So skeuomorphism is now anything besides Windows Phone style "pure digital"? Shiny = glass, black texture = leather, blue texture = denim, etc? That's going to be really, really boring.
I don't know why texture is such a bad thing. Of course you can overdo it like anything, but personally I prefer Reeder with a light paper-pulp backing texture instead of a plain light peach background.
It almost feels like people are calling it skeuomorphic so that's how they expect the developer to feel about it. I don't think regular people look at these as real world metaphors, expecting them to function as they do in real life. That feels to me like a theoretical user posed by developers that doesn't actually exist.
In reality, people see it for what it is. Design flair. Whether or not it's unnecessary or helps the user with the app is missing the point entirely. Design that's pleasing to the eye shouldn't get in the way and cause problems, but it doesn't have to accelerate your use of the service to be positive overall.
Aero Glass is a great example. It gets mixed opinions, but I think we can all agree that it's far better than Luna and IE actually looks pretty great with it. There is no skeuomorphic benefit to having glass everywhere. It's simply design flair. With that in mind, I still prefer it.
For example, what is so bad about this?
http://skeu.it/image/24908403424
Because it reproduces a hypothetical real-world object, that not only doesn't make any sense (what is a sheet of paper hanging from a glass panel anyway?), but doesn't add any meaning to what this interface is supposed to do?
You can use skeumorphism where it makes sense. The problem is that login form has no analog in real-life, so in this one designer just went crazy for the sake of it.
I found myself giggling at this one along with all the other ones with things that make no sense like leather buttons and switches, and then I started to wonder: is it possible that the designers making this nonsense are actually representing an aesthetic totally decoupled from actual usability? In fact, let me get ageist here for a second—could it be that the designers making this nonsense are actually too young to have ever seen or used the real-world objects these skeumorphic interfaces are imitating?
I don't know about you, but I found some of my rage dissipated when I started to consider this just fashionable design. Yes, in a perfect world Apple would make appropriate (i.e. less) use of skeumorphism and therefore we wouldn't be seeing these kinds of ridiculous excesses from young designers, but something has to be the fad, and right now this seems to be it.
could it be that the designers making this nonsense are actually too young to have ever seen or used the real-world objects these skeumorphic interfaces are imitating?
You sure have something there. I recently felt like a dinosaur when I was explaining line ending characters to a young programmer who had never seen a carriage returning or a line feeding.
"it uses a lot of bandwidth" is exactly the problem that skeu-craziness is. Purposeless high-resolution backgrounds and animations waste storage space, bandwidth, cycles, and developer time. Time/money spent adding a fake leather texture is time/money unspent on functional aspects of a product.
So you're against textures full stop, not just skeumorphism? Because of course high-resolution textures are not necessarily skeumorphic.
> Time/money spent adding a fake leather texture is time/money unspent on functional aspects of a product.
Using a fake leather texture takes about as long as using some other texture or choosing a solid color or choosing which direction the gradient goes in... You're either spending time on design, or you're not. Even being minimalistic takes time and intention.
Skeuomorphism is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original [1].
So the problem is exactly it: the designer attempted a skeumorphic design of something that has no original in the first place. The consequences then are that it doesn't improve usability, wastes bandwidth, etc. - just as in any other bad design.
from a usability standpoint, absolutely nothing. from an aesthetic standpoint, it is tacky as hell. They may as well have wrapped their login form with faux-fur texture leopard print. You're right, it is merely a stylistic choice and it isn't going to confuse the users. That doesn't make it good.
Though I agree with both of you, I think that there is a certain amount of success that drives these designs to continue to be made. In retrospect it's quite easy to criticize the design here and naturally, we are all pretty unanimous that it could be much better. That being said, saying "it fails because it uses textures" is very different than "it fails in it's use of textures".
