waffle

So maybe iOS 7 uses the same grid system as for some of its hardware.

If this is true, some people seem to find it the mark of a new era of consistent design at Apple. To which I say: bullshit.

Rules and guidelines are fine. The iOS 7 Grid is certainly a good idea for internal consistency among a set of intricately connected icons. You will see dozens of them in the span of minutes, and as it’s something you dip into quickly more than 100 times daily, clear coherency is not a bad thing.

But iOS 6 also had clear coherency. There are also millions of apps that have already bought into that design language (sometimes with mixed success, but still). My feelings on iOS 7 are complicated and I’m not citing this as a reason for Apple to abort its iOS 7 transition, I’m just pointing out that it’s not being groundbreaking in this aspect.

So is the grid system still a better way of achieving the coherency? The exact example that everyone seems to use is the Mac mini bottom plate, carefully aligning with the App Store circle or the biggest of the grid’s circles. To me, this is a perfect example to illustrate why I think this consistency is bullshit.

The bottom plate on the Mac mini is a physical thing; a dial that turns to unveil the innards of the machine. It is one part of the exterior, together with a plastic back plate on which the connectors, fan slit and power button are placed, and the unibody, CNC milled aluminum case. Since the case is milled from one piece and there’s a mess of technical components that have to enter, they have to enter through the bottom plate’s hole. For this reason, it is supremely convenient for the bottom plate’s hole to be as wide as possible while not looking like crap. Additionally, considering that the bottom plate is not level with the case’s bottom, the wider the bottom plate is, the more evenly the Mac mini stands and the less likely it is to rock or tilt.

The size of the bottom plate of the Mac mini is predicated by engineering practicalities. It is that big because it makes functional sense, not because it is the most aesthetically pleasing. Apple is continuously attacked for placing “form over function”; this is a good case of them placing function before form at least somewhere. (The ultimate example of placing function before form would assume that internals have to be poked and prodded at every now and then and make accessing them simpler, but given the assumption that the only internals that need poking and prodding are the two RAM DIMMs, the current design solves these problems without screwing, sweating and certainly putty kniving.) These considerations, above just picking the right materials and colors, are what gives a design integrity – working well in its own context.

So if the Mac mini’s bottom plate size is predicated on physical realities, what is the compelling reason to crib those measurements exactly? Consistency is a candidate. But consistency with what? If the Mac mini changes, should the Grid also change? Isn’t Apple just doing to itself what it made fun of others for doing – shamelessly nicking the end result without bothering with the details of figuring it out from the start?

That’s why I’m having trouble with the iOS 7 Grid. Not just that its proportions are aesthetically off to people that know what they’re doing (something, I hasten to add, completely unrelated to textures). Not just that it could foolishly align with something and that it’s considered a good thing by default. We know that there is a Grid, but we can’t relate to it. Maybe the Grid has integrity, but I’ve looked for ten weeks and I can’t find it – there’s no reason to consider that this Grid is better than any alternate Grid. Its outcome looks mysteriously off. The colors picked to work with it are not all garish, but are not sanded down and don’t provide a good contrast to the sort of vibrant background pictures that people are likely to have (and which they must pick for the lock screen for that text to be legible).

It’s not something that Apple can’t fix. But it bugs me that its most likely happenstance coincidence with the Mac mini bottom plate has people whooping and cheering, instead of wondering what’s making them drag rules shaped by necessary physical compromises into something that by Apple’s own ambition should be so unbound by physical compromises as possible.