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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."
When I was taking a look at that article, this jumped out at me. It's a quote from a Times article:
He still visits the institution in the north-east to give masterclasses, giving up part of his three weeks’ annual leave.
Really? Probably the most influential person in the the biggest company in the US, and you only give him 3 weeks annual leave? What does he have to do to get 4 weeks?
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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.
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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.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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.