Try doing a ghetto case study by asking anyone around you whom is ignorant of good design trends whether they rather login to your shot or one like this:
Did the skeuomorphic shot shot pick up votes? It won unanimously from the people I asked. As designers we can nitpick about the goals of each design and the information that had to be shown but at the end of the day, unless your designing for a community like Dribbble, it's going to be design ignorant people using your interface. The main objective of this interface should be to retain users through it and a large component to succeed in doing so is by having the form be visually compelling - not to us, to them.
Just like programmers are told to assume that every user is a malicious hacker, I believe designers should assume every user has poor taste. It's a much like how you don't see people in public wearing edgy designs off the runway despite them being created by people considered the very best fashion designers. There could easily be a company that takes these designs as is and mass produces them cheap for the public but this doesn't happen because there is a major discrepancy between designers and consumers tastes. Our job as designers is to bridge the gap in these tastes - between what we know is good and what users will actually agree is good.
Of course, don't take this to mean that I think this type of login is in any way ideal but I do think it works better than what more or less an unstyled form adhering to metro. It would be one thing if all good designers were all designing in a minimalistic style... but they aren't. The problem with the excessive paper/glass/linen/wood/gradient/etc is that good designers are using them in their designs and it forces the trend followers of the industry to feel like they somehow need to incorporate all the same elements. To me the design tells a tale of someone who believed that adding, well, added to the design. The result was something over-designed, superfluous, a cliché of what something outstanding should look like.
I think it's quite odd when people are adamantly against one style of design. I have extremely minimal designs I enjoy like the Nest thermostat and I have more skeuomorphic looking designs I enjoy like Path. To me, both are designed well because both use their respective language correctly not because they use one language over the other. Maybe some programmers can attest to a similar feeling... if you preferred Python would you rather work on a project with terribly written Python or extremely well written Ruby? The later seems obvious. One last thing to consider: if anything the reason skueomorphic design is getting hated on is largely because it's existed so long. Though a minimal design is likely harder to butcher completely, it won't be long until people are making really atrocious looking Metro apps and then all those who thought it was the be-all-end-all future of interfaces can have a beer and laugh about being wrong.
Just my opinion though. If you disagree, please don't downvote me to oblivion - tell me why you side with the camp you do as I'm always open-minded to good persuasion :)
It's incredibly annoying to see some people discount any design if it is anything more than flat and solid colors.
Everyone of all design understanding levels understands a sense of craft. Subtle gradients, shadows, textures, and effects go a long way to creating a 2d digital object of worth.
Nothing in the real world is a solid color--it has light, texture, and materiality. Stripping a visual of all of these characteristics creates an uneasy steril-ness that can feel flat and or cheap.
I agree. This site seems to call-out anything with a certain kind of texture as "skeumorphic," and many of the examples are quite attractive on their own.
But I think you're pigeonholing it into a certain school of design. I don't see it calling out just any texture -- only a certain range commonly found in software these days (especially on iOS). I'm talking about denim, paper, stone, leather, and other rough, durable surfaces that remind us of certain tactile sensations. (I'd also add a category for shiny, glossy, perhaps candy-like textures.) It certainly makes sense for these kinds of textures to appear most commonly on touch devices, but as designers it's good to understand when we're being a bit derivative.
If anything, skeu.it will help me be more self-aware.
> I'm talking about denim, paper, stone, leather...
Add glass, wood, and brick and that's probably every common surface texture that humans interact with daily. Is it really any surprise that these are used over and over? You claim it's derivative but maybe it's just common.
> So skeuomorphism is now anything besides Windows Phone style "pure digital"? ... I don't know why texture is such a bad thing. Of course you can overdo it like anything, ...
Here's a key to interpreting the internet (and, well, all of society really, but the internet is like normal society on speed):
(1) People love to whine.
(2) People love to feel that they're on the cusp of a trend.
(3) People love to repeat what <somebody smart> said, because that makes them feel smart too -- but often don't really understand the basis of <somebody smart>'s statement (details matter!).
(4) People like black-and-white, crisp, clear-cut dogma; details and shades of grey are confusing and annoying. Whoooo, slogans!
