
Jony Ive is Not a Graphic Designer - monkbent
http://stratechery.com/2013/jony-ive-is-not-a-graphic-designer/
======
calinet6
Honestly, does it matter what kind of designer you are as long as you have a
good visual aesthetic and understanding of usability and how people will see,
interpret, feel, and use your product from end-to-end? Isn't "graphic
designer" just a pigeon-hole limiting title that doesn't really mean squat
when thinking about product design at a high-level?

Apple, in the past, has gotten things right because they thought about product
correctly at every level. I don't see why we should think they will change
this habit.

~~~
namank
"understanding of usability and how people will see, interpret, feel, and use
your product"

This is the foundation of design (all kinds) and, what I think, the post is
about.

------
aresant
The most interesting subtext to this entire story to me is that Jony Ive,
under Jobs, was a hardware designer.

In Job's biography we see that Ive's "design studio has foam cutting and
printing machines, and the windows are tinted." (1) - hardware is what he's
done, that's what he's won awards for

His aesthetic is unimpeachable w/hardware IMO, but I am so curious to see how
his talents translate to software and usability.

(1) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive>

~~~
twelvechairs
He is an industrial designer by training (I read the title and said to myself
"of course - he's an industrial designer"). Physical products are what
industrial designers generally do. Foam cutting and printing machines are a
common tool of the trade.

There are, however, few organizations which strongly value industrial design
enough to employ a serious team of them. Young industrial design graduates
have a very hard time finding work in the field.

~~~
GuiA
> Young industrial design graduates have a very hard time finding work in the
> field.

RISD Industrial Design graduates often end up in software UI design, actually.

~~~
ianstormtaylor
Yup second this. RISD ID graduates tend to end up in Interface Design just as
much (if not more than) Graphic Design majors. The ID curriculum actually does
a much better job at introducing the students to a lot of the concepts that UX
Designers champion. Industrial Design tends to be much more research driven,
so it translates well.

Graphic Design tends to be much more about story-telling, metaphor, visual
qualities, etc. — which are all important in Interface Design as well, just
different. Joe Gebbia's double-major in ID and GD makes a lot of sense for a
startup designer.

(Bias: RISD Graphic Design student.)

~~~
vanderZwan
The real problem is that we're all thrown on the same heap by outsiders and
that they tend to underestimate the added value of having a team with these
diverse backgrounds.

(Bias: IxD student - in a master programme where everyone has a different
bachelor)

------
mikeash
How much discussion of the iOS design overhaul, based on fourth-hand accounts
of what somebody might have seen once as they walked past an office, will we
have to endure over the next month? It's driving me nuts. Roughly nobody knows
what it's actually going to look like, but everyone seems to think they're
still very qualified to comment.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
I don't mind the discussion as long as there's some hint of intelligence to
it. My problem is that people are so stuck in this "here and now" mentality
that they can't _think_ outside of the box even a little bit. Example: the
banter about the "flat" UI. Did anyone even consider that a design can not be
skeuomorphic and ALSO not be flat? The flat interface is Google's and
Microsoft's thing -- why would Apple copy it directly, ESPECIALLY when there
are well-documented UX issues with flat interfaces?

The fact that people have already 1) claimed to know exactly the path that
Apple is taking and 2) have already made opinions about said path is what is
entirely frustrating.

~~~
mikeash
I agree, a discussion about UI design in general, informed by the current
state of iOS and speculations about its future, could be interesting. But
instead we get "they're doing _this_ , and it'll suck/rule!" when people
_don't even know_ what they're doing!

------
r0s
> When the iPhone came out, nobody used touch devices.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_sales>

By the time the iPhone was released in 2007, more than 40 million DS units had
been sold worldwide.

I think it was last year the iPhone managed to beat the DS for total combined
sales.

~~~
kpao
Yeah, and Windows Mobile devices with touch screens had been around for quite
a while before the iPhone came out... Ex:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard>

~~~
biot
Before that, there was the Newton, Palm, and various clones. And for thousands
of years prior, the abacus had a touch interface.

------
cateye
It is obvious that iOS needs an update. It is really behind the competition
both in design and functionality.

Making someone the face of the brand and mentioning him a lot seems to me just
some marketing trick.

~~~
ocean12
I'm curious: in which areas does iOS functionality lag the other competing
mobile OS's?

~~~
potatolicious
Oh no, now you've done it :) I'm an iOS dev full-time, so this is a favorite
topic...

\- Multitasking architecture is broken for many use cases. The biggest one is
any sort of messaging application - your app doesn't actually execute any code
when a notification comes in, so when your user reacts to the notification and
launches your app, your app has to go and re-fetch much of the same data that
the notification already carried. This comes across to the user as being slow
and finicky.

