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.
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.
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.
All this brushed silver/gold/black bores me. I am very glad Apple has decided to embrace colors once again.
I’ll gladly be proven wrong though, but design wise I’d absolutely hate to go back to pre 2012.
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.
it may be a while
> Sadly, true.
Any additional context you can give here?
But seriously, I do really love flat design. Though I do agree with some of the arguments against it.
A more varied design landscape is always better though.
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.
Apple TV remote is possibly the worst remote ever made.
If I were paranoid, I'd say it was designed to force people to use the voice-recognition system, which gives better user data.
“flat design” is a reference or common term to a graphical design style that followed skeuomorphism, not a term used for the industrial design aspect.
The newest is really good, in fact I think it's the best remote I've ever used.
Yup. It's awful. I shelled out the bucks for the new one, and have found it to be worlds different.
Designers don't like this fact because that embossed 3d look is considered ugly, but it's intuitively and obviously true.
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.
Come on. These were an awful trend.
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.
A bunch of engineering effort spent just to make digital products looked like the old physical products they killed.
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.