Malibu Stacy has a new user interface
There’s an argument to be said in favor of it, which is: Apple has five operating systems, and they should look somewhat the same. Currently, bar fonts, they do not. So this is an attempt to make everything look the same, which helps for both branding (you know you are looking at an Apple thing) & system governance (Apple edits one thing somewhere, it changes everywhere).
It is also something nobody asked for, because ultimately people care how a thing works, not how a thing looks. Was anyone saying the design of any Apple product got outdated? But no, every six years or so we get a new thing, because trend demands it. Fine.
I got into interaction design for this reason: because affecting the functionality was and will forever remain the point of highest leverage. Really you just care that the product helps you live a better life. You care that the task completes. You care that the thing works, and works fast. You care that you aren’t charged $30 a month to own a light bulb or something. You care that the thing you brought into your home doesn’t take your job.
My first book began with a quote:
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
That was Steve Jobs, a guy who ran Apple for a little while there. Now Apple is run by a different guy who thinks design is something different, maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him about it. He stopped answering my texts many years ago. Feels like a him thing.
I had to go back to that quote because the word just is doing a lot of work. Jobs does, in fact, acknowledge that graphic design is still a form of design. But his emphasis on the functionality shows us something important about what we forget when it comes to design. Design is more holistic than any of us wants to believe. Design is something between “all of it” and “most of it,” which is why we still have designers, or people who fired all the designers and now practice design themselves, or maybe at least the generational change that centered design and made it everywhere.
In the aforelinked press release, Apple refers to it as “delightful” and “elegant,” and it is neither, of course, because given its timing we are all about to subliminally associate this era of design with apocalypse. It refers to the interface as a material, which is ontologically incorrect, but might have been done to rip off Google??? I don’t know, man, I just work here and 95% of technology doesn’t make any sense to me anymore. I’m just over here writing in Markdown in a plain text editor on a $1,500 device that ostensibly has “pro” in the name and still can’t install fonts I own.
I do appreciate that three days later, the first search result is still for this. Dudes rock, man. I hope they get into a trademark war. I hope Apple loses, for the sole reason that it would be very funny.