
Jony Ive Put Apple's Marketing Team in Charge of iOS 7 Icon Design - jamesjyu
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/12/jony-ive-put-apples-marketing-team-in-charge-of-ios-7-icon-design/
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bbx
I've worked as a graphic designer in a rather large company (500+) who handled
several shopping websites. There was no design team, just a marketing team of
which I was a part. It seemed logical considering my work was meant to _sell_
things, not to _just_ make the website look good. But I was frustrated because
most design decisions require some indepedence and instinct, and it's
difficult to argue with marketing-focused people who solely rely on figures,
charts and basic strategies. The real problem was that graphic designers were
only subordinates, meant to execute the design decisions the marketing team
made.

Each team in a large company has a different goal. Marketing needs to sell,
developers need to make it work, designers to make it beautiful and usable.
When 2 of these goals are assigned to the same team, there is a purpose
conflict. You can not refine one aspect of your work without the fear of
damaging the other. So you end up in a gray area where none of your 2 goals is
completely fulfilled.

The Apple design team probably worked on the new iOS 7 interactions which
turned out to be great. But seeing how the icons turned out, you understand
how frustrated designers across the web have become because they _know_
designers wouldn't have let that happen.

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daughart
Maybe they will change some of the icon designs so we can re-hash the ugly
icon debate for months to come!

