Jony Ive’s new look for iOS 7: black, white, and flat all over | Hacker News Reader

Jony Ive’s new look for iOS 7: black, white, and flat all over

9to5mac.com

35 pointsuladzislau55 comments

As much as I (And, I'm sure, many here) loathe the recent overuse of textural design in Mac- and iOS, I think it's also important to note that similarly dreadful results can be achieved through equally slavish devotion to flat design. The most important thing is functional design--design that conveys its purpose in the most concise and clear way possible. Flat isn't important, texture isn't important--what's important is clear communication of purpose.

I think Ive's background as an industrial designer prepares him well to do that, as the design of his products testifies. But this article makes the rumored redesign of iOS sound like change for the sake of change--a dogmatic revolution against textural design instead of a reasoned reconsideration of Apple's recent design principles. If that is the case, I think Apple will meet some bad press from angry customers, much the same way Facebook does whenever they do one of their redesigns.

"I think Ive's background as an industrial designer prepares him well to do that, as the design of his products testifies"

Yeah. My MBP is grey, dull, solid brick of aluminium. It is not fun to use like older pre unibody ones. It is cold, bland, unfriendly solid block of greyness. I do not get layd using this, none of my friends say wow. How do you wow a brick of aluminium. No details. Nothing. And not fun, not fun at all. Is it wrong to desire nice, fun tools?

Eh, it's a natural progression given their design goals -- I think the central principle behind Apple's design, one even more basic than their idolization of Dieter Rams, is to capitalize on a trope you see in a lot of science fiction: technology that is so advanced as to defy compartmentalization, as if the driver of their functionality is external to the universe itself. Thus the black slate design, the aluminum unibody, the elimination of removable batteries, the thinness obsession they have with the MacBook Air and the iMac. This works especially well for them because technology isn't actually at that stage, so creating the illusion this way really does make their stuff look more advanced (note how that's far and away the most prevalent word in their ad copy, by the way) than competing products to your average consumer.

During my Windows 2000 days (up until about 2005) I really wanted a monochrome and flat interface. I tried really hard to get black and white flat icons, and to turn the interface as monochrome as possible.

I suck at design, so my attempts were hideous. I was so bad at design that it was very obvious that my scheme was totally broken.

People trying flat UIs today are good at design. But the flat UI paradigm hasn't had all the UI testing that other UIs have had. I really hope there are feedback things built in, so that companies can learn from users about what is good and what needs more work.

It's very easy to look at an almost good design and not spot the stuff that'll trip up users. And this stuff rolled out by Apple and MS and Google will inspire other designers. Icons and themes and schemes etc will be heavily influenced by what those companies are doing. So I hope we're not taking a step back.

the article and your comments bring back memories of my model 50Z PS/2 which I had attached to the black/white monitor, think it was VGA

Ugh, the flat vs skeuomorphic debate seems like a false dichotomy. I hate flat design. Isn't there a middle ground? If you think this looks great, more power to you, but I'll stay far away: http://uxmag.com/uploads/clum-flat-design/UX-11.png

I like gradients. I like borders. I like physical metaphors. The tabs in Google Chrome look really great because of all three. I understand moving away from heavy skeumorphic design. But I don't get jumping to flat design. Why copy the person with 6% market share?

We do not know if they will go for a completely flat design. The last rumour I read about before this one said that they were going for a balance, as in the middle-ground you seek. Not quite as flat as Windows Phone but much more so than current iOS. Let us wait a few more weeks instead of criticizing a design we haven't seen.

In which case, they'll be accused of copying Google.

Speaking of hate and like, I hate that the popularization of the word "skeumorphism" gives engineers a false sense of confidence and understanding when discussing design. The designers and writers that use this word make their living from the tech industry so they understandably pander to this engineering culture.

On the other hand, many designers read HN so they can talk nonsense about engineering topics. It goes both ways.

Really? I don't doubt there are plenty of bad desigers on HN (myself included), but skeuomorphism is a useful word that describes a real and easily defined phenomenon.

