Jony Ive’s first major design since leaving Apple
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
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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.
In some ways, working for a big tech conglomerate can be seen as being a sellout in more artistic circles.
For some engineers, Google might be peak street cred. For others, it’s working on Rust. It’s super competitive to get into SpaceX, good for them, but I’m not being a code monkey for Elon. For finance roles, it could be Goldman, whereas it’s less prestigious to be a Goldman software engineer. Then in finance, those in equities may think they are superior to those working in equities. There’s talented people in all sorts of places, and there are mediocre people too. I’m sure Jony Ives is rich enough to not work or start his own project if he wants to. Maybe this project is something that is a personal / intellectual challenge because it is so distinct from Apple.
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://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.
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.
All this brushed silver/gold/black bores me. I am very glad Apple has decided to embrace colors once again.
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.
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.
The seal isn't anything special. It's a small area with too much going on. It's an eye strain to understand what is happening on the seal b/c so much is happening in such a small area.
This article isn't on the front page of HN b/c of the seal, it's on the front page b/c of who designed the seal. Thus, people will talk about the designer not the seal.
At the top we have a crown, who's crown, the (imported) House of Windsor? I don't know? But at the bottom we have a white rose which is the moniker of the house of York. The house of York's lineage ended in 1499.
There was this thing called The War of The Roses, which saw the House of Lancaster and the House of York in conflict with each other.
If this was signed off by Prince Charles then he's as equally ignorant of the significance of the white rose. Even to this day it ruffles feather. The Tudor line pretty much ended when James VI of Scotland took the throne. Years down the line the Windsors were an imported royalty supplanting the House of Hanover at the turn of the 20th century, and has no direct connection with York or Lancaster sigils.
Most UK folks with the faintest awareness of history on the British Isles would spot this right away. We got this stage of English history rammed down our throats, even in Scottish schools.
In short, it's just another corporate logo that "looks nice" but the designer is clearly a bit clueless. I thought Ive would know better.
The design of the York rose is quite consistent. It isn't merely "a flower with white petals". In particular, these always have five petals; the one at the bottom has six.
Not every white flower is a symbol of York versus Lancaster.
It's not a crown but a coronet. Coronet are a heraldic device to symbolise noble ranks, including those of the royal family. In British usage a coronet of crosses and fleur-de-lis symbolises a child of the sovereign.
One could quibble about another detail: traditionally Charles’ coronet as heir apparent is displayed with a single arch. Crowns have two or more arches. That single arch is almost not there apart from the green arch formed by those interlocking circles of the seal.
Btw: It’s seems a bit silly to call the House of Windsor or Saxe-Coburg and Gotha “imported”. Queen Victoria of Hanover married, her son and heir took the “house” from his father, that’s pretty much it. What’s far more annoying was the patriarchal habit that “houses” go with the father’s line, at least until EIIR and Philipp.
Btw 2: Isn’t every British and English royal house “imported”?
Hanover was imported from Germany, based on distant descent from James’ VI/I second child and of course protestantism.
Stuart was imported, based on distant descent.
Tudor … imported and invented themselves, based on distant descent.
Plantagenet was Angevin, meaning from Anjou in France, because Geoffrey of Anjou married Matilda.
Normandy imported themselves, because of distant descend from Wessex.
Denmark is Denmark.
Wessex is homegrown, apart from the whole “sex” part.
This looks like it would be a nice pattern for cross-stitching. It doesn't have any qualities that make it succeed as a logo.
To prove my point: try to remember and draw any part of this logo after it leaves your screen. Do you even remember the name of the company? Could you read that name at a glance?
Criticizing the logo is valid, but rehashing the same over-dramatic conversation about Ive is not worth the digital ink.
Have you ever bought a poorly-designed $2,000 device? Apple products can inspire deep, personal anger in a way that other brands can't because they're expensive and the company's leadership was a combination of oblivious and smug about user-hostile decisions.
Look at the touch bar: it ruined generations of some people's favorite laptops. Ive isn't the anti-Christ, but it's frustrating seeing someone so lauded after making some unbelievably bad design decisions and then stubbornly sticking to them.
It may not make sense to you, but Ive's work is very personal to some people (on both the good and bad ends of the spectrum).
If you're going to be furious at Jony Ive for the Macbook Pro, why not be angry at his competitors who can't seem to make a credible competitor? And if that is incorrect and there is a credible competitor, why not buy it and ignore Apple?
> it's incredible that in this day, no company comes close in design and aesthetic
Lots of companies shamelessly mimic Apple, so there are plenty of smartphones and laptops that are equally nice to look at.
