A bit offtopic, but I am disappointed that the the initial "winners" of this seal [1] seem to be almost all companies that are terrible for the environment and society.
> The following global corporations have been awarded the 2021 inaugural Terra Carta Seal in recognition of their commitment to, and momentum towards, the creation of genuinely sustainable markets. These firms have credible transition roadmaps in place, underpinned by globally recognised, scientific metrics for achieving net zero by 2050 or sooner.
1) Seems like they're all companies that have noble commitments.
2) They don't seem that bad (tech and banks mostly)
3) Bad companies have the biggest potential for growth i suppose.
> 2) They don't seem that bad (tech and banks mostly)
AkzoNobel, a Swedish chemical manufacturer.
Unilever, lol, fucking Unilever is earning a Seal for their "commitment".
This feels almost purely a greenwashing-PR-thing than any kind of proper achievement mark.
Anyone can have noble commitments, when those commitments come to fruition then they should be lauded. Right now it just leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth, it's bullshit stamped by a Prince, that's all.
Maybe I'm being a pessimist, but I wonder what percentage of their "commitment" was calculated in dollars donated as a tax-write off to the committee's pet green charity as compared to the percentage of Unilever actually changing any of their pollutive practices?
> I've seen actual astroturfing that sounds more pragmatic than this!
Its a meaningless seal for a vague commitment to being "green". There are very low expectations here.
Any improvement is good. And framing everything as needing to be green just forces the hand of every other company.
I could care less what this seal means these companies are doing. But even a commitment to be more green that is ignored is better than no commitment and no action. At best, this creates a cohort of companies committed to and acting in global best interests, and at worst, it moves the overton window more so every other company is expected to be more green postured, which will eventually lead to more political and social expectations.
More money is spent on marketing products than on sustainability. The top wealthiest companies in the U.S. will shove money into offshore bank accounts and refuse to spend it on the U.S. The largest tech companies provide the least funding in education, and heavily target schools and students to gain significant profit.
Sustainability, like every other issue, is based on socioeconomic ability. Being "Green" is expensive as an individual. The best way we resolve that issue, same as many others, is a mass rewrite of education, funded by private companies. This will not happen so long as there is a surplus of skilled work. We can easily demonstrate the surplus by how little these companies invest into getting skilled workers.
> The top wealthiest companies in the U.S. will shove money into offshore bank accounts and refuse to spend it on the U.S.
"Shove money into offshore bank accounts" makes it sound like they're moving money from inside the U.S. to offshore in order to hide it. I don't think they're exporting money from the U.S. As I understand it, they're stockpiling foreign-earned money outside the U.S. and not importing it.
>This will not happen so long as there is a surplus of skilled work. We can easily demonstrate the surplus by how little these companies invest into getting skilled workers.
Interesting, isn't there a shortage of talent going on (suppossedly)?
I'd say, yes. The US is just consuming talent from the entire world and it works because tech jobs in the US have really competitive salaries. But this talent is missing elsewhere, so I don't think it's sustainable in the long run.
No. If there were these companies have so much money they could build a massive university in every state just for themselves and lose very little money. They don't, because they don't have to. Unfilled positions are "nice to have's", not a requirement of their work. They will not lose money over that position not being filled, not to the amount they believe matters.
If PepsiCo (one of the companies listed) ceased production of plastic bottles immediately I would be happy. That is a serious, credible commitment to improve.
We don't have to ban them, but we definitely don't have to support and laud them either. Tolerate and shame, like we do with tobacco companies, seems like a reasonable approach.
And to disclose my own biases, I'm 100% on team "Full Sugar Soda" and will definitely choose no soda over sugar free soda every time.
For me it feels like this: if your local bus drivers have been showing up to work drunk, for years, would you:
(a) welcome a new initiative to help them tackle their addiction issues, with a commitment to move forward together, as a team, one day a month outside of their ongoing bus driving duties; or
Thanks for pointing this out. Even if it’s not green washing, when the only diversity in your flagship sponsors in their ranking in the FTSE100 then something’s up.
I would be loathe to see sustainability as yet another form of regulatory capture.
Arçelik is a prime exception. The most notable thing they do is recycle & re-use almost all water in their factories, so that their annual fresh-water use is just 1000L.
Kinda feel for poor Jony here. Went from doing industrial design for some of the most widely-used and sought after products in the world to making a logo for a greenwashing group. Hope to see more interesting stuff from him going forward.
Sometimes it’s not about the money. As for prestige, that depends on which social circle you’re in or what street creds matters to you.
In some ways, working for a big tech conglomerate can be seen as being a sellout in more artistic circles.
For some engineers, Google might be peak street cred. For others, it’s working on Rust. It’s super competitive to get into SpaceX, good for them, but I’m not being a code monkey for Elon. For finance roles, it could be Goldman, whereas it’s less prestigious to be a Goldman software engineer. Then in finance, those in equities may think they are superior to those working in equities. There’s talented people in all sorts of places, and there are mediocre people too. I’m sure Jony Ives is rich enough to not work or start his own project if he wants to. Maybe this project is something that is a personal / intellectual challenge because it is so distinct from Apple.
Are you pitying Jony Ive? Why do you think he’s unhappy with current scenario? People make all kinds of career decisions; what makes somebody feel for one person, could just as well work fine for that person.
Pretty, but kind of exemplifies the problem the world is facing.
Exquisitely beautiful marketing and that's it, nothing behind it.
We all know the beautiful environmental ads the worst polluter companies are making (like oil companies).
