Beauty, Truth, and Jony Ive

In a similar vein, John Siracusa asks:

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?

Put another way, if the hardware should be true to its materials — glass, aluminum (hard not to spell it aluminium when discussing Ive), plastic — what is it that software should be true to? RGB pixels? I think not. I think the on-screen UI elements should (and under Ive, will be) simply true to themselves. Let a button be a button, and make it look good, with an emotional feel appropriate to its context and purpose. No need to overthink it.

★ Wednesday, 8 May 2013