Wow, yet another speculative article about iOS 7's UI overhaul with no images whatsoever. How uninformative.

I'm glad we only have to endure this silliness another couple of weeks.

"Black, white, and flat" makes me think it'll look something like this:

http://jomsurf.com/an-iphone-with-the-1986-mac-os/

I hadn't seen that project before, but the old System 7 on my 1-bit black-and-white Mac screen was the first thing I thought of. The flat monochrome and pinstripe were things I missed for years after I stopped using that system.

I have never wished iOS could be skinned more than when I saw this the first time. I think it'd be so cool to walk around with System era Mac OS on my iPhone. Of course, it will never be that pixelated, but I love the retro feel and familiarity of something long gone.

Agreed. You can have a small glimpse of that with this app I linked in my other (surprisingly quickly shot down) comment: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2013/04/feeling-nostalgic-about-t...

Am I the only one kind of loving that retro look?

If Apple isn't very careful, iOS is going to come away from this looking like a freak circus of poorly integrated design. They could get everything right with the hardware, but if they make the software even the slightest bit undesirable, it'll drill iPhone 5S sales.

I'm not sure this is a case of if it ain't broke don't fix it, but when you're selling a hundred billion dollars worth of one phone model, it certainly warrants caution. One bad generation of phones from Apple and the chain reaction could easily be apocalyptic (they have no moat protection, unlike Microsoft with Vista; the smart phone market is moving at warp speed; Android is an inch away from a global monopoly already; Apple's brand is known for very cool design, lose that and sales will plunge, no matter how much cash is in the bank).

calm down. they know what they are doing.

Maps

The design of Maps is great. It fails in other areas.

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

It "works" well, albeit the data it is working with is flawed (depending on where you live).

Right, functionality is just fine, it's the underlying data that's lacking. If one is going to include map data as part of "design", then it seems that there's nothing that "design" doesn't cover, at which point it becomes a meaningless word.

Design covers the full experience of a product. If the data isn't up to snuff then it's poor design to rely on that data for key functionality.

Is there anything that isn't "design", then? Does it then mean anything?

Not really. But I'd say that it has been ripped off any semblance of sanity by Apple and such. I came to know it's meaning as made cleverly to work just as needed/expected, not "OH SHINY, but a bit lacking in usability here and there, still, SHINY"

I dunno, one thing I notice about Apple maps is that although it's very pretty, it feels sooooo much less functional, and less "integrated" than Google maps. Google maps seems to just have everything you want there, lightweight and easily available, whereas Apple maps is basically just ... a map.

It's true that Apple maps also has problems with poor-quality underlying map/search/image data, but that's by no means its only issue.

I think if there's anyone in the world capable of implementing a redesign correctly it's Jony Ive.

It's not going to fix every other app on the App Store that's mimicking Apple's current glossy look.

Corinthian leather and green felt are one thing, but I worry that Apple may swing too far on the pendulum. I don't want an entire OS that looks like Letterpress, and if I did, I'd buy a Windows Phone.

I think there's a place for textures and visual concordances that doesn't get into skeu territory. See also: the definition of skeuomorphic design (i.e., ≠ textures).

Most people who "agree" with Ive don't seem to share his (stated) reasoning. I mostly hear of visual distaste for skeuomorphism, but the article points out

"Ive's…reasoning behind his distaste for the texture-heavy (skeuomorphic) interfaces [is that] software designs filled with physical metaphors do not stand the test of time."

Considering how long Apple has used skeuomorphic design, it will be interesting to see how long Ive's vision lasts. I wouldn't be surprised when as many years have past, that there will again be change.

I'm surprised he would care about the "test of time", when he's designing an OS that updates every year.

The visual design of iOS has hardly changed since it was introduced. Individual apps have changed their appearance, but the OS itself has largely looked the same.

Same goes for OS X iterations over the past 12 years. Minor variations on the same theme. That's a very long time in tech.