Or luxury companies creating "come to us with your damaged bag and we'll repair it for you instead of throwing it out, because we care about the environment" programs, but at the same time having a policy of slashing and throwing away unsold merchandise (https://www.newsweek.com/coach-accused-deliberately-slashing...)
>Or luxury companies creating "come to us with your damaged bag and we'll repair it for you instead of throwing it out, because we care about the environment" programs, but at the same time having a policy of slashing and throwing away unsold merchandise
Very cynically, the first program would also help stamp out any market for repairing their bags outside of their control. Which just further reduces the value of slashed merchandise without proof of purchase.
Off topic, but I just looked that up to get around the resource limit being reached without even stopping to think that someone might have already posted it lol
You need to warn people before posting this. I saw it when it popped up on HN and now I'm like Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense: I see dead butterflies, all the time. It changes a person.
Yeah, I think my partner is tired of me me mentioning it when we read our 15-month son picture books. (Some of the best that I remember are in the book Little You.)
Basically just that 95% of butterflies are drawn in unnatural stretched out death poses used by collectors to take better pictures for books. But that has become the reference material so they are drawn in poses that they can't do in life.
Butterflies feeding in the sun may fold their wings up to look like a sail, but other times you see them with wings stretched out.
Now, it’s true when you see a group of butterflies they are not uniformly in one position. But some of their positions coincide with those of pinned butterflies. It’s also true some pinned butterflies spread out their wings in extreme positions but not all are pinned like that —at least not by amateurs.
We have swarms of butterflies here every end of the summer and I can confirm that it is true. Plenty of those sitting with spread out wings, folded wings and all kind of in-betweens.
It’s not about whether the wings are open or closed, it’s that the “dead” ones are drawn with the wings raised up above the head. It’s as if people were always drawn with their arms raised straight in the air -- not an impossible posture but a pretty unusual one.
Not all the “dead” one are drawn to show and highlight their wing geometry and colors. Iconic ones, yes, typically, but some are drawn in flight, feeding, and wings fanned out but not unnaturally.
Now, iconic ones, yes, typically. But it’s the same for other exemplary of iconic models. When did you last see a toilet door with a natural picture of a person rather than an iconic outline?
The same could be said of lots of things.
When we have a concert T-shirt of a performer you more often than not get a more of less straight on shot. Or political candidates. You get their headshot not a profile pic or a pic of the backs of their heads.
Why should depictions of butterflies depart from a pose that exposes more of their recognizable and appreciated features?
What about flower photography? Why don’t they use shriveled up wilted flowers for Valentine’s Day? Why do they look for perfect specimens?
Sure, I get it, “ha ha, look you idiots that’s not the natural pose of butterflies, you guys and gals have been getting fooled and I’m not”
Not all the “dead” one are drawn to show and highlight their wing geometry and colors. Iconic ones, yes, typically, but some are drawn in flight, feeding, and wings fanned out but not unnaturally.
I just did a couple of image searches.
First, searching for "butterflies", I get many different photos of real butterflies in various postures. The most common is wings open, spread out horizontally. None of the real butterflies have their wings stretched upwards in the pinned-out posture.
Second, filtering the same search with "image type: clip art", fully 99% of the results have the wings spread out and stretched up. (The 1% is detailed, realistic drawings.)
Now, whether you care about this is another matter, but it's hard to deny that that article is onto something. There's a very consistent quirk in the way butterflies in particular are illustrated.
Sure, I get it, “ha ha, look you idiots that’s not the natural pose of butterflies, you guys and gals have been getting fooled and I’m not”
I think you're misreading the tone of that article and the people citing it. It's not anger or contempt; it's sadness that real living butterflies aren't widely understood, and hope that the stereotyped depiction can be improved on.
not the intended take, but I'd love to see fewer dead butterflies regardless of the posing. while the patterns on their wings are beautiful, butterflies are a particularly unpleasant insect to look at for me. I'd enjoy looking at beetles or flies more; something about the proportions of butterflies makes them rather awful
I'd be happy to. Something about their very long, skinny, dark bodies, especially their proboscis, is just horrid to me. From afar it's nice to see little colorful wings flapping around, but at any level of closer examination their bodies are almost as repulsive as spiders are to most people (though funny enough, I somewhat like spiders).
From the outside, it looks like Jony Ive was only able to get away with the damaging push to flat design after Steve Jobs died, and since Ive has left Apple, beautiful skeuomorphic gradients, lighting, embosses, drop shadows, and photo-real elements, have started to return. His legacy is a deep stain on the design industry that we are only now beginning to recover from. The loss of accessibility and beauty from only using flat design has set us back a long way.
> His legacy is a deep stain on the design industry
This is a rather extreme statement. A person's career can be long and complex, involve many projects, not all of which will be successful. We all learn.
From the outside, it seems that Jony Ive was successful in a lot of endeavors, was successful in creating a disciplined design culture, and yes, sometimes, went too far (it seems) but even that kind of exploration can be useful for how it informs future work.
Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7, which was the first flat-design iOS: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious."
In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 didn't.)
Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction."
And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products from Jobs era are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.
Consider iPhone 5c, for example, which was the first post-Steve-Jobs design. The colors were horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr.) That the 5c didn't do well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.
It all is debatable. Apple regularly backtracked after having gone too far in one direction. See e.g. the dialling back of translucency after OS X 10.1, and of brushed metal after Panther. The break in iOS 7 was extreme, but the same people whining about Ive were whining about skeumorphism a couple of months before.
Jobs had good taste, but was not infallible either. And he could not have designed a computer if his life depended on it. Saying that Ive has nothing to do with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, Cube, PowerBooks and MacBooks is very myopic, to beat the least.
