Retro design is crippling innovation
wired.co.uk
Retro design is crippling innovation
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: Retro design is crippling innovation
#2I don't get it.
He spends most of the article telling us that skeuomorphs are bad giving the example of calendar app that looks like a desk calendar and then finishes by praising an app with a screen that skeuomorphically flips up just like a wall-calendar.
Re: Retro design is crippling innovation
#3I don't get it. He spends most of the article telling us that skeuomorphs are bad giving the example of calendar app that looks like a desk calendar and then finishes by praising an app with a screen that skeuomorphically flips up just like a wall-calendar.
The difference (at least as I understood it) is that that app isn't a wall calendar and chose that approach because they believed it was the best design, not because they wanted to mimic a wall calendar. Most designers of calendar and calculator software set out to design something as close to a paper calendar or desktop calculator as possible without necessarily asking if it was the best possible design.
Or in summary Mimicking because it is good design that fits what you're trying to do is good, mimicking simply for the sake mimicking is bad.
Re: Retro design is crippling innovation
#4Regarding Google Calendar, there's a "7 days" view that shows today+6 days.
Personally I prefer the regular week view.
Re: Retro design is crippling innovation
#5This is article's premise is weird on so many accounts..
It's "crippling innovation"...what!? Retro design isn't an institution, or a person, or even a "thing". It's a concept that designers take in order to progress towards a more usable interface.
You know what "cripples" innovation - massive design changes that happen in extended batch schedules. Technically this doesn't cripple innovation, it simply decreases innovative adoption and user acceptance.
Re: Retro design is crippling innovation
#6First thing I saw "Retro design is crippling innovation" followed by the left hand column "Subscribe to Wired Magazine for..."
Magazine, how retro
Re: Retro design is crippling innovation
#7Comparing the headline to the contents, I feel there's room for a follow-up article: "hyperbole is killing criticism".
I mean, it's OK to hate skeuomorphs, a valid critical position, but nobody is going to die.
And the whole thing feels like Louis CK's riff about airplanes. You are riffling through entire bookstores and museums on an affordable 150dpi Star Trek pad in the bathroom while complaining that innovation has stopped because the graphics look too familiar.
Two limited defenses of skeuomorphs. One: In a world where all of tech turns over on a timescale of months, orientation is important. It may be more important that people can glance at your calendar app and tell that it's supposed to be a calendar than that the calendar app perform optimally in the hands of a trained expert.
The other is: Skeuomorphs generally mimic designs that are at least decades old, sometimes centuries old. Be cautious about casually discarding the work of tens of generations of designers in the name of neophilia.
(Book page-flipping animations are less defensible with the latter argument, but the former still applies.)
Re: Retro design is crippling innovation
#8Isn't iOS filled with skeumorphism, too? I know Matias Duarte said he wanted to make Android 4.0's design completely digital and without any skeumorphism.
Re: Retro design is crippling innovation
#9I don't get it. He spends most of the article telling us that skeuomorphs are bad giving the example of calendar app that looks like a desk calendar and then finishes by praising an app with a screen that skeuomorphically flips up just like a wall-calendar.
The difference (at least as I understood it) is that that app isn't a wall calendar and chose that approach because they believed it was the best design, not because they wanted to mimic a wall calendar. Most designers of calendar and calculator software set out to design something as close to a paper calendar or desktop calculator as possible without necessarily asking if it was the best possible design. Or in summa…
Yeah, there's a lot of cached thoughts in UI design.
Someone should start an open source lab that sets out to explore and test new design patterns in that space, without any preconceived notions of what should and should not work.
Re: Retro design is crippling innovation
#10There's a nice tip in the comments for that article:
"In Google Calendar, pick the "4 Weeks" option at the top, instead of "Month" and it functions exactly as you describe, with the current week at the top. -benjymous"
I didn't have a 4 Weeks view - turns out there's a setting which controls what the button between Month and Agenda does, in Settings -> General -> Custom View. There's also a setting above that for which view is your default when you reload the calendar.