> The folder-like design in iOS 5 and iOS 6 has been replaced with an opaque app icon. The end result is so horrible that it’s hard to avoid thinking it was done maliciously: if someone was tasked with hiding away a set of unwanted apps, they would be likely to come back with a design that was something very much like the iOS 7 Newsstand.
I doubt it was done maliciously, but I stand by my previous belief: Jon Ive is just really, really bad at overseeing software design. He's much worse at software design than Scott Forestall.
Maybe Scott's UI wasn't "up to date", but he seemed to be great at UX design. Jon Ive doesn't seem to understand UX at all (did you see the font he chose for iOS7 at WWDC, which fortunately got changed because of backlash? You could barely see it), and he just copied some UI designs from 3rd party apps or other mobile operating systems (webOS, Android, WP8, etc), and made the colors lighter - all of it implemented in a not very cohesive way. And let's not even bring up the animations, translucency or parallax effect anymore, which again are things only a UI/UX newbie would add.
I just checked the dates on Wikipedia: Forestall left Apple in October 2012, and Newsstand appeared in October 2011. I think the idea behind Newsstand itself is terrible, and no amount of design of the icon matters.
You're joking, but if we take the statement seriously... Perhaps the mechanism works like this: The further we move away from skeuomorphism, the less correlation we'll see between industrial design talent and UX design talent.
It's awful, there's no getting around it. The newsstand icon just seems to be the way it is because the designer ran out of ideas. I can't wait for a jailbreak so I can remove some of the most awful animations.
I doubt it was done maliciously, but I stand by my previous belief: Jon Ive is just really, really bad at overseeing software design. He's much worse at software design than Scott Forestall.
Maybe Scott's UI wasn't "up to date", but he seemed to be great at UX design. Jon Ive doesn't seem to understand UX at all (did you see the font he chose for iOS7 at WWDC, which fortunately got changed because of backlash? You could barely see it), and he just copied some UI designs from 3rd party apps or other mobile operating systems (webOS, Android, WP8, etc), and made the colors lighter - all of it implemented in a not very cohesive way. And let's not even bring up the animations, translucency or parallax effect anymore, which again are things only a UI/UX newbie would add.