\- Basic UI paradigms are behind what the community is pushing. This isn't a
lag behind _competing_ OSes, but rather lagging behind itself. Apple used to
be the flag-bearer for the state of the art of iOS UX, but the community has
largely taken over to both good and bad results. See: pull to refresh, launch
screens, side menus, etc. Apple can, and should, reclaim its position as being
at the leading edge of its own platform.

\- Lack of a proper inter-app communications channel. Intents on Android is
very powerful, something like this is totally lacking in iOS.

\- Lack of customizability when it comes to core functions. I cannot associate
all mailto: links in the browser to GMail for example. I _must_ use Apple's
Mail. Ditto for Maps.

There are a bunch of others, but today is a rather busy day :P

~~~
coob
As a user, I prefer knowing that if an app is in the background, unless it's
VOIP or Satnav it's not doing anything. We've seen what happened when apps can
do what they want - they _will_ abuse system resources. As a developer, I can
appreciate the need for limits on the notification system for the sake of
scale.

Oh and and inter-app communications channel you're after is it?
<http://audiob.us>

~~~
potatolicious
You're right. There's no way that allowing apps to spawn as many processes as
they want, running for as long as they want, is a good idea.

But there is a middle ground. Like already mentioned, if you register for
location updates you can do a small amount of processing when your device
moves and the OS wakes up a (very small) portion of your app to respond to it.
If your app runs for too long here it will simply be killed.

Apple has created a _very_ small number of cases where an app is even allowed
to do this, which puts a huge cap on what people can do with it. The IM case
is the most egregious: I can get a push notification saying "Bob messaged you:
Let's meet up at..."

You tap on the notification, your app opens. It has to load from a cold start.
Then it has to go to the server and fetch Bob's message to you, even though
your notification obviously already had it. All in all, it's 10-15 seconds
before you're actually reading the message, which is unacceptable.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
You can put a payload into your push notification (as long as you're not going
over 256 bytes). The developer guide says that notifications should not be a
way to send data to your app, but what they mean by that is that it should not
be the _only_ way that your app gets data. You can use a custom payload to
"cheat" with the UI (much like how Apple's blank UI splash screens are meant
to make the UI look faster), and present the user with at least _some_ new
data while the app loads all of the up-to-date data in the background.

------
com2kid
He is a UX _/Visual designer, of course the design is going to be more than
skin deep. Skeumorphism impacts everything about UX. Think about the desktop
model, from that we got folders, which had files in them.

Compare that to throwing out the desktop model. Now you have an image gallery,
you select an image. You do not dig through folders of images, instead you
look by context. Maybe that context is dates, maybe it is locations, or maybe
it is whose faces that were auto detected in the images.

Things like auto-tagging location and faces are features that stem largely
from the abandonment of skeumorphism, skeumorphism is a metaphor and as with
all metaphors it is designed to make thinking about a new concept easier, but
at the same time it is also limiting because all metaphors are limiting and
imperfect.

_ Note that I have a very encompassing view of what UX designers do. The lead
UX designer I work with oversees everything from physical hardware design to
software, and indeed having integration between the two is very important.
(Something Samsung could learn, if I had a dollar for every time my phone got
put into Mute mode on the way into my pocket the phone would have long since
paid for itself!)

~~~
Confusion
Slightly offtopic, but I almost daily trigger the mute switch on my iphone 3gs
when shoving it in my pocket.

~~~
girvo
Funnily enough, the mute switch was a Palm innovation originally.

------
Aloha
"When the iPhone came out, nobody used touch devices. The signaling benefits
of skeumorphism were very useful, especially since most iPhone buyers were
buying their first iPhone."

I would hope so, the iPhone _was_ the first iPhone. It was not the first touch
screen device, or the first smart phone.

~~~
cwp
The point was two-fold: first, existing touch-screen devices had tiny
installed bases. He didn't say there were no touch devices, just that
(approximately) nobody was using them. Second, people buying iPhones now are
often existing iPhone users, and so they are already familiar with the way iOS
works. Obviously, that wasn't the case in 2007. Both of these factors
contribute to skeumorphism having been useful in the first iPhone and less
useful now.

~~~
Aloha
I think a limited amount of skeumorphism is still useful and quite valid, I
think however giving everything a texture to match what it would be, or the
tape deck motif of the podcast tool is less useful, in fact, I think its
distracting, maybe even for new (read non-technical) users. Everyone knows
what the play, pause, stop, fast forward and reverse signs look like, are the
spinning reels needed?

