'Apple's aesthetic dichotomy' by James Higgs
John Higgs on Apple’s skeuomorphic designs:
They are an expression of purest kitsch, sentimentality, and ornamentation for its own sake. In Milan Kundera’s brilliant definition, kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit”. These are Disney-like apps, sinister in their mendacity.
This was widely linked to a few weeks back, but it so neatly encapsulates how I feel about Apple’s decisions that I wanted to link to it.
My biggest problem with skeuomorphic design is that it creates false UI interaction clues. After reading a novel in iBooks, I once switched to Calendar, and instinctively started dragging the stack of pages on the edges of the screen to flip through the display. This doesn’t work, of course. Neither does dragging at those cutsey little torn edges in the Calendar, in a futile attempt to clean them up – which is precisely what I’d do to the real-world object.
This will always be a problem unless we somehow make all our UIs exhibit all the physical behaviour of the real world objects they resemble. That’s at best massively redundant and at worst impossible. As far as I can see, this is an Achilles’ heel that skeuomorphic designs can never hope to side-step.