Looking back, Apple kept being Apple and not much changed when Jobs died. Well, the keynotes are less interesting now. But product development does not look too different. Occasional mistakes are still made, and occasionally fixed. It was so before both Ive and Jobs, and it will still be that way after them.
You’re seeing what you want to see. Ive tried many things throughout his career, from colorful transparent plastic all the way to deep black metal. iPhone 5c was perhaps the most comfortable iPhone iPhone to hold, and it came it a variety of bright colors that Apple overcorrected for afterwards and only recently has started to embrace again. Its poor sales were likely due to its high perceived price and lack of features, rather than its design.
Don’t forget the cavernous spaceship with acoustics and privacy issues that has caused many an engineer to loathe working in it. That was his design too.
I completely agree. His exit signaled the return of flat screens rather than the terrible curved glass edges, slippery corners and the mess of designing for design’s sake. I don’t know if he was responsible for the butterfly keyboard but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I'm mostly and android user, but ios7+ flat design with translucency is way better than the old ways. Just remember, how ugly the stock buttons were! Whenever I see screenshots of old apple interfaces it makes me want to throw up.
I really liked the iPhone 5c's design. The colors were fun, and the case options weren't super bland. The 5 was there to fill in the need for more traditional iPhone design, but the 5c felt like a little throwback to when phones were a little more fun and weird.
Johnny Ive pushed design deeply into "lowest common denominator" territory, to the point that I've seen a lot of features flat out cut from products simply because the UI/UX team couldn't make enough white space on the screen to hold them all. Ives did not invent "more white space is better" but he certainly embraced it and helped push out complexity at all costs in the name of usability.
I disagree with you, I think it was a much needed reboot to the concept of design, and the future will be all the brighter for it. Accessibility is more on everyone’s mind today than ever before, and I think skeumorphism’s accessibility was more of a side effect than an intended effect.
I’ll gladly be proven wrong though, but design wise I’d absolutely hate to go back to pre 2012.
I am just glad flat designs look really dated. Skeuomorphic accessibility was very much an early design goal, the issue is it lived so far past it’s origin that people forgot why it was built that way in the first place.
> Jony Ive was only able to get away with the damaging push to flat design after Steve Jobs died
Sadly, true.
> and since Ive has left Apple, beautiful skeuomorphic gradients, lighting, embosses, drop shadows, and photo-real elements, have started to return.
Not really. Where have you seen this return? It hasn't, not in any significant way. The damage Ive did seems more or less permanent.
Jony Ive is only part of the problem. The other problems is hatred towards Scott Forstall. Since Scott was a proponent of skeuomorphism, one way remaining Apple execs stuck it to Forestall is by losing skeuomorphism, and then opening deriding skeuomorphism during the reveal of iOS7.
The iMessage mac desktop icon, the Preview icon using real 3d elements, System Preferences keeping beautiful 3d icons, are all giving me hope that we can back out of this nightmare.
There is something deeply antihuman about flat design. It's hard to describe exactly how, because it sounds silly when it comes out of your mouth, but I really believe this is true on some deep, pre-verbal level. They make me feel mentally and spiritually harmed somehow.
Humans see in 3d, and we use 3d cues from the world around us to assess everything. Taking these cues out of design is absolutely antihuman. And we know it's bad, especially for older populations, where nothing looks like a button or clickable, so folks click on things until something works.
In your opinion, what would be an example of a "beautiful skeuomorphic gradient"?
I don't use Apple software (or hardware) much, but I recall a certain stitched-leather user interface for iCal that really put me off skeuomorphism in User Interfaces.
A nice story with a bow on top, but it doesn't match reality. Flat design started at Google and spread to Microsoft and eventually Apple. It was simply the style, and now the trends are starting to change. We'll go through a 3D glossy "aqua" phase for the next 10 years, then we'll go back to brutalist flat design. And we'll have no choice but to follow the UI designers into whatever obsession they're on time after time.
This. I forever struggle to persuade my remote to do what I want it to. That touch-sensitive panel is a complete PIA, and just navigating across a rectangular array of icons is fraught with detours.
If I were paranoid, I'd say it was designed to force people to use the voice-recognition system, which gives better user data.
It really is. You can’t even wake the remote from sleep without sending a keypress to the TV. And the trackpad is difficult to use accurately. Totally over engineered for no benefit.
That remote is awful, but isn't usually what I've heard people refer to as flat design. Flat design tends to refer to the more simplistic software UIs that have been in fashion over the last few years.
You may love the way it looks... but no one being honest with themselves loves the way it functions, UI is visually functional, a functionality that happens in your brain, like legibility - flat UI has very poor "legibility" if compared to something like 3d embossed win95 UI where every identification and anticipation is painfully obvious to the point that it's effortless. It's familiarity is also learned in a very short space of time; whereas flat UI continues to elude even advanced users and remains ambiguous with high cognitive load - you might not realise why, but it will feel slow, and uncomfortable for each new front end you encounter.
Designers don't like this fact because that embossed 3d look is considered ugly, but it's intuitively and obviously true.
I think all of your points are true for badly made UIs, regardless of if they are flat or not. I like flat UIs, partially because they look and behave like digital things instead of trying to resemble something else and partially just because they usually (entirely subjectively) look better. We have a deeper well of inspiration to draw from for non-flat and more experience with them (so it's easier to make them "better") but I don't think anyone can say they are inherently "better".
They’re better for accessibility for anyone less interested in learning the new technological design UIs to have their programs function, people that just want to look at something and get how it works without a manual or googling it. The functionally has never improved because of flat designs, ever.
