Authentic Design

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/07/16/authentic-design/

by porker • 13 years ago

107 41 13 years ago

pbowyer2• 13 years ago

Interesting essay. I would come back on two points:

The modernist style of which the author is so fond has been softened since; it was too harsh an aesthetic to appeal to many people (outside the design world, where it is still very popular)

Flat UI design doesn't strip back to functionality; it's another aesthetic trend like skeumorphism.

return0• 13 years ago

Indeed, flatness is not even functional in many ways. Our vision is designed to recognize shadows and bevels instantly as indicators of depth, which can make many "skeuomorphic" designs easier to work with compared to their flat equivalents.

lmm• 13 years ago

I consider myself a modernist, but I was surprised to find I preferred the Harrods frontage to the modernist building in the picture below it.

pbowyer2• 13 years ago

Me too. In interior decor, I always thought I liked it clean and modern, but the more I look around I realise I like it comfortable and homely. Not Laura Ashley or shabby chic, but not stark and unfriendly either. Not white walls and chrome. Even in an office, I like colour and warmth.

Clean lines, light and airy, colour and not too much over-ornate art... there has to be a name for this design movement.

brudgers5• 13 years ago

The Harrods building has a well proportioned facade. One could say it has good bones. It is only the idiom which organizes its ornament which has fallen out of fashion. None of this should surprise us. Typologically, it is a modern building. There are not 18th Century department stores. The building has elevators and escalators.

The comparison to Sullivan's building is silly. The sites are differently constrained. Harrods low profile fits its context outside the urban core. Carson Piere Scott is sitting in Chicago's Loop; it is downtown where land is expensive. Hence it's greater overall height and lower story to story height.

But even more relevant is that Sullivan's architecture is a series of additions and renovations. The building was not birthed fully formed, but is several projects joined together as additional land was available. Part of his job was to tie these pieces together, and that's what its facade reflects.

digitalengineer2• 13 years ago

Is it just another skin or more? Judge for yourself: A list of screenshots of iOS7 redesign vs the 'old' design: http://ios7redesigns.tumblr.com/

sp332• 13 years ago

I'd like to think not, but I'm not sure how a series of static screenshots could show anything other than "skin" differences.

digitalengineer2• 13 years ago

For a large part it is just that; same composition, same 'buttons', same place, but in a new design. You do raise a good point though: I feel the App Store could do with short video's instead of screenshots. Like they do on their own iOS7 page: http://www.apple.com/ios/ios7/#videos

SmeelBe• 13 years ago

Perfect explanation, good was mentioned Flat UI by designmodo in this article http://designmodo.com/flat-free/.

panacea• 13 years ago

UI design has always been about abstracting away underlying complexity and presenting a virtual wizard to manipulate the underlying code.

Would it not be more 'digitally authentic' to present 1's and 0's?

'Flat design' is as much an arbitrary aesthetic as 'decorative design', and whilst I agree it's very pleasing and a sight for overloaded eyes, it's most certainly a trend and not an objective improvement on interfaces usability design.

brudgers5• 13 years ago

To the degree a flat design idiom such as Metro [or whatever it's called] begins to admit text and favor it over icons, a reasoned argument can be made that they are objectively better.

It is not just that the pictographic language of icons -, folders, floppy disks, file cabinets, trashcans, glue bottles, scissors, clipboards etc. - is drawn from a context largely irrelevant to large segments computer use today such mobile devices, educational contexts and home uses. Nor is it that elements such as the floppy disk are twenty years obsolescent.

The problem with the pictographic language rooted in skeuomorphism is that it lacks a grammar. It has no rules of combination. There is no icon for copy and paste - let alone one for copy from context a and paste in context b.

It is not entirely an accident that alphabets have been replacing pictograms for three millennia. They are more flexible. Likewise, the iconography of industrial buttons is rapidly disappearing both as a relevant context from the workplace, and as a human interface. Industrial interfaces are increasingly a screen and a keyboard [a keyboard is our industrial interface to an alphabet].

