gurupanguji
I’m pretty sure that if you were to interview one of the designers at Apple responsible for this icon devolution, they would say something about reducing icons to their essence. To me, this looks more like squeezing all life out of them. Icons in Mac OS X used to be inventive, well crafted, distinctive, with a touch of fun and personality. Mac OS X’s user interface was sober, utilitarian, intuitive, peppered with descriptive icons that made the user experience fun without signalling ‘this is a kid’s toy’.
More assorted notes on Liquid Glass | Riccardo Mori
Riccardo Mori is a writer and a translator that clearly cares. Not everyone reads the HIG and not everyone actually shares their thoughts about it. As someone who appreciates the pursuit of passion, Riccardo was an instant follow for me.
This post channels my own criticism of Liquid Glass and presents it in a delightful essay.
I highly recommend going and subscribing to Riccardo.
There's another post of his that resonated too (emphasis mine):
In the past, technology used to be my coping space. A place for a knowledge worker like me to nerd about his tools and related passions — user interfaces, UI/UX design, typography, etc. And if I have developed these passions and interest is largely because of Apple. Apple had a huge impact on my life ever since I started using their computers.
This is the crux of my own disappointment and resulting anger. Apple used to have a direction - a cohesive idea around where it wanted to take computing.
OS X was about bringing modern multitasking, thoughtful design and while Aqua is heralded from a visual design perspective, what I remember about it is Grand Central and a robust multi tasking system that could leverage the underlying hardware super effectively.
It was also open - but, let's not open that can of worms for now.
Francisco sounds right to me and that's a sad moment given where I still place the Mac in my computing world. It's not doom and gloom. There's still time for Apple to right the ship. That said, I am also on the lookout for who will fill the design leadership vacuum left behind.
I totally missed seeing this. Thanks to Riccardo Mori, and now Francisco Tolmasky for highlighting this egregious marketing screenshot.
What I’m seeing today is more like the opposite approach — ‘technology first, ideas & concepts later’: a laser focus on profit-driven technological advancements to hopefully extract some good ideas and use cases from. Where there are some ideas, or sparks, they seem hopelessly limited in scope or unimaginatively iterative, short-sightedly anchored to the previous incarnation or design. The questions are something like, How can we make this look better, sleeker, more polished?
This is one place I disagree with Riccardo. I am not against technology first, ideas & concepts later. However, it used to be:
- here's the technology
- here's how we are using it in thoughtful ways
- it's now available for all you developers in this following way that is users first, apple second and developers last.
My gripe is that Apple's been erring on both the tech and reference examples in the recent past.
I empathize with Riccardo's idealism. I also believe that idealism and realism need to co-exist to bring together true technology revolution. An idealist is often needed to set the vision and how that vision will make things better in a win/win/win fashion between users, Apple and developers.