I mean, in fairness, the design outlined in TFA is an intricate, 3D, embossed design, so maybe Ive himself is off the "simple and flat" train ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Flat design was never about flat design but about layers and animation. The idea was to get rid of the fake 3d and instead use layered animation to create the depth.
Ive would've left Apple way earlier, if someone hadn't convinced him to stay. iirc he moved to London a couple of years ago and everyone was curious if he was still interested in Apple. I'm sure they lured him to stay with the new Apple HQ.
To say that it was Steve Jobs keeping him from having too much unrestricted impact on the product is not a convincing argument. Sure, he took over software design as well but skeumorphism, gradients and huge shadows were often heavily criticized before it was cool to hate on a minimalistic flat design.
EVERYTHING beautiful is skeuomorphic. The page turn in iBooks, page curl in maps, cover flow, the shred animation in older versions of Passbook, the date picker (all in iOS 6), rotating settings gear (when updating iOS 6), the Time Machine interface in older versions of OS X, photo borders and shadows in older versions of iWorks documents, etc.
This is not surprising, because our sense of beauty comes from the physical world.
So what is the problem with skeuomorphism?
Tech enthusiasts would like their phones to look like something from the future, not something from the past. But ordinary everyday people prefer for it to look like things they are already familiar with, or can relate to.
Tech enthusiasts worry that the skeuomorphism was getting totally out of hand, particularly where the UI metaphor started limiting functionality (e.g. an address database that's limited to what a Rolodex can do, rather than exploiting what is possible with a computer). But this is not really true. For example, iBooks has instant search, something only possible with a computer.
Some people point out that many skeuomorphic elements reference things that a large part of Apple's audience hasn't used in a long time, if ever. True, but here's the thing: It doesn't matter whether the user has ever seen a reel-to-reel tape. What matters is whether the visuals depict a physical object that the user can model in his mind. If it is too abstract (that's the opposite of physical) then non-tech-enthusiast users will find it hard to intuit.
Some people say skeuomorphism looks tacky. This is partly true. Skeuomorphism is hard to do. When done poorly it does look tacky. But when done well it looks very beautiful.
By removing all skeuomorphism Apple threw the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't think you can make any kind of categorical statement like this about a topic as subjective as beauty. Maybe you only find skeuomorphic things beautiful, but some of us disagree.
I take it you haven't seen the new iMessage mac desktop icon. You may also be misinterpreting this as two color gradients that also came from the poisoning of flat design.
Why get a retina screen to display what like design limitations of low resolution screens?
Why do you loathe them? It’s for ease of use, in iOS 6 the notes app that looks like notes or the newsstand app that looks like a news stand it was easy to understand. What does the photos app look like now? A bunch of circular colors to mean what exactly? What about the news app? Used to be a bunch of geometric shapes, now it’s a square slanted candy stripe.
The actual content (eg pictures, videos and text) all look better on a retina screen. I don’t think people buy retina screens so that the UI elements look prettier.
That might not be why, but the UI elements looks worst, the apps are unified under uglier UI, and by the logic of content it was an unnecessary design change with less accessibility, more complications to make boring UI that needs explanation and all for no benefit to the user. Just look at the iOS 7 news stand icon or the one that’s a red candy cane stripe versus the iOS 6 news stand icon. Who designed the photos icon and what’s it represent if not just designing for design’s sake? He made it minimalist, harder to use, and forced every iOS UI to congregate under a more flawed design. Pretty elements that highlighted the Retina display’s capabilities in the are now replaced by uglier boring design that was probably a practical scaling solution for ease of designing unified UI that was more developed friendly and less user friendly.
How is it that in a land on Nokia N95 and the likes, introducing the iPhone was not revolutionary?
You are cutting short and focusing on the design of the software (which I am sure Ive had a limited say in) while ignoring decades of excellent design work.
Gosh such negativity. Instead of rehashing the same anti-Ive narrative, how about we discuss the seal? It’s subtly beautiful, with light lilting colors, like an Erik Satie or Ravel song. I love how it emphasizes natural beauty, something so remote in Apple’s products (other than maybe a vague mathematical aesthetic). The dark version is wonderful and definitely elicited more of a reaction from me, with that lovely dark green contrasting the white flowers beautifully.
It's absolutely OK for people to be negative. Ive isn't reading this. He's not some downtrodden underdog that we should root for. He's arguably the most famous non-clothing designer in the world. We can and should critique his work and, if it's bad, rip it to shreds.
This looks like it would be a nice pattern for cross-stitching. It doesn't have any qualities that make it succeed as a logo.
To prove my point: try to remember and draw any part of this logo after it leaves your screen. Do you even remember the name of the company? Could you read that name at a glance?
It’s more that most of the comments aren’t discussing the new logo and also contributing nothing new to industrial design discussions.
To answer your statement and question, this would actually be a poor cross-stitch due to the angles and intricate overlaps, but it’s a good seal. Understanding that it’s a seal, and not a logo, is key here—the logo is Sustainable Markets Initiative’s and follows the design principles you’re invoking in your comment.
The name on the seal, Terra Cotta, is presented clearly and memorably enough in large letters in the center of the seal, but the field of the seal is meant to look like a light or dark green disk at a glance and to reward more careful examination with details. The English and Latin arranged traditionally around the perimeter are mottos and not meant to be marketing keywords.
Those (presumably unintentionally) reminded me of an old Jason Rohrer game, Cultivation. You had to sort of tend to a garden that would produce five generations of bugs.
