Skeuomorphism is the easy way out

The first few times it happened to me, I felt that I had been manipulated into "approving" of the article, when I felt no such approval. It was abusive.

Now, whenever I visit a new Svbtle blog, I block that whole element so I never accidentally vote again.

> The "Notes" application on OSX is a fantastic use of skeumorphism.

I think good skeumorphics are called "affordances", while skeumorphism is being used as a prerogative term ("indiscriminate affordances").

There's no reason for a new word. Affordances are ancient. Bad affordances (especially crappy media players) are ancient.

"Apple" and "media needs a new trend to carp on about" are the only reason to start using a new term for them.

There's bad skeuomorphism, and there's good skeuomorphism. In the end of the day, it's a personal option, and it really depends on the type of product/site/interface you're designing.

I've designed a mobile application that is skeuomorphic, with the intent to resemble the original one, being this one of the goals of my client, and I justify it well enough to make sense. Even though it's a skeumorph looking app, not really a skeuomorph interface.

But you must admit, skeuomorph isn't that bad when used properly and with caution. There are some good uses to it. And I don't like extremes, I'm not with the "Skeuomorph all the things" team, and neither with the "Skeuomorph is evil", because I believe there's a time and place to everything, but it must be used with obvious moderation.

Originally he did. It was a large format, expensive custom grid paper designed for the kind of old fashioned production scheduling he used to do.

In general it was a grid, but the cells weren't square, they were wider so that there was more room to write, and along the top and left side were various specialty cells for tracking schedule numbers, days of production, reference numbers, various call-outs and along the left side room for specific machines and machine operators to be inserted. He used a fairly sophisticated color coding sytem to show linked jobs as they moved through the queue and hopped machines, so a red diagonally striped cell on one machine represented the same job later in the day on another machine also using a red diagonally striped cell. It basically allowed him to plan execution of production pipelines similar to thread execution on a modern day processor.

He had to hand draw the legend on every sheet and all of the setup. And since it was all pens and markers and such, a small mistake meant redrawing the entire schedule. I remember growing up watching him sit in front of the TV working on his production schedules late into the night.

I agree that Excel in general is not terribly skeuomorphic, but like I said elsewhere in this comment, skeuomorphism is a gradient and Excel was just similar enough to a paper book-keeping ledger of old that he thought that it would only be useful to him in that sense never realizing it could replace the custom production schedule grid he managed until quite a bit later.

edit it was not too entirely different from this

http://preoccupiedbymoonlight.blogspot.com/2010/06/productio...

only quite a bit more complex and larger format, and in the end looked almost calico colored there were so many production pipelines at once on it (vs. this example with only one real pipeline)