What is the most useful feature of the iOS interface? It would be hard to argue for anything other than the touch keyboard. It has two important features. Each icon represents a symbol rather than an action. Those symbols have rules of combination which allow the expression of complex abstractions.

Your roommate can text "Scrunchie on door." They don't need to download "The Let Someone Know You're Getting Laid App" from the app store. Neither do you.

The icon and skeuomorphism will continue to lose ground simply because they are too brittle for general purpose computing. There will be specialized contexts where they persist - just as pictograms are a useful way to describe the way the Grants Mill Road winds over the hill. The sign before two successive turns shows two successive turns.

Today, we are in a future where Grants Mill Road has been straitened as it heads down toward the bridge, but some interface designer has not only retained the sign but had it painted to simulate a brushed aluminum finish and shading to simulate an embossed surface illuminated from the upper right.

Most skeuomorphism is cutting two inches off the potroast.

http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/conventionalwisdomassumptionsan...

mark_integerdsv• 13 years ago

You just explained flat design to me in the most utterly convincing fashion. Seriously, The Penny Has Dropped.

What I can also see now is how utterly piss poor most if not all the current flat designs are at even beginning to approximate the effects that you are alluding to.

I totally buy your version of FD but I have yet to see it implemented. Do you have any examples perhaps?

radley2• 13 years ago

If the keyboard was really so predominant Blackberry should have beat iPhone, not the other way around.

Not only are icons easier to grok (picture == 1000 words) they usually don't need to be translated into multiple languages for international use.

The backlash against skeuomorphism was not due to a demand for more text. It was due to overuse and, in many cases, crippling functionality for the sake of inappropriate design (i.e. iOS podcast app).

mortenjorck• 13 years ago

This is a very perceptive observation, but you're ignoring the reciprocal trend in the evolution of language: The development of abbreviation, shorthand, and idiom. The conceptual open-endedness of language allows for infinite flexibility, but at a cost of efficiency of communication.

You actually allude to this in your example: "Scrunchie on door" is a cultural idiom for "please do not enter the room as its occupants are currently engaged in intimate activities" – we can imagine the occupant chose an iconographic symbol for this rather than writing out the aforementioned sentence in marker on a piece of paper solely because it was more efficient (there are plenty of euphemisms that could be written out longhand as well, negating any argument that the icon would be chosen purely out of discretion).

Ultimately, this sequence of abstraction be seen as a loop: Ancient pictograms led to written language, which may be optimized to idiom and icon (the scrunchie), which again serve to inform language (texting about the scrunchie). Iconography is not a one-way path to language – it's a communication tool that works in conjunction with language.

diminish• 13 years ago

ui design progresses similar to fashion, with escapes and refutations from the immediate popularized trends of itself, in order to bring back one of the forgotten previous trends. but each new trend indeed contains both the immediate and far pasts.

flat ui design appears to replace skeuomorphism, but it is indeed a skeuomorphism of the early computer interfaces instead of a blunt skeuomorphism of earlier non-computing objects.

ZitchDog• 13 years ago

All design is arbitrary, sure, but I think the current trend is to embrace the underlying primitives graphics cards give us, rather than hiding and deforming them into real world objects. These primitives are absolutely arbitrary, but I think think is where the idea of 'digital authenticity' comes from - being true to the hardware.

jmilloy• 13 years ago

The user's goal is rarely to manipulate 1's and 0's. Any design that mistakes the tool for the goal will be inauthentic (skeumorphic calculators being an example). Inasmuch as a design helps accomplish the ultimate goal, it is not arbitrary.

mbesto• 13 years ago

Exactly. I'm beginning to get sick of the debate about design. Design has one purpose - make things easier to use.

For example, rounded corners in digital design aren't just for a skeuomorphism trend, but rather a trick to reduce cognitive cost.[0] Let's stop pretending it's anything more than that.

Note - One of the principles of design is the aesthetic-usability effect[1]. I would argue this is the main reason why we continue to debate trends and their effectiveness around usability.

