This is Why We Can’t Design Nice Things
Yesterday Apple announced the future release of iOS 7. After the crowd in attendance gave Jony Ive a standing ovation for his work, the extended body of design experts have had time to weigh-in. The verdict from the peanut gallery is in, iOS 7 is terrible.
According to some of the twitter followers of Giga Om’s Om Malik: It lacks visual hierarchy, is poorly balanced, garish, cramped, unattractive, and just plain ugly. From the collective view of UI designers, UX whizzes, OS wunderkind and folks who just know these things, Apple has made a terrible mistake. I’d like to ask these people, What planet having you been living on?
Did you just come from the human outer world colony of Milania where everything is pixel perfect, expertly beveled and quality tested to the highest design standards? Or have you been living here on planet Earth? Where a majority of the top 1000 sites in the Alexa ranking look like a grade 7 web publishing class made them back in 1999. Where buildings and streets are constantly falling apart because the construction team took short-cuts. And where the number one request of every client is, “Make the logo bigger!”.
I hate to say it, but this is exactly the reason why designers are rarely allowed anywhere near the decision making table. Designers should be part of the early stages of any major business or product or service. They should be spearheading ways to improve company processes. Instead a majority of Designers specialize in nitpicking. They look at a beta version of an operating system and don’t ask themselves what is the overall significance of the design. They complain about the gradients, the font choice, the use of transparency, etc, etc, etc.
You dear nit picker extraordinaire are the problem. You are the one lending credence to the belief among non-designers that design is simply a superficial additive. You are the one eroding the value of Design with sneers and jeers at the attempts of designers to make great things. You clearly don’t understand so let me simplify it for you.
Design is a process. It is the pursuit of perfection, not the achievement of it. Tearing down the efforts of talented designers does not make you look better, it makes Design as a whole look worse. Unless you are willing to to offer constructive critique keep quiet. Think you can do better? Then put up or shut up but whatever you do, do not continue to show your ignorance of the bigger picture of how Design can make the world a better place. Stop staring at the leaves and learn to see the forest for the trees.
James is a designer & developer @ Modu Design who spends long nights thinking up crazy ideas and watching classic films.You can find some of his work at www.modudesign.ca.
