IBM Design Language | Hacker News Reader

IBM Design Language

ibm.com

115 pointspaulojreis43 comments

I like their replacement for Lorem Ipsum:

Be authentically thoughtful

Authenticity is based on real, shared experiences and is sensed rather than rationalized. Thoughtfulness is a quality that comes from the heart with the best of intentions in mind. It is the deliberate consideration for the needs of others and an empathic understanding of what is most important.

Unity, not uniformity

By giving people a common starting place—and the freedom to innovate and experiment—we allow them to recombine ideas and build specifically relevant solutions, while staying connected to that common center point.

IBsuM...

Instead of leaving a simple comment I would like to share my authentic and thoughtful comment brand which communicates my living perspective and collection of crafted experiences working together as a cohesive language of positive reflection in the inverse context.

Exactly!

Positive reflection in the inverse... Hey!

IBM has great products and the design of this website is nice but the content does the design a disservice. The design expresses "clarity and simplicity" while the text expresses "vagueness and complexity".

personally i feel that your mission statement could benefit from some bespoke, artisanal, hand crafted attention to locally sourced details, which would enhance the user experience. for over five years.

Net-net, we need to boldly strategize a new mission statement, bringing to the table our best and brightest outside-the-box thinkers. Let's set up a series of weekly meetings to best discuss how to monetize the paradigm.

The only limit is yourself.

As a design language/guide/framework etc, I've spent 5 minutes on that link clicking around and I still don't really know what I'm looking at.

I'd say it's IBM's response to Google material design. IBM blog announcement: http://www.ibm.com/design/blog-page.shtml?ibm-design-languag...

That's the only thing their webpage said to me 'we too!'. I used to enjoy improving the visual qualities of data (Brett Victor and previous inspirations as extrapolation) but nowadays it's more of a fad of form over content.

This is exactly what I thought.

It's responsive, has animations when scrolling, pretty color scheme and only small amount of text. Oh, and let's not forget the social buttons. What else can a consumer hope for.

sǝuᴉlǝpᴉnƃ uƃᴉsǝp uɹǝpoɯ >;)

There are actually some interesting bits about why things are the way they are, which is useful for someone like me who is not a designer:

http://www.ibm.com/design/language/framework/visual/layout.s...

Sometimes I wonder how much of Apple and IBM starting to work together was due to the shared love of Helvetica Neue.

There was a good talk from IBM's head of design about what they are doing earlier this year [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvsnezSMdYk

Leading with the Paul Rand "Eye Bee M" rebus is always cool:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/gooddes...

At the very least, a beautiful presentation. And it collects some interesting hints for anyone remotely interested in graphical design. But then it reminds me how this is a field in and of itself, that deserves more professional attention than my own amateurish efforts. When I play around with design, I will do so in my spare time :)

Why the hell the height of navbar is so huge? It just has 6 words in it, but the level of distraction is like from a modal.

Serious question: does anyone have anything resembling an idea as to what the hell the linked page is talking about?

I find it interesting that even going to the main homepage at http://ibm.com shows that these guidelines haven't made it very far internally. I'd have thought they would have established their own brand at home before releasing guidelines.

You could have said roughly the same about most of Google's products when they released Material Design.

That's probably not comparable at all.

I actually quite like mockups on their inspiration pages:

http://www.ibm.com/design/language/inspiration.shtml

looks pretty good for a summer internship project, but nothing more. Why are all these guides uglier than bootstrap?

uglier? to me bootstrap's visual patterns are overused and frankly unoriginal.

Well, the unoriginality is an advantage to me. Trying to discover yet which of the things is an active button gets tedious.

This doesn't feel at all like IBM.

It feels like a modern design team trying to fit in, not realizing they work at IBM.

Am I missing something here?

Why (and how) does IBM have anything to say about design?

You mean the company that hired Paul Rand decades before Apple did? [1]

[1] http://www.paul-rand.com/foundation/ibm/

Now they just need to hire a celebrity to back up all this bullshit.

Who's next at coming up with a 'design language'? Blackberry?

Clearly, you know nothing about design. This design language looks pretty solid to me, and is much nicer (IMO) than Google's gee-whiz Material language.

Not saying it's doesn't look nice, but certainly waaay behind Google's Material Design in terms of solidness and clarity IMHO. IBM is just trying to stay 'trendy' IMHO.

From the folder icons in resource zips you can see that they are using Google Drive.

Interesting, considering the size of the corporation.

I couldn't find the folder icons. Could you post the link to it please?

What's the issue with Google Drive? Do you suggest they should come up with their own whole backup solution? Why reinvent the wheel anyways. Not to mention it's possible that only certain teams use it, not all the teams, nor the teams who have truly sensitive information in the spirit they don't want Google to see.

No issue, just interesting.

I would assume that such a big corporation would have very strict data sharing policies. Apparently, that's not the case. Interesting!

This is like the complete opposite of creativity. I actually feel a bit sick..

Why? This is pretty standard design guidelines. Create a typography hierarchy, design mobile interfaces with enough space for fingers... etc.

If anything, I'd say these guidelines are too generic. Not specific.

Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur?

Dear IBM... you suck at communication! Take a look at their Watson LP (http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/) If you don't continue reading blog articles comments and do some tryouts you actually have no idea what they want to sell you and EVEN LESS how exactly you can use it.

Sadly even when they customer research, we have been on a few of these with regards to improving their support sites, they seem to take all the suggestions and go the opposite direction.

At least the linked sites look good, try navigating their support sites, it gets worse when they cross license products and some support is here, some there, and all bound up behind horrid search engines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com