I think it boils down to your priorities, too. A lot of people still use and love hideous Lenovo Thinkpad laptops that are highly functional. They have the trackpad and the "nub" for a mouse -- something Apple would likely find appallingly redundant, but is the thing that makes people love Thinkpads.
On the other side, there are people who use aging Macbook Airs from years ago, even though they're incredibly slow.
But all this aside, what I'm saying that Ive did was make enforce design decisions that were hostile to users across the spectrum (again, Touch Bar and USB-C-only notebooks are the easiest examples).
To answer your statement and question, this would actually be a poor cross-stitch due to the angles and intricate overlaps, but it’s a good seal. Understanding that it’s a seal, and not a logo, is key here—the logo is Sustainable Markets Initiative’s and follows the design principles you’re invoking in your comment.
The name on the seal, Terra Cotta, is presented clearly and memorably enough in large letters in the center of the seal, but the field of the seal is meant to look like a light or dark green disk at a glance and to reward more careful examination with details. The English and Latin arranged traditionally around the perimeter are mottos and not meant to be marketing keywords.
Interested in your take, given that. You can see it placed in context of the SMI brand here. https://www.sustainable-markets.org/terra-carta-seal/intro/
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.
Another great seal to savor is Mughal Emperor Alamgir's https://mobile.twitter.com/mkapoorofficial/status/1095588089...
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.
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.
https://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?
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.
It looks very... Baskerville-y. I like Baskerville, so it's fine (aside from the ampersand which I find too deviant from the normal ampersand & liable to confusion), but you definitely don't associate Jony Ive with oldschool Baskerville or Bodoni serif fonts!
As far as the person that brought Bodoni into the corporate branding world - that would be Paul Rand.
I think that’s called “classical”
I get what they are trying to achieve.
But the branches interweaving the letters makes it harder to read and it feels jarring.
Jony Ive is the most over-rated product designer in at least the last 20 years.
I wouldn't go that far.
There is a reason the average Joe and Georgina love Apple products. Simplicity makes them usable. Before the iPhone, most high end phones were complex and clunky. It takes a special combination of design aesthetic (from Ive) and a laser focus on user happiness (from Jobs) to come up with something like the iPhone.
But personally I agree that it’s busy, hard to read and forgettable.
It’s not a great seal. It looks to me like something an artistically talented novice would make.
I'm not sure what the difference between a logo and a seal is (in the context of a digital image representing a brand).
But regardless, this article calls it a logo, as does Ive in a direct quote.
Personally, Apple hardware (minus the all usb-c MacBooks) and their software interfaces are more useable to me than Android or Linux. If it was easy, Google would have found a better Jony Ive.
There are probably better product designers out there, but to succeed in a big org, it’s also political prowess and story telling ability. Jony Ive is at the top because he’s good at what he does, and that’s not necessarily being a product designer. It’s being Apple’s chief product designer, and that is not the same as being a product designer. His skill is convincing enough decision makers that he is the best chief product designer in the org.
Is material design good? Having worked at Google as an engineer and working extensively with designers, then also attending design school and coming from a family in the creative field, I don’t respect Google design org for their aesthetic sensibility. I have never met a single designer at Google that impressed me with their aesthetic / photographic eye ( arguably a proxy measure for good designers in the same way logical reasoning abilities are for engineers ). The skill set of a Google designer is not that of an artist.
Is creative director Virgil Abloh of Louis Vuitton a good designer? Most people who studied fashion design would say no. But he sells products, and that’s what the Louis Vuitton’s of the world needs. The fashion designers who have the most street cred aren’t the ones leading fashion brands you’ve heard. Michael Kors is a pretty mainstream and commercially successful brand, but he’s a laughing stock among fashion designers. The ones who know how and when to balance commercial and artistic are the ones who rise to the top in our economic system.
Same with mainstream musical artists. It’s not their music abilities, it’s the whole package. Their style, their album art, their public image.
As for whether Apple products are badly designed or not. We don’t know what Apple’s higher level games are. It’s plausible they intentionally alternate back and forth every few years from disappointing to exciting products. Maybe this is the most profit maximizing. A kind of forward looking planned obsolescence or planned disappointed. We wouldn’t be as excited for the latest MacBooks if the prior generation wasn’t a flop. What we know is Apple is a trillion dollar company, and their stock has consistently done well irrespective of bad industrial design.
