The Trend Against Skeuomorphic Textures and Effects in User Interface Design
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
That is nothing short of insane. Just because a few applications on iOS use a flat(ter) design, iOS is the leading edge of flat design? That makes no sense, when there's Windows Phone and Windows 8, two high-profile products from one of the largest technology companies in the world which have adopted this design style to its very extremes.
Heck, even Google has adopted this flat design to a great degree with Holo and, by lack of a better name, the "Google Now"-theme.
Yes, there is a trend towards this flat design, but if you're looking for its leading edge, iOS, and Apple as a whole, is about as far removed from said edge as possible.
I'm not sure if Gruber is intentionally dishonest, or if he actually believes what he's writing here. I'm not sure which is worse.
No it's not remotely 'insane', it's just mildly ignorant. As for 'entirely undermined', clearly the important takeaway from the article has nothing to do with which platform is at the leading edge.
And if you follow the thesis that "retina" quality displays are what's encouraging flat ui design. it's hard to get away from the fact that Apple has been leading the way on that front.
Gruber has been a very vocal critics of Apple's hard on for skeuomorphism for a long time. When he says the "timing of this trend, and the fact that iOS — and the iPhone in particular — is its leading edge, is not coincidental" he is most certainly not talking about the OS itself. This should be obvious because in the very next paragraph he says that "the whole default iOS look" is made up of "phony effects". But I guess if you're just here to get your HN rubber stamp upvotes by calling Gruber a one dimensional Apple shill you might have missed that.
(And I would agree that he overestimates the universal love for Letterpress, but basically all of the blogosphere was fawning over it. How much $$$ has it raked in compared to Carcassonne, which is almost a parody of skeuomorphism?)
If they could jettison all of the holdovers from Windows XP and replace things like the file browser and command console with "Metro Native" apps, it would still be pretty to look at, but painful to live with.
If you want to talk about leading edge, look to webOS which was ahead of its time in significant ways.
Not necessarily. When Metro came out the design was definitely talked and made an impact. The market unpopularity, after that, doesn't effect the initial impact.
iOS is many things, but the forerunner of minimalist or flat design? Hardly.
To an extent, I agree with some replies that say, "Well, nevermind, that wasn't really central to the point being made." Yes, but it would be like me saying Java is at the forefront of first-class functions because Java 8 is doing lambdas and then going on to talk about first-class functions.
Skeumorphism has nothing to do with pixel density at all. It's being used since the inception of UIs for affordance, reusing knowledge from the physical world and increasing usability.
If there's a trend toward a flat design, it's because we're past the mimicry phase, current users were already born in the digital age and don't have a problem understanding new paradigms and touch screens. Now we can focus on UIs that put content forefront (back to print design) and interact in different ways.
iCal has become a classic example. It's been covered with faux leather to make it look "better", even though in the Lion version was actually harder to use than the "digital" Snow Leopard version.
In the case of iCal, it is skeuomorphic, just poorly executed. It mimics the appearance of the object, just don't interact like the real one. In this particular case, we can argue it's bad design, because it's not honest: it deceives the user and breaks the mental model.
I suppose Apple's heavy use of skeumorphisms is less for usability, and more a result of a culture of design inside the company. They often use it to pay hommage to iconic product designs, like Braun products, the Rolodex, Swiss clocks, etc.
BTW Braun design, esp. Rams's are the closest to "flat" in a 3d world [0].
Sorry, but I think turning everything into solid colored rectangles is throwing the baby out with the bath water, and largely misses the point. When you design an app you have to choose for different pieces where on the continuum they should lie. The only way to know where the limit is is to try it, and Apple obviously in certain cases found the limit. Just like with the brushed metal stuff they pushed up to the edge to discover where it was. This reactionary type of design of having no gradients, no textures, no shadows, etc, is less about understanding what makes good design for users and more about blind differentiation.
Personally I like "skeumorphism" in many cases. Why? 'cause in those cases they made it pretty, and I like pretty.... :]
Usability is of course a baseline requirement, but there are many things you can do on top of that, of which the "make it look like leather!" is one. As long as you're mindful of the baseline, it's all a matter of taste (and taste is fickle).