The basic look of iOS is unchanged since the first version. OSX has basically stayed the same for over 10 years. Apple like to find what they consider to be a great UI solution and stick to it for long periods of time.

In contrast see Windows 2000 vs XP vs 7/Vista vs 8, and Android 2.x compared with 4.x

The "find a good design and stick with it" idea seems to be an Apple trait, as it applies to hardware just as much as software.

The Mac Pro design debuted with the Power Mac G5 in 2003, the Macbook Pro design comes from the Titanium PowerBook in 2001, the same year as the iPod Classic.

The newer designs are the iMac (2007 for the current metal incarnation), Air (2008), AppleTV (2010) and iPhone (iPhone 4 in 2010, although you could argue that it hasn't really changed at all since 2007).

The exceptions are the iPod Nano and Shuffle, which they don't seem to know what to do with.

But it still uses a receiver on the icon for making a phone call? http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14Oth...

Outside of striped lines to brushed aluminum, has the design of 10.x changed dramatically year over year? I would suggest no.

The argument Ive uses is that when the iPhone first came out and smartphones became a mass market consumer good, people needed the guidance afforded by skeumorphism to adapt to a touch-screen environment.

Now that pretty much everyone and their grandma has had a few years using a smartphone and knows their was around a touchscreen, the usability benefits of skeumorphism are no longer as valuable when compared to the aesthetic concerns. Thus, flat design.

We still don't know exactly what it will look like, but depending on how flat it is that sounds just like Android.

Might be a mix, Android's black/white scheme with the perfectly flat Windows 8 design.

I imagine black and white wont be like windows phone, but will be more like the current iPod music app or the podcast app where they're dark and light, not completely flat, and still maintain shadows and gradients.

I think you're spot on. Also, refer to last year's WWDC app. Everyone thought there would be a more silver like UIKit coming, but that didn't happen.

I would guess that there was already pressure to remove some skeuomorphism at that point.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. A lot more like Android than Windows Phone. Android isn't pure black/white, but dark/light with hints at 3D while remaining very flat. http://i.stack.imgur.com/WYvUq.png

tl;dr: We don't have any idea, so we're publishing speculation to drive pageviews.

It'll be interesting to see how third party apps look. I can imagine the launch of iOS7 resulting in a clean, sleek OS with textured, brightly coloured apps.

The "linen" Notification Centre pulldown has always looked awful. The other (pretty nice) uses of linen (multitasking bar, folder contents, Safari runoff area) have the impression of being embedded beneath the rest of the UI, while NC is the exact opposite. Secondly, it has a really harsh light to dark gradient on it that makes the top look almost like worn denim. I hope it's canned with extreme prejudice.

This is true. Linen (and texture in general) is a fantastic as a way to represent the virtual seams of an OS. It's just really really poorly used in certain areas like login screens and notification center where it dominates the interface.

I agree. The linen texture looks "rich" to me, when used in certain places (full screen app). But in the Notification Center, it just adds visual clutter and makes it hard to read.

Steve Jobs in 2002: "Design's a really loaded word, I don't know what it means. And so we don't talk about it much around here, we actually just talk about how things work Most people think it's how they look, but it's not really how they look, it's how they work"

Video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=sPfJQmpg5zk

I don't think there will be dramatic changes in UI in iOS 7. Otherwise, all the apps would need to be updated (at least, recompiled) to make it doesn't look like alien.

Apple loves giving developers reasons to refresh their apps.

So it should mostly look like the iPod app and the podcast app. Great

The new podcast app is dull, grey and boring. Stopped using it. Yeah, really. The reels were fun. That's not so bad as iPads clock/timer app though. That one i must use and i cry a bit every time i use it. It so flat, so boring and so ugly and so grey.

You cry because the visual design of an app is boring? Really?

I liked the reels but they made scrubbing difficult and hid the podcast image.

If they could keep it as one of the views that could be cycled through it would be great.

Here are some screenshots of iOS System 7 http://appadvice.com/appnn/2013/04/feeling-nostalgic-about-t...

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