[0] http://www.uiandus.com/blog/2009/7/26/realizations-of-rounde...

[1] http://courses.washington.edu/art479/media/universal_princip...

porker• 13 years ago

Thanks for link 0, I'd never seen that before.

zeckalpha2• 13 years ago

Isn't the calculator example still skeumorphic?

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

A skeuomorph /ˈskjuːəmɔrf/ is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that were necessary in the original.

You can say that it isn't, because they departed with the aesthetic elements intended to make it look true-to-life like reflections and bevels; or that it is, because it still retains the placements and interacts like the physical calculator.

zeckalpha2• 13 years ago

For a while there, it seemed like people had reached the consensus that flat vs. skeumorphic is a false dichotomy. After iOS 7 was unveiled, all of a sudden they are opposed again.

Kerrick• 13 years ago

If you enjoyed this article, you'd probably also enjoy Material Honesty on the Web [1], by Kevin Goldman on A List Apart.

[1] http://alistapart.com/article/material-honesty-on-the-web

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

same author as the OP, and one of the best things I ever saw posted on HN: http://fadeyev.net/2012/06/19/moral-design/

stevenkovar• 13 years ago

Design solves problems. That's it.

Projecting these terms and trends only serves to handicap those who choose to emulate over develop a grasp on the fundamentals of problem solving.

huffman• 13 years ago

"solves problems" encompasses a vast space of decision making, some of which is arbitrary and stylistic. "That's it" is oversimplifying things.

"In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there's only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice. So for instance, packaging for a perfume or for chocolate in order to make things fashionable, obsolete and therefore bad for society because we don't really need it. While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. That means you as a person try to invent a new thing—which is intelligent, which is clever, and which will have a long-life. And that's called stylistic durability. It means you can use it for a long time." - Gert Dumbar

jjindev• 13 years ago

I grew up with simple interfaces. I came up through the monochrome Macs. I loved the early Apple Human Interface Guidelines. I think the first time I said "whoa" was when I saw Enlightenment. Suddenly excess ornamentation was fun. I even advised Steve Jobs (if he read USENET) that "eye candy rules."

So now maybe we've all been through that cycle, and eye candy, excess ornamentation, over the top skeumorphism, is falling away.

That's probably ok.

SolarUpNote• 13 years ago

And of course, there are always cases where flat design wouldn't make sense:

http://www.apple.com/logic-pro/whats-new/

crazygringo• 13 years ago

One of the better articles I've seen on this. However, I still have a big bone to pick with their conclusion, which everyone from Microsoft to Apple has been parroting:

a desire to curb superfluous decoration and to focus on the content itself

All this "focus on the content" is driving me nuts. The only time I really want to focus on the content is while listening to MP3's, watching a slide show, or browsing a webpage -- and that's what full-screen mode is for.

Most of the rest of the time, the whole point of the phone/tablet/desktop is to interact with the content -- to edit it, to transform it, and so on. I don't want extra clutter, but I do want the buttons, the toolbar, the menu bar -- I want to sit down at a program and see what I can do with it, not look at bare "exposed content" and wonder where on earth I click/tap/swipe from in order to reveal the hidden interface.

I want to know what's a button and what's a label and what's a textbox without guessing -- I want affordance. I don't want everything that's part of the interface to be whitewashed and homogenized and grayed-out until I can't tell what's what, just so it can all be relegated to a neutral background so that the content itself can be all "focused on" or "exposed".

I mean, pre-flat-design-era, people complained about plenty of crappy interfaces, but I never heard anyone complaining that whatever "content" wasn't "exposed" enough, unless they were IE users with 20 toolbars.

Sometimes it seems like half these new flat interfaces are really just made for stores and TV commercials, so people can see bigger pictures of professionally-taken "vacation" photos -- and the actual experience of using them suffers for it. (Kind of like "cover flow" was beautiful in commericals, but then I've never known anyone who actually used it for real -- which makes sense why it was finally removed from iTunes.)

Authentic Design

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