I use the term "graphics designer" lightly here. A lot of people call themselves that (well, anyone can)- but in my experience few actually have the skills required to pull off truly innovative and awesome work. I am NOT saying I'm one of these people. I try my best, I think a lot of my work sucks, but I'm generally striving to improve my technique in any way I can.
What I'm wondering is this.
Is iOS 7 a slap in the face to the professional graphics designers out there?
I know a lot of folks who pour their heart and souls into things like icon design, and produce some marvellously awesome stuff as a result. Full colour semi photo-realistic icons that look awe inspiring on the Retina display. Totally themed application user interfaces that actually work with the user and not against them, improving the end user experience tremendously and stylizing that app towards a specific developer.
When I look at iOS 7, all I see is this: uniformity. Everything is the same. Everything is simple. What kind of technique would be required to recreate those new Apple icons? Relatively none, any monkey can fire up a vector editor and whip those out in under an hour.
So what I wonder is if there is still room for innovation in iOS 7. I mean, really, how many ways can you make text and stuff fly around the screen with a whacky animation? How many ways can you convey a compass using only circles and lines? Have we completely forgotten about raster graphics and all the wonderful visual cues a textured interface can provide?
It just seems like when you drive something down to that level of simplicity, it's a bit of an insult to all those people who worked so hard at creating the awesome artwork we've been living with for the past many years. We've got all this marvellous, wonderful technology- and we're going to use it to toss up a 90% white screen instead with some text that moves around. That's not technological advancement, that's de-evolution. We could have had that stuff years ago with half the required computational resources, yet we chose to build better and faster systems because the operating system demanded it.
Anyone else feel the same way?
-SC
What I'm wondering is this.
Is iOS 7 a slap in the face to the professional graphics designers out there?
I know a lot of folks who pour their heart and souls into things like icon design, and produce some marvellously awesome stuff as a result. Full colour semi photo-realistic icons that look awe inspiring on the Retina display. Totally themed application user interfaces that actually work with the user and not against them, improving the end user experience tremendously and stylizing that app towards a specific developer.
When I look at iOS 7, all I see is this: uniformity. Everything is the same. Everything is simple. What kind of technique would be required to recreate those new Apple icons? Relatively none, any monkey can fire up a vector editor and whip those out in under an hour.
So what I wonder is if there is still room for innovation in iOS 7. I mean, really, how many ways can you make text and stuff fly around the screen with a whacky animation? How many ways can you convey a compass using only circles and lines? Have we completely forgotten about raster graphics and all the wonderful visual cues a textured interface can provide?
It just seems like when you drive something down to that level of simplicity, it's a bit of an insult to all those people who worked so hard at creating the awesome artwork we've been living with for the past many years. We've got all this marvellous, wonderful technology- and we're going to use it to toss up a 90% white screen instead with some text that moves around. That's not technological advancement, that's de-evolution. We could have had that stuff years ago with half the required computational resources, yet we chose to build better and faster systems because the operating system demanded it.
Anyone else feel the same way?
-SC