I'm not saying the logo should be left unchallenged. It's more so that the top comments at the time were all complaining about Apple's design direction and ascribing it all to Ive as if he's some horrid aesthetics anti-Christ who wrecked the company. Which first, is besides the point of this logo, and second, is ignoring his vast body of successful work.
Criticizing the logo is valid, but rehashing the same over-dramatic conversation about Ive is not worth the digital ink.
> It's more so that the top comments at the time were all complaining about Apple's design direction and ascribing it all to Ive as if he's some horrid aesthetics anti-Christ who wrecked the company.
Have you ever bought a poorly-designed $2,000 device? Apple products can inspire deep, personal anger in a way that other brands can't because they're expensive and the company's leadership was a combination of oblivious and smug about user-hostile decisions.
Look at the touch bar: it ruined generations of some people's favorite laptops. Ive isn't the anti-Christ, but it's frustrating seeing someone so lauded after making some unbelievably bad design decisions and then stubbornly sticking to them.
It may not make sense to you, but Ive's work is very personal to some people (on both the good and bad ends of the spectrum).
I mean I own quite a few Apple products. I wouldn't call them poorly-designed per se. Okay, the Touch Bar was a truly awful feature and I'll admit I don't love it. Other than that, I've liked my Apple products. I've also struggled to find any alternative to Apple that comes close. What invokes deep, personal anger for me isn't Apple's products, but the sheer amount of ugly, bad design outside of Apple's sphere. I don't want to get into a rant about this, because as I've stated before, this argument has been rehashed endlessly, but it's incredible that in this day, no company comes close in design and aesthetic.
If you're going to be furious at Jony Ive for the Macbook Pro, why not be angry at his competitors who can't seem to make a credible competitor? And if that is incorrect and there is a credible competitor, why not buy it and ignore Apple?
I think you're talking about the full universe of Apple products, while I was talking only about the specific things Ive enforced (like the touch bar). Now that Ive is gone, Macbooks are no-compromise machines again (if you ignore that they're difficult to repair).
> it's incredible that in this day, no company comes close in design and aesthetic
Lots of companies shamelessly mimic Apple, so there are plenty of smartphones and laptops that are equally nice to look at.
I think it boils down to your priorities, too. A lot of people still use and love hideous Lenovo Thinkpad laptops that are highly functional. They have the trackpad and the "nub" for a mouse -- something Apple would likely find appallingly redundant, but is the thing that makes people love Thinkpads.
On the other side, there are people who use aging Macbook Airs from years ago, even though they're incredibly slow.
But all this aside, what I'm saying that Ive did was make enforce design decisions that were hostile to users across the spectrum (again, Touch Bar and USB-C-only notebooks are the easiest examples).
I agree the seal is beautiful with it's tones of green and a sense of overflowing nature. But the vines growing over key points of the point makes it hard for me to read, the C in CARTTA keeps morphing into what looks like an E or G when I look at it.
I agree that it's a little less legible, but it's also two words that need to be read once before the seal itself becomes recognizable. In my view that's an acceptable tradeoff
Why would we discuss a seal that anyone on fivrr could have come up with for $5? If I came up with this seal, would you still be interested in talking about it? You'd probably be wondering how it ended up on the front page of HN...
The seal isn't anything special. It's a small area with too much going on. It's an eye strain to understand what is happening on the seal b/c so much is happening in such a small area.
This article isn't on the front page of HN b/c of the seal, it's on the front page b/c of who designed the seal. Thus, people will talk about the designer not the seal.
But there's a bit of a problem with Ive's design demonstrating some historical ignorance.
At the top we have a crown, who's crown, the (imported) House of Windsor? I don't know? But at the bottom we have a white rose which is the moniker of the house of York. The house of York's lineage ended in 1499.
There was this thing called The War of The Roses, which saw the House of Lancaster and the House of York in conflict with each other.
If this was signed off by Prince Charles then he's as equally ignorant of the significance of the white rose. Even to this day it ruffles feather. The Tudor line pretty much ended when James VI of Scotland took the throne. Years down the line the Windsors were an imported royalty supplanting the House of Hanover at the turn of the 20th century, and has no direct connection with York or Lancaster sigils.
Most UK folks with the faintest awareness of history on the British Isles would spot this right away. We got this stage of English history rammed down our throats, even in Scottish schools.
In short, it's just another corporate logo that "looks nice" but the designer is clearly a bit clueless. I thought Ive would know better.
> At the top we have a crown, who's crown, the (imported) House of Windsor? I don't know?
It's not a crown but a coronet. Coronet are a heraldic device to symbolise noble ranks, including those of the royal family. In British usage a coronet of crosses and fleur-de-lis symbolises a child of the sovereign.
One could quibble about another detail: traditionally Charles’ coronet as heir apparent is displayed with a single arch. Crowns have two or more arches. That single arch is almost not there apart from the green arch formed by those interlocking circles of the seal.
Btw: It’s seems a bit silly to call the House of Windsor or Saxe-Coburg and Gotha “imported”. Queen Victoria of Hanover married, her son and heir took the “house” from his father, that’s pretty much it. What’s far more annoying was the patriarchal habit that “houses” go with the father’s line, at least until EIIR and Philipp.
Btw 2: Isn’t every British and English royal house “imported”?
Hanover was imported from Germany, based on distant descent from James’ VI/I second child and of course protestantism.
Stuart was imported, based on distant descent.
Tudor … imported and invented themselves, based on distant descent.
Plantagenet was Angevin, meaning from Anjou in France, because Geoffrey of Anjou married Matilda.
Normandy imported themselves, because of distant descend from Wessex.
Denmark is Denmark.
Wessex is homegrown, apart from the whole “sex” part.
