Apple Design Guru Jony Ive Named Chief Design Officer

An anonymous reader writes: Jony Ive, Apple's senior VP of design has been promoted to the role of Chief Design Officer. Ive became Apple's chief of industrial design in 1997. Under Ive's direction, Apple's put out an impressive list of products including the iMac, iPod, and iPad. "In this new role, he will focus entirely on current design projects, new ideas and future initiatives," said chief executive Tim Cook in a memo. "Jony is one of the most talented and accomplished designers of his generation, with an astonishing 5,000 design and utility patents to his name."

Comments

The guy is full of himself

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't stand the guy, he acts almost in love with the stuff he designs? Apple to me has gone from building eloquent well designed hardware. To fluffy impractical hardware for the wealthy geek 1%. Does anyone remember how a Power Mac used to be a power house of computing? Now it resembles something like a vase for flowers. With no potential to ever upgrade graphics or CPU. Or how about the new Macbook with one USB C port?? How functional is that? Apple has become the technology boutique for the wealthy and Jony Ive has help turn Apple from a technology future paver to a fluff tech maker. Only concerned about profits and looks.

Re:The guy is full of himself

[azav]

I agree. His fascination on cramming everything into the smallest space has left us with Macs that are not worth upgrading. It blows.

His touches on the UI are like cancer since he applies principles from designing hardware shapes (Industrial Design) to UI design and THEY DO NOT FUCKING APPLY THERE. Minimalist UI is bullshit. Context matters. You wan to eyebell the UI and understand what each part can do without having to interact with it.

If text looks just like a button, then you can't tell the difference between an item you can interact with and a static design element that you can't click or tap on. This confuses the user. This creates crappy and confusing UI.

I remember looking in Xcode for the longest time for an option in the far right panel. It just wasn't there. Well, his dumbass design principles replaced the arrow that shows the items can expand next to the text with NOTHING. I had no idea that the item was expandable because the visual cue that it was expandable was removed. I wasted 1/2 a hour on this and I'm not the only one who has.

I could go on, but there are so many cases of this now in the UI. It sucks.

And all the motion in the UI? We are wired to divert our attention to things that move or dart. It happens before we think. Every time an item darts or jumps or bumps, it's a distraction that pulls out attention to that item and away from the task we wanted to accomplish. The UI becomes an ADD machine. It's terrible.

All this thanks to Jony Ive. I say no thanks. When not in the office, I use Snow Leopard (10.6.8) because it's simply so much more usable a UI.

Re:What is the difference of these 2 positions?

[SJ]

Ive is in a supreme position of one of the most powerful/richest companies on the planet.

There is no cash offer big enough that could tempt him away from that.

What would get him there is the chance to do something that he couldn't do at Apple...

Now re-read my first sentence.

Jonny isn't going anywhere.

Stupidly in charge of user interfaces too

[ArcadeMan]

Ive: "Hey, I don't like outlines on buttons, they clash with my finely crafted hardware."
Me: "We need outlines on buttons otherwise we don't know what's a button and what's an icon indicator."

If you need to try to interact with the GUI before knowing that you can actually interact with it, you failed.

Jesus Christ.

[azav]

Ever since he's gotten his "design direction" on the Mac OS and iOS, their design have gone to shit.

Everything's animated whether it needs to be or not and you can't turn it off. Everything is ultra skinny and harsh blue on glaring white. Common standards of "don't make the user guess what's functional in the UI and what's not" have been thrown away and the UI of the Mac OS has become a distraction machine that gets in the way of the user. Too much darty motion is ADD fodder as it innately draws your attention to the little darty thing as opposed to keeping your attention on the task at hand that you are trying to accomplish.

I don't want animations that get in the way of me doing my task, or ones that pull for my attention. I want a goo d looking, non distracting UI that lets me do my job, not one with crap sliding all over the place and with hideous colors.

Ugh. This is crappy crappy news for the Mac. But then, we already have too much animated crap in the UI.

Nice... even smaller batteries.

[jbssm]

We must find space to get an even thinner iPhone, perhaps we can ship one without a battery next time. We already use the iPhone plugged to the wall most of the time anyway and I'm quite sure the marketing geniuses at Apple will find a way to advertise that as a "feature".

Re:How to promote without really promoting

[harperska]

He might have been a disaster as a manager. Now they want to replace him.

That's a good thing. He's a creative genius, but probably sucks as a manager. And it sucks that in the corporate business world, often the only way to advance in your career is to manage people who now do for you what you used to love doing yourself but can't because now you're too busy managing. It looks like Apple recognized all of that, and so to keep their most valuable employee happy and of most use to the company they created a position to promote him to that would allow him to just be the head creative director of design and let the people-managing responsibilities fall to someone else who actually wanted that role.

Exhibit A: Itunes

[Anonymous Coward]

Just spent a weekend with the clunky pile of crap that is itunes. Not just not user-friendly. Possibly anti-user. Software that hates you.

Want to know where and when you can scroll? Just throw the mouse around the screen and see what happens, maybe it'll popup. Great news, we've made it really fucking hard to see too.
We've added x's at the end of rows of your purchased music. Want to know what they do? Click and find out, that's the only way you'll ever know. Maybe you'll get to buy your music over again. What fun it is to guess what a button does!
Wondering where your cursor is when filling in payment/contact info? Great news, you'll never know which field you're on, who needs cursors, instead we've got shit that animates that shouldn't.
Like logging in? Holy shit are you in the right place, we'll have you entering your username and password for every goddamned thing possible and never remember that you've already entered it elsewhere in the program.
Want to remove duplicates? Awesome, we've added a view duplicates button but if you want to remove the duplicates, you get to either remove all versions of the song and start over or get that carpal tunnel wristguard on and start manually selecting every other one like its your job. Really settle in and enjoy removing the duplicates because you'll be doing it long enough to wonder whats become of your life and seriously consider wearing a turtleneck again.
Want to see what you've purchased but isn't on your pc? We'll default to Most Recent view every time. Don't like it? Too bad. Useless differentiation? Totally.
Likewise we'll default to album view every time because we really like looking at pretty album art and would rather you deal with the impact of that shitty functionality every time you open the program.
Don't have any interest in radio, and have no movies or tv shows in your library? We'll be prominently including those in your interface anyways.
We're avant garde as all fuck with removing cursors, pointless animations, disappearing scrollbars but when you're putting your playlists together, enjoy drag and drop like its 1995 all over again allllll day long.

Its just bad. Just bad. Awful. So bad. Loathsome. Hate-inspiring.