Apparently, for whatever reason, some people have decided that so-called "skeuomorphism" is so-misguided, so-yesterday, so-OMG-ARE-YOU-STILL-DOING-THAT?!1? No doubt there is a kernel of truth behind this, but it's also probably completely swamped by the resulting noise...
Except that when it comes to usability, using skeuomorphism tends to confuse user (note that it happens in some cases), because it implies that something will behave in a certain way like a real world counterpart, while that piece of interface might not.
I liken this stance of skeuomorphism to Douglas Crockford's stance on JSLint. To parahprase him "if there are two ways to do something and one of them can be a terrible source of conusion, use the other". This was originally meant for programming but it can apply as well to designing interfaces. So using skeuomorphism isn't immediately bad but it's a red flag, like saying if(a=b) in C.
The "leather" tagged posts on the front page are more than "black texture". Both of them feature "thread stitching" along the borders. I thought these were the worst of the bunch, actually.
I agree that the "Skeumorphism must die" meme has gotten out of hand. But the examples on this site are actually pretty well justified AFAICT.
Both of them feature "thread stitching" along the borders
It may be overused and bad taste but "thread stitching" is not in itself Skeumorphic design which is I believe the GP's point. A skeuomorph /ˈskjuːəmɔrf/ skew-ə-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original
A calendar app which looks like a desktop calendar is skeumorphic, a notepad app which looks like an actual notepad or a media player which looks like a tape player are the same. A weather app with a jean texture and a zipper may be ugly, but its not skeumorphic. The examples on this site may be examples of poor design but they are not, necessarily examples of poor skeumorphic design.
The way I see it, this website features two types of design. The first is skeumorphic design, and the other is a sort of mimicry of skeumorphic design by people who presumably did not realize the underlying point of skeumorphism.
I would argue that there is no "underlying point" of skeuomorphism except to make shit feel nice by alluding to familiar real-life objects. There's no requirement that the source material be functionally similar.
That linked one is inoffensive though still a bit goofy IMO: we've got lined paper, but the text on it completely disregards the lines, and the rope/metal cord hanging the paper doesn't look right depth-wise. And glass + lined notepaper is a weird combo in general. :)
But I agree with your take that in a case like that it's merely a stylistic choice (some of the other examples, though...). The interesting thing to me is the cyclical aspect: skins seemed to have died down in popularity, at least among the geek crowd, for the past decade. Apple's brushed metal stuff was largely derided, Luna got toned down to Aero Glass, Aqua got toned down to what it is today, "skinnable" became less and less a bullet point for apps (ah, for the good ol' days of Sonique and Audion...). It remained on the web, since there's no good "native" equivalent like for desktop apps, though even there Bootstrap was a move away. Then it exploded again, driven by iOS and an increase in single-page web apps. I have to wonder if it's due to an influx of new designers and developers who are starting on iOS or the web and missed the first go-round. Ultimately I suspect that many of the more extreme examples we see today will end up massively toned down, along the lines of Mac OS X 10.0's Aqua vs today's. I.e., linen/denim/leather/etc are today's pinstripes and brushed metal.
What is wrong? Mainly the fact that those have nothing to do with skeuomorphism, it is only pointless bloat. Those designs have nothing to do with real world metaphors, they just shout "I can use cool textures too!"
And it is not new; the first weave of this epidemy stroked Windows somewhere around Win98 when average developers, inspired by a few actual skeumorphic designs, have learned how to use non-rectangular visibility regions and all this crappy ~1MB shareware become ~10MB (because of textures) crappier (because author had spent most time on "design") shareware that was antiskeuomorphic because it looked/behaved neither "real" nor like a Windows application.
Both Luna and then Aero were nice enough to make people appreciate consistency and refocus on function, while the madness moved to iStuff (ok, Android too, but thank heavens considerably less).
I completely agree, I'm getting a little tired of the whining about the 's'-word. For example, on the blog it shows the letter from Square with a paper background. What are we supposed to do instead of something like that? Blocks of solid color for everything, like you said?
