The Next Web: “First of all, many of the new icons were primarily designed by members of Apple’s marketing and communications department, not the app design teams. From what we’ve heard, SVP of Design Jony Ive (also now Apple’s head of Human Interaction) brought the print and web marketing design team in to set the look and color palette of the stock app icons. They then handed those off to the app design teams who did their own work on the ‘interiors’, with those palettes as a guide. We’ve also been hearing that there wasn’t a whole lot of communication between the various teams behind say, Mail and Safari. And that there were multiple teams inside each group that were competing with various designs, leading to what some see as inconsistencies in icon design. Those may well be hammered out in days ahead.” What. Reminds me of how Microsoft does (used to do?) things.
I thought this was an interesting perspective on iOS 7 and what it may mean longer term. I tend to forget what a shock at the time the new Aqua design for early Mac OSX was.
http://furbo.org/2013/06/11/been-there-done-that/
It will interesting to see what gets tweaked and changed between now and the release, which I am assuming will coincide with the new cycle of iDevice hardware releases sometime around Sept/Oct.
I am not sure if this is like Microsoft given that this was the first beta unveiled by Apple. They have months to try to address issues of inconsistencies. If they don’t make the changes at release date, then this criticism could be valid.
If Apple significantly changes the look of iOS 7 that would in itself be a hugely atypical move for them. They never show off anything truly unfinished. That is, shall we say, more of a Microsoft move?
It’s easy to draw the similarities with Microsoft, though I’d say it has more to do with the Leadership (or lack thereof). If you don’t have 1 person with a strong vision at the top (Jobs), then it’s inevitable that someone else’s vision will fill that gap. Or in this and Microsoft’s case: the separate, perhaps conflicting visions of multiple people.
What about Mac OS X Public beta?
Not sure what you are talking about, not that much changed between the public beta and 10.0. It is true that the earlier developer previews were a bit more different, but then it was a question of an entirely new OS in every respect, and Apple didn’t really have the possibility of holding it back until it was ready to ship since apps needed, for the most part, to be all-new to work on it.
Edited 2013-06-14 13:34 UTC
I find the change on iOS disturbing more than anything, i not sure why though. I had hoped that Apple would have continued to champion its “skew” design idea, and leave with Microsoft to continue evolving its “modern” design ideas.
The problem with skeuomorphic designs is that it does not scale well between a wide range of screen resolutions and form factors.