Furthermore, who supervises the twenty-five other usability experts? If Denis Villeneuve had to make a film by himself, no cinematographer, editor, gaffer, grip, etc., he'd make a pretty awful film. It's the combination of creative people working in unison under the watch of a single auteur that makes film, and products successful. That doesn't mean Villeneuve or Ive are overrated; it just means they're directors.
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.
And there’s a fucking crown in it. Yikes! Hope companies and executives who don’t have to love monarchy and colonialism, stay the fuck away from it.
It reminds me of some of the designs that came about during the William Morris era.
In any case, it’s a Royal initiative, regardless of who the royal is, so it needs to be classy.
"I think that there is,.. therefore, a sort of .. gravity .. and authority, perhaps, in the way we tried to treat the form."
How does this affect you? The company paid him. If they don’t like it, that’s on them. If other companies think his design suck, then they won’t pay for it. Maybe they’re paying for his name instead of his design. Prince Harry is some kind influencer for a startup / Vc or something now. Is he qualified ? Who knows. Does it affect you?
Apple doesn’t owe you anything to be honest, but he doesn’t work there anymore.
I understand the culture in design and fine arts is to critique. But since when did HackerNews become a forum for critiquing subjective aesthetic appeal and goodness? Jony Ives is still probably a better graphic designer than most engineers here. As for people who trained in design, if Jony Ive’s isn’t your inspiration, we get it, but are you doing groundbreaking design or designing another unsexy B2B CRUD app. Are your own designs and bloated CSS / assets inflating your ego or actually useful to users? Are people just envious that Jony Ives was the one who won the lottery and gets to design for Apple?
Are you kidding? The original iPhone was a revolutionary product. iOS was a revolution in user experience. Steve Jobs showed the world that you can build a complex, sophisticated product and still make it simple to use, intuitive and breathtakingly beautiful. That amazing creation has been severely crippled, and Jony is the person that did it. Of course there is a lot of disappointment in the tech community.
I'm referring to his post Apple career and this seal/logo design.
> The original iPhone was a revolutionary product.
Sure, but in a parallel universe it could have flopped.
Risks need to be taken nonetheless. In this case, too aggressively, and it sucks that the users have to pay the price.
It's not fundamentally that all USB-C minimalism is inherently bad design, it's just that the standard is confusing, so it's bad in implementation. If we were to imagine a perfect sci-fi future, a single connector or no connector would be ideal.
The alternative is slow incremental iteration, but there's no guarantee that would lead us to a global optimum either. Look at Sony. Sony had some of the most groundbreaking products, then they merely iterated and didn't take risks. Where is Sony now?
Armchair designers can whine all they want but they were the same know it all’s who ridiculed EarPods when they came out (haha it’s like a toothbrush) and every Apple product before then.
Of course not all these products became a runaway success. But a pretty significant amount of them changed the world.
I used to do poetry, and you take risks, and sometimes it doesn't land the way you expect it to. We look at great artists and remember their greatest works, but forget about all the mediocre crap they produced.
Ridley Scott or Christopher Nolan, they take risks, and produce a movie that's a little too high browed and is not engaging or compelling as they envisioned, but they've already committed, launch it, and wait for the next cycle.
I don't so much get the hate on Jony Ive, but I do get the disappointment, in the sense that we could have had really great products 5 years ago if it weren't for Ive's obsession with thinness and "svelteness" as I put it. Things like the failed butterfly keyboard, always sacrificing decent battery life for shaving another millimeter, etc. Glad to see Apple reversing many of these poor decisions with the latest MacBook Pro, but again, just frustrating because it could have been so close to perfection years ago if it didn't run off the rails with Ive's design obsessions.
I agree. But we're buying Apple's reputation, not Apple products. If Apple makes crappy products consistently long enough, people will stop buying. I think it is in Apple's financial incentive to alternate back and forth between "near perfect" products than to mediocre ones.
In the same way Facebook and Social media shows you a mix of stuff that you don't like and just enough interesting stuff to keep you hooked.
What should be blamed here is corporations maximizing profit.
The fact that Apple basically threw out all his 'innovations' for the new Macs speaks volumes.
One of the most over rated, over hyped and of course over paid tech person ever.
Jony Ive did incredible work at the core of absolutely iconic products-- iMac, iPhone, iPod, iPad --- and is a key figure in Apple's overall beloved laptop designs.
Yes, in the past few years, since a bit after becoming CDO--- he went a little too far in on "form over function" (touch bar, no ports, butterfly keyboard)-- and Apple's reversal of these things is a good thing. But that hardly erases the rest of his legacy reaching back through all of Jobs-era Apple.