>So skeuomorphism is now anything besides Windows Phone style "pure digital"? Shiny = glass, black texture = leather, blue texture = denim, etc? That's going to be really, really boring
How is Metro really really boring? Have you used WP beyond seeing screenshots?
If you're really interested in the design philosophy , here's some analysis of Metro's alternative approach which mainly goes by the 'authentically digital', 'intentionally 2d' and 'content before chrome' philosophies.
Aero Glass is just barely skeumorphic, it mostly stays out of the way except for window borders. Other skeumorphic designs are much more in your face and some affect usability because it's not clear what the controls are and how to interact with them.
In defense of your parent I think you misunderstood what he's saying is boring. What I took it to mean was that if you write off everything remotely skeuomorphic, textured, etc. and only leave 2D Windows Phone style pure digital design then that becomes boring. It's not boring because it's WP-digital style but because after a while that style of design will become as boring and played out as skeuomorphic design. Windows Phone and Windows 8 are actually really nice looking and that's coming from a guy who loves Apple's design sensibilities and have hated Windows' design up until Windows Phone and Win8 (with 7 having some redeeming qualities to it).
I actually think Aero Glass is quite skeuomorphic. It's literally a window. And for me it definitely does get in the way. The way the shadows and colors change behind the glass is distracting, it's often hard to tell what window is active, and I always get distracted by the taskbar because suddenly one of the icons will flash except the flash isn't a real instance of an app trying to alert me but a false alarm caused by my mouse getting too near it or, again, another window moving just the wrong way as to make the taskbar glass react even though nothing relevant is going on there for me to look at.
I don't want to start a flame war over Apple UI v. Windows at all. What I'm saying is that the parent has a point. I'm also saying Aero Glass isn't for everyone. There are lots of people like me who have the same problems with it and we're not imagining it and no, we're not using it wrong. It's just now we are and it doesn't mean you're wrong for liking it just as much as it doesn't mean we're wrong for disliking it.
The larger point I want to make beyond all that is that design flair matters. It's not superfluous at all. A lot of people like to talk about design flair like its a gimmick and take a purist view of design where it's only about usability. Usability is most important but design flair can take an interface with perfect usability to the next level. It's what gives apps credibility. It makes the experience enjoyable and it's what makes people love their apps. Any trend taken too far can become exhausting and awful to look at though and I think we're starting to see this with skeuomorphic design. It's sad because I loved it until some people butchered it. It's Web 2.0 all over again and the "pure digital" style will eventually fall victim to overuse too eventually.
I think this site is funny but it's meant to be taken with a grain of salt. Some of those designs really are nice but it's still fun to poke some fun at them nonetheless.
The thing I really like about Android, and to an even greater extent WP8, is that apps feel more like pieces of an integrated task. On iOS every app wants to be a special snowflake and this is annoying when most of the time I just want to grab an image or a chunk of text from one place and use it in another place. To me this is all part of one overall task and the UI should feel like a cohesive tool for this and not emphasize the (to the user) arbitrary boundary between one app and another.
I don't know why texture is such a bad thing. Of course you can overdo it like anything, but personally I prefer Reeder with a light paper-pulp backing texture instead of a plain light peach background.
For example, what is so bad about this?
http://skeu.it/image/24908403424
It almost feels like people are calling it skeuomorphic so that's how they expect the developer to feel about it. I don't think regular people look at these as real world metaphors, expecting them to function as they do in real life. That feels to me like a theoretical user posed by developers that doesn't actually exist.
In reality, people see it for what it is. Design flair. Whether or not it's unnecessary or helps the user with the app is missing the point entirely. Design that's pleasing to the eye shouldn't get in the way and cause problems, but it doesn't have to accelerate your use of the service to be positive overall.
Aero Glass is a great example. It gets mixed opinions, but I think we can all agree that it's far better than Luna and IE actually looks pretty great with it. There is no skeuomorphic benefit to having glass everywhere. It's simply design flair. With that in mind, I still prefer it.