Hit me with your ugly square!
I'm still having trouble accepting that Apple would drastically change the form factor of the nano that much....
I totally agree. The little square design that has been passed around is so ugly I have a hard time thinking up ways that Apple could still use this form factor but make it look good as opposed to all the fugly mockups we have been seeing.
Just like Jonathan Ive, I have been to design school and one of the first things they teach you (if you don't know already), is the importance of proportion and the centrality of the golden rectangle. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle)
Objects that are shaped like this just "look right" to the eye, this is why doors, buildings, and almost everything else has been shaped this way since the stone age. Objects that are "thinner" rectangles, look even cooler or slimmer, whereas objects that approach a square, will look "fat" and ugly. Every designer/artist knows this either by training or just instinctively.
On a practical level, this square design would imply either that the nano is getting
wider (as this poster and others assume), or that they have chopped the height only. If it's the first case, then this design will require all new docks and accessories! WTF? Why would they do that to us?
If it's the second case, then they have removed all the comfort areas around the clickwheel, and jammed everything into this ugly little square when they clearly didn't even need to. The thing is already dead tiny, and there is no design advantage to reducing the height. Staying the same form factor would not affect plans for the wider screen, would not affect the controls, etc.
Making the current nano form factor shorter, just introduces a design *constraint*, in that it makes the interior volume smaller, meaning
less storage and
less room for the OS. I can see nothing to be gained by this except perhaps a slightly lighter weight.
The "rounded corner rectangle" might be Apples longest running design standard, but almost always it's the
golden rectangle we see, and for good reason. If Ive has actually done this to the nano, it might be the first of his designs that I truly think misses the mark.
These square mockups we have been seeing just make no sense from a design perspective unless it's like the Volkswagon "Thing" where the product was supposed to be "so ugly it's cool." And you don't see many VW Things driving the streets these days do you?