Unfortunately the anti-skeumorphism fad seems in many case to be even more shallow than the skeumorphism fad, obsessing over the look and ignoring basic usability...
This is a joke, right? He's actually giving Apple and the Retina® display credit for this design trend? Letterpress came out in October for christ's sake; the "leading edge" of iOS apps is months behind what Microsoft has already made a core part of their operating systems.
At one point, this is how the Be and Apple fans felt listening to Windows folks blather on, now the Windows and Android folks get to listen to the Apple folks blather on, and so on and so forth.
Such is the circle of tech life.
This is, however, so new to Gruber that he is apparently still in denial. While it's far too early to say, one has to wonder if Apple is headed for a period of uninspired decline, similar to what they experienced in the 90's. Could Gruber end up like the mac-zealots of the 90's who proclaimed the superiority of OS9 when, in fact, it was inferior in every way to its competitors?
One problem with his analysis: Apple's skeuomorphic applications look bad on both high and low DPI displays.
> On retina displays, as with high quality print output, these techniques are revealed for what they truly are: an assortment of parlor tricks that fool our eyes [...]
Did they reset the bar on smart phones? Absolutely. But Google, Microsoft, Kiipt, Skype, Rdio, Spotify, Flipboard, Harvest, and Facebook (just to name a few) are all flat (some of them since inception) because of the Retina display? Of course not.
Designers are running from skeuomorphic designs because they are becoming tired and cliche. THAT was caused by Apple.
It's not fashion. It's just that bad taste is finally being sidelined by better graphic design literacy among general users. We drank cheap wine for years, but now we have a more refined palette. That's not going away.
(Back then? I fought that fight and lost. Today? Same design, flat elements in its place.)
Apparently it has been reduced to a footnote in an article.
And what an insufferable introduction.
"Wiskus rightly cites Loren Brichter’s Letterpress for being at the leading edge of this trend."
It may be true that Letterpress is setting an example for iOS apps, but it's hardly true of software interfaces in general. Windows Phone metro UI has been around a lot longer than Letterpress.
Drop shadows and textures provide affordances and a visual language to communicate what a user can and should interact with on screen. They provide a visual hierarchy to the user so they can easily see what is content and what is interactive, etc.
Print has no interaction, so it's a bit naive to say we're going back to print aesthetics. We need a new way forward that provides both. Web apps have been experimenting with this for a while now. Some of these ideas work, some don't, but we can't just pretend print design has all the answers.
Now, on HiDPI displays we can go back to using more detailed fonts that we use in print without loss of quality, so the text part of the interface gains a lot in aesthetics and character, so much so that we no longer need all the stuff around the text to make it look good.
Additionally, because HiDPI displays are able to show that much more detail, it is a lot more difficult for designers to create skeuomorphic interfaces that look believable. The crudeness of the old displays helped mask the simplicity and lack of realism of the skeuomorphic design. Our eyes and mind knew that what was being represented is not real, just an impression, and so we evaluate it as an impression, not as something real. On contrast, HiDPI resolution is so high that what's being represented actually looks real, but if the smaller detail is off the effect of realism is lost, so the overall thing ends up looking like a poor fake rather than a good impression.
Gruber hasn't been this far off in a long time.
Or maybe they like Metro in Cupertino...
But I'm probably just rationalizing, I haven't grown old of that basic "light from top left" pseudo 3D since Amiga Workbench 2.0, and I won't tire of subtle gradients, ever. I think I'm fine with my "design" seeming old-fashioned or even primitive as opposed to being hip; I genuinely like bevels and gradients, I'd use them if nobody else did, and now I can finally prove that haha (though when everybody used them, there was so much to learn from, so I'm glad that happened ^^).
Whereas on a low-resolution display a flat, typography-based design might look empty and bland, on a hi-dpi screen it can look gorgeous.
Of course, textures also look better on a hi-dpi screen. But the point still remains that Metro-style design has now become an option on iOS thanks to retina displays.