I mainly agree with James Higgs when he posted about skeumorphism, but I think he goes off the deep end in trying to sew it all together like so many Find My Friends UI elements:
These designs are not the only evidence of an infantile aesthetic at Apple. Jobs mentioned “emotion” when launching iAd (he meant “sentimentality”), and Apple’s own advertising regularly features sickly-sweet “stories” containing grandparents talking long-distance to their grandchildren on their iPhones and so forth. I understand: many people like these things, they like emotion, however fake (these are adverts they’re scripted and acted; they are the opposite of authentic; the emotion is false, corrupt, a lie) and they help to shift vast numbers of devices.
The locus of the infantilist aesthetic seemed to be Steve Jobs himself, if his pronouncements at keynote presentations were an accurate representation. The default book in iBooks? Winnie the Pooh. The trailers he used to demonstrate the video capabilities of the device? Pixar movies. The music choices? Resolutely mainstream, conservative and sentimental. At his recent memorial service on the Apple campus, Coldplay and Norah Jones played. Can you imagine these artists playing at a Dieter Rams memorial?
Sure Steve Jobs was sentimental (although he wasn’t nostalgic). And sure every ad is scripted. But are you going to tell me that people don’t use video chatting to have those sorts of moments? When you just represent the way the product is being used accurately, you can do anything you want with an ad, even fake the way those things won’t happen spontaneously on camera and on set during the making of the ad.
His weirdly strong enthusiasm for iAds bothered me at the time and still does because he was more excited about people making ads than he’s ever been (publicly) about people making apps. For a guy that always professes to hold the interest of the customers to heart, that’s a strange position. It’s hard to square this particular circle, but you could certainly guess that his motivation was more about most ads sucking and being able to prevent that than it was about raking in the big dough from advertisements; they haven’t from ads and they already did from lots of other things at the time.
There’s evidence in his biography that he personally enjoyed Coldplay and the artists that played at the events, like Norah Jones. I hope James isn’t making a cheap point of them playing at what was effectively his second funeral, but it sure sounds like it. I can’t imagine these artists playing at a Dieter Rams memorial, but that’s because I don’t know what kind of music he likes at all. It’s a peculiar comparison and a strange metric; Apple’s lead designer is Jony Ive and not Steve Jobs, even though I’m told he also likes Coldplay “despite” being far less into skeuomorphism.
I find James Higg’s entire post fairly repulsive — apparently I’m unusually alone in this, judging by reactions in the blogosphere — but I believe everything in it is cut from the same cloth. His thesis is: “Now that Steve Jobs is gone, Apple can and should embrace a clean UI aesthetic, without any nasty skeuomorphism.” And you need only read a single paragraph to understand his underlying problem with skeuomorphism:
They are an expression of purest kitsch, sentimentality, and ornamentation for its own sake. In Milan Kundera’s brilliant defintion, kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit”. These are Disney-like apps, sinister in their mendacity.
In other words, this is about design elitism, not about whether these are effective, delightful user interfaces, which is the debate we should be having. (I’d argue that it depends on the details.) Merits of their talent aside, the Coldplay and Norah Jones crack is of the same elitist nature. It absolutely fits in with his larger point as he sees it.
I dislike Coldplay’s music, and I’m not going out of my way to listen to Norah Jones again, but it was great of them to appear at the memorial, at least in Coldplay’s case going far out of their way to do so. And what music would be proper at a memorial for Dieter Rams? JMJ’s Oxygene? Kraftwerk? Philip Glass? Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma? Probably not. Dunno.
Also, I’m not about to take design advice from someone who writes (to take just one example) “the locus of the infantilist aesthetic seemed to be Steve Jobs himself, if his pronouncements at keynote presentations were an accurate representation.” (1) How can one fairly criticize ornamentation in UI using such ornamental prose? (2) Concise writing is a skill that UI designers must have. Something like, “Judging by his keynote presentations, Steve Jobs was the source of the problem ” would do equally well and would carry more power.
By Missy · 2011.11.18 19:27
Just making sure: disliking a part of something, even asserting it, in a forum intended to broadcast your own thoughts, as being wrong, is not design elitism. It’s having a strong opinion. (The subtext of a weblog is “this is just my opinion”.) Now, saying that there is a linear absolute scale from 1 to whatever, and that you are better than something else, that is design elitism.
Usually, the sword of design elitism can be wielded cautiously alongside other concerns. I don’t see it as wrong to proclaim that someone’s Myspace page with red on blue Comic Sans is a worse design than many other pages because there are so many practical problems. But if you take the smallest examples of that kind of practical problems, they are niggling things on par with the scraps of paper in iCal that you can’t remove and that drives some neat freaks mad.
I enjoy skeumorphism when it is well done, when it evokes something that is useful for me to make a connection to and when it does its best to stay clear of annoyances. Let’s take the Notes app in the iPad; there’s a flap for “holding still” the list of notes “piece of paper” to the left. Even if it’s a bit much, care has been taken that nothing can ever disappear permanently beyond the flap, and that hasn’t been implemented in such a way as to cause a permanent “footer” beyond when it’s needed.
Like James, I am reticent towards inventing physical looks for things that aren’t physical to begin with. There never was a Find My Friends leather device to evoke or fall back on; it might as well be made of wood or plastic or something else. I am not absolutist about this; it just has to pass a high bar to prove itself. The leather look is carefully implemented, but they haven’t made the case for why it is that way. Although we are at the beginning now, the end of this road is arbitrary (or ill-explained) looks for everything.
Like James, I think some of this is attributable to Steve Jobs, the man who dreamt up brushed metal (and also, lest we forget, probably drove the continuous refinement of it into something that both looked fairly good and worked well).
However, I will not crucify him over it, attempt to retrofit his every attribute in support of these leanings, assert that they ruled or ruined his life and/or Apple or conclude that these were flaws that better designers did not suffer from.
By Jesper · 2011.11.18 23:30