Steve would probably have fired the tasteless "designer" who came up with this utterly broken redesign.
How are the new gradients any different than the old gradients?! Any more "childish"?! (Look at the Messages app for example.) Is there any consistency between the old Voice Memos, Apple Store, Videos, iTunes, and Stocks apps? Do these icons really strike you as fundamentally better than the new ones?
I was comparing to MeeGo, and the icons there look much more polished, because they smartly use gradients and shadow when needed while keeping it simple when it comes to colors and symbols. Apple just simplified everything.
Funny, I think people who LIKE this design are nuts. People are nuts indeed!
> How are the new gradients any different than the old gradients?!
OMG?!?111 Well, it's not that the gradients are different, it's that the colors are bright and vivid and each icon has little distinction from the next. Oh, and it looks like something my 6-year-old nephew would draw with his colored pencil set.
If you look at the icons I mentioned, Voice Memos, Apple Store, Stocks, Videos, iTunes, Game Center, etc., they too are bright and vivid and have small inconsistencies. Why is the radial effect different between Apple Store and iTunes? Why is the light source for Videos different from Stocks?
The only difference between these icons and the new ones is that the old ones looked like they were designed by a self-important designer, thinking, "How much arbitrary detail can I pack in this icon?", rather than your extremely talented nephew.
Steve Jobs was probably great on a more holistic design level, and that's the sense of design awareness we tend to give him credit for. It still allowed weird and outright design trends every now and then, though, but not in a way that tainted the entirety of the design.