The design of the York rose is quite consistent. It isn't merely "a flower with white petals". In particular, these always have five petals; the one at the bottom has six.
Not every white flower is a symbol of York versus Lancaster.
Not a fan, seems derivative and low effort, the foliage diapering surely obscures the text too much to make a good seal (I guess with a proper depth mask it could work). The circumferential motto is standard seal/coin design, of course.
It's relatively good on austerity, mainly carried by the strong display type, or would be in the right colouring -- but not as a [wax] seal.
Should be more emblematic IMO. That doesn't mean it can't be intricate fwiw.
The deconstructed 7-ring version has some cleverness, I'll give you that. The rest is really generic and lacks overt symbology of historic [royal/government] seals IMO.
It doesn't matter though, they got what they wanted, Ive's name attached to provide publicity.
A complete tangent, but the design reminded me of one of the most beautifully illustrated children’s books I have ever read: Trouble for Trumpets. It was written in 1982 and still looks futuristic. Even at 40 I can leaf through it joyfully.
Thank you for reminding me about this book. It captived me as a young child. I must have seen it in a library. Unfortunately it seems impossible to aquire now, for less than a few hundred pounds.
When people, particularly designers, say something is "too intricate" or whatever, it's usually just a signal they wouldn't have the skills to make something like it.
Late 2000's/ early 2010's there was a rush of college students wanting to pursue app/ web design. Colleges had no faculty to fill that, so they just took print design professors and they shoehorned print philosophy into interaction design and we ended up with a generation of designers who don't have the first idea about depth hierarchy, affordance, etc and everything looks like a scrollable poster now.
In software design[1] if I say too intricate it does not mean I don't have the skills to do it, it means the typical user (the developers working with the system) will have difficulty in working with the component.
Simple and functional design is considerably harder . I don't see why other design streams are that different. I would be worried if a civil/mechanical engineer said a bridge is too intricate .
[1] Technical/ Systems design not Graphic/UX design.
Scrollable poster. That's how every 'modern web' site feels to me. Case-in-point: lovefrom.com. Makes me want to maximise the browser window on my 30" monitor and still doesn't seem enough.
Nothing says "we love the planet" more than a mountain of old dongles, broken and cracked iphone charger cables, and unrepairable consumer electronics.
All of which could have had much longer useful lifetimes through the most basic engineering practices. Apple cables are perfect examples of style over substance. Insufficient reinforcement for a daily use item. Poor design.
agree, I thought Ive went off the deep end towards the end of his tenure at apple, Tim Cook prb was afraid to rein him in due to his seniority with apple and how close he was to Jobs.
You can see how things were "fixed" at apple now that Ive is gone and the new M1 macs no longer have alot of the design inputs he pushed for.
The Air is still pretty, the new Pros however looked off to me in the presentation. Maybe the proportions between the body and the screen are off (from the side). It reminded me of a bowl of cereals, for some reasons.
I wonder if the Air design is still influenced by Ive?
>Apple cables are perfect examples of style over substance. Insufficient reinforcement for a daily use item. Poor design.
They used to be fine though, it's when they changed the rubber to whatever they use today that starts to fray and fall apart.
My Titanium Powerbook cable is still intact and fine even today, but every cable I've bought from around 2014 onwards has frayed. I've heard they switched to a more "eco-friendly" rubber at some point, but I don't see the value in that if I have to buy 2-3 power cables over a laptops life.
I see Ive getting blamed for how the macs were designed but isn't that to be expected when you put a designer at that level of decision making? Why not blame Tim Apple for letting him go that far.
Not a logo, but a "seal". The distinction makes sense, since the intricate design would not work well as logo I think. I found it beautiful, but obviously it's only "news" because of who created it.
As such, there is an argument that a seal refers to a physical object with physical imperfections, which are hard to reproduce. Note that the article is about the "design" for the seal, as distinct from the seal itself. Maybe the plan is to manufacture a physical seal off the design (complete with manufacturing imperfections) then use that to make impressions?
Logo has to work in many more contexts. You probably aren't going to be embroidering a seal on a polo shirt, for example. A seal will go on your website and marketing pamphlets, but that's about it.
My next question would be is there an economic value of a seal? I would think slapping a logo on everything works all the same. Or am I wrong to think most (everyone except the creator?) people would not know or care about seeing a seal vs a logo.
A seal conveys a specific certification/endorsement while a logo is identifying a company/product/service/etc. For example, if you're a Microsoft Certified Solutions Engineer, slapping a Microsoft logo on your website doesn't convey that (and surely won't be appreciated by Microsoft).
Part of the value is (apparent) exclusivity [1]. Expensive strongly correlates with aspirational value as more expensive becomes more exclusive but being expensive is not always required.
You can have normally priced goods, that are exclusive(limited editions). There are plenty of "luxury" products like sneakers/ watches or cars or graphic designed items that actually retail for (relatively)reasonable amounts but almost impossible to buy as you need to be invited to a waiting list or some other convoluted gating mechanism . Getting on the waiting list may need to you buy a ton of other less in demand products / wait for years / be popular or famous etc.
John Ive was head of design at Apple after all, apparent exclusivity from rest of us and keep commanding the premium they do is like the defining characteristic of Apple as a brand.
The "Love Serif" Baskerville revival covered in the second half of the article can be seen up close at their home page https://www.lovefrom.com/ (enable JS).
It looks very... Baskerville-y. I like Baskerville, so it's fine (aside from the ampersand which I find too deviant from the normal ampersand & liable to confusion), but you definitely don't associate Jony Ive with oldschool Baskerville or Bodoni serif fonts!