It raises another question, when does chrome become just a distraction, rather
than easing the user into using the product?

~~~
jfb
The problem with the podcasts app wasn't the reel to reel nonsense; it was
that the damn thing _didn't work_. Ditching the skeuomorphism happened in the
same release as serious upgrades to a working functionality.

------
riffic
Biggest misconception about design these days is that design is purely about
looks.

"What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good
lasts." — Ray Eames

~~~
Sevores
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People
think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told,
‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it
looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs,
[http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html?pagew...](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Visual design is concerned about aesthetics, or at least how visual
characteristics influence usability. Interaction design is more concerned
about the overall story and workflow of the artifact. These are quite
different jobs.

~~~
Sevores
Yes, but I think he's saying that they shouldn't be separate. At least not in
the sense that someone wires it up and _then_ makes it pretty. "…prior to
Jobs’s return to Apple, design was what happened at the end of the engineering
process. Post-Jobs, engineering became a component of the design process. This
shift made all the difference in the world." —
<http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/walter_isaacson_steve_jobs>

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The daringfireball post is messed up on so many levels. There are actually
designers (IxDs) who are solely concerned with artifact function and not
aesthetics. Such designers are often former developers (but they could just as
well be trained as graphic designers or even architects), and in the worst
case design-light organizations, they might just be product managers. Design
is something that happens up front and then during the engineering process as
new trade offs or realizations arise. Sometimes things get messed up and the
dev team is forced to start before the design team (due to resource
constraints), and the project just turns out to be very messy then.

When I was working in a big corp design studio, my boss was a former pre-Jobs
Apple guy and it didn't sound like things were very different back then
either.

Let's root our conversation in reality and not in some hypothetical black and
white world.

------
kyro
I agree on the whole although I don't understand why you call that quote
asinine -- it seems to support your message.

~~~
monkbent
Fair. I was more referring to the quote in it's entirety:

“The very fact that we’re talking about who’s going to design the icons, who’s
going to design the applications and the operating system is a little bit of a
concern. Because that’s not innovative,” she explains. ”What I’m interested in
is not so much what they’re going to do about skeuomorphism, and those awful
leather book pieces and daily planners, but a couple things that Apple didn’t
hit the ground running. Like for today, Wii and Microsoft own gestural.”

“Apple kinda missed television and missed social,” she continues. “I’d be
concerned that they’d miss natural user interfaces because they’re busy
getting rid of skeuomorphism.”

EDIT: This is the quote from Wired that I called asinine. I don't agree with
it. Wired link: [http://www.wired.com/design/2013/05/what-jony-ive-needs-
to-d...](http://www.wired.com/design/2013/05/what-jony-ive-needs-to-do-for-
apple?cid=co7698294)

~~~
stcredzero
Isn't further developing the language of touch interfaces part of the same
thing as getting rid of skeuomorphism?

~~~
loganfrederick
I think the quote is saying that Apple's work on developing touch interfaces
is potentially hampered by trying to get rid of skeuomorphism, which keeps
skeuomorphism on their minds. The company that might really change touch
interfaces will be one that isn't even worried about skeuomorphism problems
and legacy interfaces.

I'm not saying this is actually true, just how I think the quote is meant to
be interpreted.

------
kepano
I get what the author is trying to say but this post is all over the place.
The conclusion does not have much to do with the ideas presented.

I agree, it's shallow to think that under Ive all we'll see is a reskin. A
visual update along the lines of OSX's evolving window styles might be part of
it, and perhaps the first step, but I would guess that by iOS8 we'll see big
new ideas that make the OS even more intuitive.

iOS has developed a lot of cruft as new features and preferences were grafted
onto the original release. Settings are a hierarchical mess and many of the
default apps have inconsistent mental models that need to be reevaluated.

By advancing the touch-based UI, iOS brought a more analog (or hardware-like)
type of interaction to software. I don't think that fact has been explored
deeply enough, and I expect Jony Ive will bring those insights to the revamp.

Although iOS also has advances to make in inter-app communication and other
areas, I expect Ive to be particularly interested in challenging the high-
level HCI problems that are appearing as mobile OSs become more complex. He'll
be a force for the much needed intuitiveness that has been eroded from iOS.

------
williwu
Steve Jobs wasn't a graphic designer either, but people still quote him on the
skeumorphism of Calendar or Notes app among others.

------
mikecane
It will be interesting to see how Ive resolves the tension of a 21st-century
digital device and its 20th-century analog interaction cues. Remember how the
iPhone was the first device to have a black background in its launcher? And
how when turned off it looked like a black slab? Nothing else looked like that
before it came out. But then the faux leather and textures ... ugh. A reverse
example would be the brushed aluminum of iTunes being used in the cartoony
Windows interface.

------
kyberias
"When the iPhone came out, nobody used touch devices... especially since most
iPhone buyers were buying their first iPhone." Is iPhone already a synonym for
smartphone?

~~~
hoi
only in America... where they forgot Blackberry was already a smartphone that
was popular there,

He also disregards that touchscreen smartphones have been around since the
1990's and there were plenty of people outside the US who used such devices.
If he mentioned that it could be used with just your finger, accurately, then
he maybe right.

