Designers Should Look to Demis Hassabis. Not Jony Ive | Hacker News Reader

Designers Should Look to Demis Hassabis. Not Jony Ive

suffsyed.com

9 pointsalexcos12 comments

As a reader, the overuse of "not this, but that" in this article was particularly painful. Which is ironic in an article about a designer who deeply cared about aesthetics.

It’s the biggest tell for AI writing, especially as people get more self-conscious about overusing em dashes.

It's a bit comparing apples to oranges. Ive is a designer while Hassabis is more of an engineer/scientist.

  When Ive transitioned Apple from Scott Forstall's skeuomorphic richness to the spare simplicity of iOS 7's flat design, he wasn't just updating an interface. He was teaching the world a new visual language

How do you say "Metro" in this strange, new visual language?

I don't know, I get flashbacks to Windows 3 and early MacOS on the "new" display design. Amazingly, it looks a lot like the effect of rendering a black and white icon on an LCD display, such as with an early powerbook.

I'm sorry, this article reads like AI slop.

It has all the hallmarks: grandiose writing ("everything changed"), the classic "It wasn't X, it was Y" (about five times in the first minute of reading the article), undue emphasis on symbolism...

All those indicators are coupled with an unpleasant level of obsession with how statistical models are "a new kind of mind"—even after claiming to "strip away the hype cycle".

> We are shifting, rapidly and irreversibly, from a world defined by pixels and layouts to a world defined by weights, prompts, context, and policies.

Such confidence. Just like web 3.0 bros.

a) nothing is irreversible; b) nothing is rapid — just get outside your bubble into the real world.

https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-lab...

Why would anyone look up to Jony Ive? He was never a good designer. He made stuff thin…

I have no horse in the race regarding who _should_ be emulated. But Jony Ive is maybe the single most famous designer to live, so I’m certain people look up to him for that at the very least. Actually I don’t think I can even name another “designer“. Does Andy Warhol count? Maybe Frank Lloyd Wright?

Dieter Rams. Apple copied loads of his designs.

You should know at least about Dieter Rams if you know Ive.

I have a 350MHz Power Mac G4 from 1999, and it’s one of the most thoughtfully designed desktops I’ve used. Not only is it visually appealing, but it is very easy to access its components using its door.

Ive was also behind many other innovative desktops, such as the iMac G4 and the Power Mac G4 Cube. I enjoy my “trash can” Mac Pro; it’s just too bad the dual-GPU approach was a dead end.

While I believe Ive took his desires for thinness and simplicity too far with the 2016 MacBook Pro, I appreciate the work done on the PowerBook G4 (titanium and aluminum), the original MacBook Pro, the unibody MacBook Pro, and the Retina MacBook Pro. These successive laptops set the standard for laptop design, and they helped make laptops easy to place in a backpack. Laptops used to be quite bulky in the 1990s; I have a PowerBook 5300 I acquired nearly a decade ago that is quite thick and heavy.

I don’t agree with all of Ive’s design decisions, but overall I like his designs.

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