To me, there is a distinct movement towards a particular style and I would be very surprised if Apple were ignorant of it. It’s not “flat design” per se and it’s certainly nowhere near the “Metro” levels that people are suggesting they may follow, but it’s a mellowing out of the visual indicators that people need to trigger the idea of a tappable element. Why? Because this is not 2007 anymore, and we are all now fully aware of the medium and the process; we don’t need to be led garishly by the hand. There is still a sense of depth and tactility but done in a refined and suggestive way, sensitive to the changed perceptions that people have of interacting with touchscreens.
That’s something important not being talked about nearly enough in all this “Apple is moving towards flat design” chatter: it’s not that flat design is necessarily “better”, it’s that Apple can start changing some things now because so many people have become accustomed to using the iPhone (and smartphones in general) over the past 5+ years. Not as much hand-holding in the design is required. Apple no longer has to try as hard to make new users think they’re just doing something like pressing a bunch of buttons on a screen. Hopefully that’s liberating for the design team.
A toning down of the shiny bells and whistles does seem to be a sensible approach, but Apple have long understood that texture not only gives depth to the interface, but more importantly, does a good job of obscuring greasy fingerprints.
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.John Cage, composer.
They promised us life in space, flying cars, and jetpacks but all we got were pocket-sized rectangles containing all human knowledge. FAIL.Jason Kottke
It’s interesting that Jobs and Ive saw eye to eye on hardware design and yet seemed far apart, at least in Jobs’s final years, when it comes to software design. While Jobs was reportedly a champion of rich Corinthian leather, Ive could only wince when asked about it in an interview.
I’m confident that we’ll see less leather, wood, felt, and animated reel-to-reel tapes in Apple’s future software products, but the question remains: what does it mean for an application or an OS to be true to itself?
I’m not sure how Ive will express that concept, but Loren Brichter, creator of Tweetie andLetterpress, offers one possible interpretation on an episode of the Debug podcast (starting at 6:10, and again at 1:02:26, specifically mentioning Ive). Letterpress is an exemplar of the so-called “flat design” aesthetic (and it’s also currently featured on the front page of Apple.com). Brichter designed the look and feel of Letterpress based on the things that modern graphics hardware is naturally good at doing: drawing and manipulating flat planes of mostly solid colors.