Absolutely personal and unsubstantiated: The typography is really annoying IMO. It's the cliche in-your-face typography from the New York gestalt that's making its way into the everything - from the new Library of Congress logo to the otherwise amiable California design.
As far as the person that brought Bodoni into the corporate branding world - that would be Paul Rand.
As with most of the things that Ive produced at Apple, this is very pretty, but ultimately unusable. Now let's see what happens to this when the twenty-five other usability experts at Apple come in to refine it into a workable product.
Jony Ive is the most over-rated product designer in at least the last 20 years.
> As with most of the things that Ive produced at Apple, this is very pretty, but ultimately unusable.
I wouldn't go that far.
There is a reason the average Joe and Georgina love Apple products. Simplicity makes them usable. Before the iPhone, most high end phones were complex and clunky. It takes a special combination of design aesthetic (from Ive) and a laser focus on user happiness (from Jobs) to come up with something like the iPhone.
I'm curious, is there even another product designer who is rated so to speak? I can't name a prominent designer from the last 20 years. Perhaps that speaks to my ignorance more than anything else.
Furthermore, who supervises the twenty-five other usability experts? If Denis Villeneuve had to make a film by himself, no cinematographer, editor, gaffer, grip, etc., he'd make a pretty awful film. It's the combination of creative people working in unison under the watch of a single auteur that makes film, and products successful. That doesn't mean Villeneuve or Ive are overrated; it just means they're directors.
Hacker News doesn't really care about product design outside of Jony Ive. Jasper Morrison, Richard Sapper (and his protege David Hill), Marc Newson, James Dyson, Yves Behar, and Philippe Starck are worth reading about. Isabelle Olsson is Google's current head of design, as another example.
I strongly disagree that this is pretty. It looks like the logo for a 1920s tea room. It's busy, hard to read, and very forgettable. This fails as a logo on every level.
Personally, Apple hardware (minus the all usb-c MacBooks) and their software interfaces are more useable to me than Android or Linux. If it was easy, Google would have found a better Jony Ive.
There are probably better product designers out there, but to succeed in a big org, it’s also political prowess and story telling ability. Jony Ive is at the top because he’s good at what he does, and that’s not necessarily being a product designer. It’s being Apple’s chief product designer, and that is not the same as being a product designer. His skill is convincing enough decision makers that he is the best chief product designer in the org.
Is material design good? Having worked at Google as an engineer and working extensively with designers, then also attending design school and coming from a family in the creative field, I don’t respect Google design org for their aesthetic sensibility. I have never met a single designer at Google that impressed me with their aesthetic / photographic eye ( arguably a proxy measure for good designers in the same way logical reasoning abilities are for engineers ). The skill set of a Google designer is not that of an artist.
Is creative director Virgil Abloh of Louis Vuitton a good designer? Most people who studied fashion design would say no. But he sells products, and that’s what the Louis Vuitton’s of the world needs. The fashion designers who have the most street cred aren’t the ones leading fashion brands you’ve heard. Michael Kors is a pretty mainstream and commercially successful brand, but he’s a laughing stock among fashion designers. The ones who know how and when to balance commercial and artistic are the ones who rise to the top in our economic system.
Same with mainstream musical artists. It’s not their music abilities, it’s the whole package. Their style, their album art, their public image.
As for whether Apple products are badly designed or not. We don’t know what Apple’s higher level games are. It’s plausible they intentionally alternate back and forth every few years from disappointing to exciting products. Maybe this is the most profit maximizing. A kind of forward looking planned obsolescence or planned disappointed. We wouldn’t be as excited for the latest MacBooks if the prior generation wasn’t a flop. What we know is Apple is a trillion dollar company, and their stock has consistently done well irrespective of bad industrial design.
Not sure he's done yet. Good new fonts are a rare thing and he might be on to something.
With hdpi now very common, typography for screens can evolve. The stark minimalist typography of early computers was very much driven by the necessity of having very limited resolution, contrast, and dynamic range. Sans serif fonts like Helvetica, and its many derivatives, with its straight lines & simple curves were optimal for that type of screen. Serif fonts, with their fiddly details are a lot harder to render in a pleasing way on such screens.
However, with modern screens, those problems are addressed to the point where there is little practical difference in resolution between print and screen. So, making the most of modern screens through design becomes a challenge. Serif fonts are still popular for print for a good reason: they are pleasing to the eye and it helps readability. If you work from first principles to address such a challenge on a modern screen, you'd start with a font and a serif font would be not such a strange choice as it used to be.
Just my opinion, but both font and logo strike me as rather beautiful.
The fonts burned into CGA, EGA, and VGA bioses all had serifs. The default UI fonts on many X Window systems UIs, including CDE, were serif fonts. The 80-column card in the Apple IIe had a serif font.
There was really only the first-generation home computer (and arguably first-gen PDAs) that widely shipped strictly sans-serif fonts; a blip in the history of personal computing.
I cant wait for the serif revival. Soon we are going to return to much more intricate, embellished, and ornate design, just like the seal in the article. As you say, the new displays are gonna make it feasible.
I changed my system font to IBM Plex Serif, my desktop theme to the old revered Motif-like style, and my colors to the pastel orange and teal palette of CDE. Never did it look so pleasant before.
Google is going to have to change their logo again!
One thing I always respected about MongoDB is they use a serif font for their logo in a time and age when virtually no startup would use such a thing. And then a sans-serif font for their products under it, so it really pops.
I think design in the early-90's has a chance of reemerging. Just lots of fonts being aggressively used and lots of serif fonts. Things that would make David Carson proud.
