is forthcoming. Maybe it's just a fun typographic novelty flier. Maybe it's just marketing. It's not a startup, he doesn't have to gauge market receptivity or convert leads.
Pretty sure there are plenty of CEO's out there who don't know who he is and could potentially be interested in his services. Just because you aren't aware of the designer world doesn't mean that you wouldn't pay for a top designer, and this website means the CEO would look for another agency.
But we'd do well to bear in mind that:
- Most of us are not the intended audience.
- The purpose of the site is not what most of us expect. They are not trying to create leads from this page (hence the lack of useful information and call to action).
- And tangentially, the internet isn't only about function or utility.
I sympathise with the compulsive need to pull-apart a website with >300kb javascript, scrolling to get more information and unnecessary animation when it gets in the way of you using a site that you need. But surely this is not one of those times. Instead why not treat it like you are looking at an abstract piece of art. Sure a 3 year old could have made it but that's not really the point, is it?
They're far from perfect even now on these aspects, but there are tangible, non-trivial improvements already (except on repairability for now, but one can dream...)
At least this is what the body of work after Jobs' death suggests to me: laptops that are increasingly nice to look at but, at times had faults that didn't justify their existence().
() Philippe Starck once pointed out that the world contains enough "things". Beauty isn't sufficient to justify the existence of things we make; when you make new things they actually have to deserve to exist. And I fully agree.
Whole generations of Apple laptops didn't deserve to exist.
Whatever I, or anyone else, think of the site, it's grabbed attention and provoked reaction/discussion, because Ive.
(And those animations are kinda lovely.)
No menu!
Massive waste of screen space just to display a single word!
Making me scroll to find _anything_ of substance... and then finding there isn't actually anything of substance.
Each line has one or two words on it making me scroll to figure out what they are trying to say.
And I still don't know what the company/person is selling!
Please tell me this is the first attempt at a landing page or something?
Give me Geocities over this modern crap any day!
Edit: I guess I'm not the target audience then :)
Disappointing from someone the caliber of Jony Ive.
Do browsers still obey stuff like "user-scalable=no"? That would be bad.
Trying on an iPad ... Hmm.. it behaves weird. Some attempts to zoom into the site result in no action at all. Some attempts result in the site scaling up but then freezing.
It's similar to programmers working at a successful company, who have trouble to produce the same quality and pace without a 'manager'
This is my favorite so far: “Why have a website at all?”
Let me take that one more level, by suggesting any criticism of the _current state_ of the website is missing the time dimension—as in, What happens next week? Or next month? Or next year?
Even the most vehement critic may be inclined to revisit the site to see if it still sucks. Haha
Philosophically, this reminds me of a BBC short video I watched yesterday about entropy and the passage of time, The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Good product design isn't conspicuous. It goes unnoticed. Amazon.com is a well-designed product. I've hardly ever thought about "Amazon" in the context of using it. I've only ever thought about the thing I'm trying to buy.
"LoveFrom is a creative collective. We are designers architects musicians filmmakers writers engineers and artists. You may know us by our past work. We are obsessed with the traditions of creating and making. Fanatically devoted to excellence. Insatiably curious. We collaborate with leaders and founders. We work on projects for joy. We develop our own ideas. Love & fury"
Sweet, so I don't need to pay you then.
Sounds like they created the typeface from scratch, so probably. To what end, I'm not sure.
[1] https://www.wallpaper.com/design/jony-ive-and-marc-newson-lo...
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Ive's G4 Cube will always stand out to me as the worst computer I've ever used because the power button was hidden underneath it. It seems like form-over-function has always been his style.
I think the Cube was pretty well designed, it's fanless and practically silent (apart from the HD), and opening it up is amazingly easy: https://youtu.be/AwDOJ7HztXM?t=179
I wasted literally 30 min trying to figure out how to turn one of those on in a photo lab in college (before Google and wifi were in all pockets all the time).
Even the lab tech had no idea.
If I was going to point to what went wrong with Ive designs I'd point to laptop keyboards, and the flat graphic design of iOS 7, which ruined many of the affordances of the interface.
A more fitting term here, perhaps, is "affordance" (though "discoverable" is also accurate, but "affordance" is a more technical term here).
A mug without a handle can burn your hand. Adding the handle is a way to avoid that. The handle itself is usually designed to look like a handle. It's clear what the handle does, based solely on its form. You don't need a manual or an example or a hint to use the handle - most people, intuitively, will use the handle as intended.
The handle has "affordance". Waving your hand over the top of a computer in order to use a 'button', in contrast, has little to no affordance. The comma on this site acting as a button has no affordance. And so on.
You can wave your hand over anything (unless something is blocking your way or is too far, etc.), therefore most stuff affords being waved over.
A mug, with or without a handle, affords "being held with your hand"(although more or less comfortably).
What you're talking about is a signifier.
Quoting from a random article:
As Don Norman explains it: “[…] although affordances make sense for interaction with physical objects, they are confusing when dealing with virtual ones. As a result, affordances have created much confusion in the world of design. Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.” [Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition, 2013, pXIV-XV]
Otherwise corporate website these days looks overkill, starting from that annoyingly Huge Hero banner with big image and unnecessary text. You have to scroll to bottom before you can find anything useful.
No career page though. Look like they will be hiring through referrals only or agency.
You can SO tell this is a Designers website. /s
Side note: I love the website.
Wait for it to start, wait for the comma, wait because now I’ve learned to wait, realize there’s nothing more to wait for, scroll thru meaningless verbiage that could fit in one screen, wait again to see if more will appear, scroll & bounce to elicit more, spend time tapping around for meaningful content, realize there’s nothing actually there.
Huge talent though and I hope the guy can do something cool again.