~~~
sbuk
The only real touch based "smartphone" that was released in the 1990s was IBMs
Simon Personal Communicator. You seem to be confusing smartphones with PDAs.
Palm released the first PDA/phone hybrid in 2001 and to call it a touch based
smartphone is a stretch. Ditto any of the Windows Mobile based devices that
were around at the time. All the _stylus_ based devices had interface elements
that were based around that. The iPhone changed the game, like it or not. As
the author noted, the LG Prada existed, but it was goddamned awful.

~~~
hoi
All the Symbian UIQ smartphones were touchscreen, as mentioned, outside the
US, smartphones were much more common. iPhone changed the game with its UI and
because you could use your finger making touch easier. But the biggest factor
that changed the game were the concessions AT&T made to Apple.

~~~
sbuk
Like I said, calling those "touch" screen is streaching the definition and as
far as I'm aware, none existed pre 2001.

"But the biggest factor that changed the game were the concessions
_$Launch_carriers_ made to Apple." O2 made some pretty massive concessions in
the UK too. Android came along and screwed that pooch well and truly! Don't
get me wrong, there has been a lot of good that has come from Android, but
handing the control back to carriers is harming consumers long term. Data
limits are criminally low, and the reasoning behind them is based on fallacy.

------
6ren
Touch is very laggy on iPads. It's still eminently usable, and there's nothing
better, so no one complains. But to an interaction expert like Ive, it must be
really horrible - it certainly seems so to me.

In contrast, mouse-pointer movements are perceptually instant, and have been
for many years.

Removing skeumorphism (and its heavy graphics) would help with this, as would
the faster graphics, cpus and memory bandwidth in later iOS devices (there's
surely a contribution to lag from the touch screen itself, but I don't know
what it is).

So I hope this is what he's working towards. If it is, it will be something
that everyone will love, without knowing beforehand that they needed it.

~~~
kybernetyk
Touch on current devices is laggy because of inherent touch screen hardware
restrictions. It has nothing to do with how much the CPU and GPU are utilized
by the OS.

There's some research done on reducing the latency. For example Microsoft's
work:
[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=160...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=160670)

~~~
6ren
Thanks! I didn't realize so much latency came from the device itself, but it's
good to see confirming evidence that decreasing it would tremendously improve
the experience.

That's worthwhile research to measure how much improvement makes a difference
(i.e. until it becomes imperceptible), but unfortunately I get the impression
they are only measuring it, not solving it. I gather their test setup is
faked, just to enable measurement, because of the careful way he expresses it
(I expect it doesn't actually use touch). I hate to reference a youtube
comment for support, but the top one says it's IR + projector
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4> And other links to that "Applied
Sciences" Group don't mention any on-going research on it (or even the guy in
the video)... <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/asc/default.aspx>
Searching ms research didn't up any other mention of the two researchers
involved (Albert Ng and Paul Dietz) - Albert's now at Stanford, and Paul seems
to have many projects.

100ms to 1ms is a long way...

------
wiremine
The proof is in the pudding. Until we actually see something, the whole "what
if" game is just sort of silly (although, I agree, a lot of fun).

------
jbrooksuk
I don't understand this whole argument, nobody has really outed him as a
designer. He's never said that he is either.

He's leading the changes, so he'd put some people to make his vision of iOS
etc come true, why would he design the icons himself? Surely he has more
important things to do.

------
morganwilde
You know what, this article makes more sense on What Ive is doing at Apple
than any other I've read. That's why Apple is unique in the industry, because
while the other guys are thinking - skeumorphic or flat - Ive is dealing with
Human Experience of device/system. Everything else than that is a fad, and
they come and go so fast, whereas we still have our senses and bodies
unchanged.

------
tylerhowarth
Graphic Designer ≠ Visual Designer

~~~
replicatorblog
Can you explain the difference? There's a lot of sub-specialty naming in the
field and very little in the way of standardization. I'd see those as
basically interchangeable. I see a pretty big difference in UX vs. GD/VD —
Boxes & Arrows vs. gradients and brand elements, but I'd love to how you
divide them.

~~~
monkbent
I think that visual designers are more about building design languages;
graphic designers are worker bees.

I might be wrong though - I already was once!

That said, I didn't change the article because the distinction is not as well-
known, and I liked the headline ;)

~~~
replicatorblog
I understand that view, but I don't think it's commonly understood that way.
There are a lot of prestigious "Graphic Design" programs at colleges, but I've
not seen many "Visual Design" ones. I do manage a team of 2 UX designers and 2
GD'ers. The UX team makes our apps work well and the GD team gives them their
polish, but there is a lot of overlap between the two.

Great article, BTW, very interesting thought experiment.

~~~
jamesdelaneyie
The courses are generally called Visual Communication Design and tend to have
a wider remit than older GD programs. Most of the stuff up this thread is spot
on.