Awesome. Sometimes, when I'm waiting for a build to finish, I doodle the Flower of life. And, if its a particularly big build, it expands to a Metatrons Cube. Anyway, its nice to see Ive using it in a refreshing way.
I was sort of expecting him to return to his roots of designing small appliances and other things around the house. There's a dearth of good design in the sea of cheap disposable garbage that's available now. I find it unfortunate that he chose to design something so vacuous and unnecessary. I get that he'd like to rub shoulders with the literal royalty though.
The lead designer of the Apple Car joined LoveFrom earlier this year. Ferrari has a hybrid car. Apple's ID team doesn't just design the objects they design the manufacturing machines too - and have been able to reduce a lot of materials waste. Would expect their relationship to extend into things like electric vehicles and manufacturing techniques.
A nice and welcome surprise with a logo that looks organic. I've been designing a logo and although I eventually settled on something more plain and 2D, I experimented and thought about how logos will adapt to work well 3D in the coming years.
The aesthetic of these designs will be less of a surprise if you take a look at photos of Jony Ive's house in San Francisco. His taste encompasses more than the Deiter Rams inspired minimalism of his later work at Apple.
I’m not a fan of Jony Ive’s, and quite resentful about Apple products, but the sentiment here is quite negative. Some are ad hominem, others are harsh on the design itself.
How does this affect you? The company paid him. If they don’t like it, that’s on them. If other companies think his design suck, then they won’t pay for it. Maybe they’re paying for his name instead of his design. Prince Harry is some kind influencer for a startup / Vc or something now. Is he qualified ? Who knows. Does it affect you?
Apple doesn’t owe you anything to be honest, but he doesn’t work there anymore.
I understand the culture in design and fine arts is to critique. But since when did HackerNews become a forum for critiquing subjective aesthetic appeal and goodness? Jony Ives is still probably a better graphic designer than most engineers here. As for people who trained in design, if Jony Ive’s isn’t your inspiration, we get it, but are you doing groundbreaking design or designing another unsexy B2B CRUD app. Are your own designs and bloated CSS / assets inflating your ego or actually useful to users? Are people just envious that Jony Ives was the one who won the lottery and gets to design for Apple?
I find these sorts of arguments disingenuous. Of course "Apple doesn't owe us anything", but we're all just shooting the shit on some random topic, so of course people have strong opinions about the products they use everyday.
I don't so much get the hate on Jony Ive, but I do get the disappointment, in the sense that we could have had really great products 5 years ago if it weren't for Ive's obsession with thinness and "svelteness" as I put it. Things like the failed butterfly keyboard, always sacrificing decent battery life for shaving another millimeter, etc. Glad to see Apple reversing many of these poor decisions with the latest MacBook Pro, but again, just frustrating because it could have been so close to perfection years ago if it didn't run off the rails with Ive's design obsessions.
> just frustrating because it could have been so close to perfection years ago if it didn't run off the rails
I agree. But we're buying Apple's reputation, not Apple products. If Apple makes crappy products consistently long enough, people will stop buying. I think it is in Apple's financial incentive to alternate back and forth between "near perfect" products than to mediocre ones.
In the same way Facebook and Social media shows you a mix of stuff that you don't like and just enough interesting stuff to keep you hooked.
What should be blamed here is corporations maximizing profit.
Jony Ive didn’t just win the lottery and get to design for Apple, het got to design for Apple because he’s great at design.
Armchair designers can whine all they want but they were the same know it all’s who ridiculed EarPods when they came out (haha it’s like a toothbrush) and every Apple product before then.
Of course not all these products became a runaway success. But a pretty significant amount of them changed the world.
It almost seems people here hasn't had experience building a resume of creative work.
I used to do poetry, and you take risks, and sometimes it doesn't land the way you expect it to. We look at great artists and remember their greatest works, but forget about all the mediocre crap they produced.
Ridley Scott or Christopher Nolan, they take risks, and produce a movie that's a little too high browed and is not engaging or compelling as they envisioned, but they've already committed, launch it, and wait for the next cycle.
Are you kidding? The original iPhone was a revolutionary product. iOS was a revolution in user experience. Steve Jobs showed the world that you can build a complex, sophisticated product and still make it simple to use, intuitive and breathtakingly beautiful. That amazing creation has been severely crippled, and Jony is the person that did it. Of course there is a lot of disappointment in the tech community.
I'm referring to his post Apple career and this seal/logo design.
> The original iPhone was a revolutionary product.
Sure, but in a parallel universe it could have flopped.
Risks need to be taken nonetheless. In this case, too aggressively, and it sucks that the users have to pay the price.
It's not fundamentally that all USB-C minimalism is inherently bad design, it's just that the standard is confusing, so it's bad in implementation. If we were to imagine a perfect sci-fi future, a single connector or no connector would be ideal.
The alternative is slow incremental iteration, but there's no guarantee that would lead us to a global optimum either. Look at Sony. Sony had some of the most groundbreaking products, then they merely iterated and didn't take risks. Where is Sony now?
> The fact that Apple basically threw out all his 'innovations' for the new Macs speaks volumes.
Jony Ive did incredible work at the core of absolutely iconic products-- iMac, iPhone, iPod, iPad --- and is a key figure in Apple's overall beloved laptop designs.
Yes, in the past few years, since a bit after becoming CDO--- he went a little too far in on "form over function" (touch bar, no ports, butterfly keyboard)-- and Apple's reversal of these things is a good thing. But that hardly erases the rest of his legacy reaching back through all of Jobs-era Apple.
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[1] https://www.sustainable-markets.org/terra-carta-seal/winners...