Regarding the use of drop shadows, the final projects of my two bachelor students at Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule could not be more diverse.
Together with programmer Benjamin Ludwig my student Andreas Sommer created “swap”, an application for the iPhone that is capable of letting its user interact with public projections, installations or games. Therefore “swap” uses its own server as a gateway between the client on the iPhone and Flash in which the application is running.
For now there are two sample applications. With “Particles” you can contribute to projected music visuals with simply drawing on your phone. And “Race” is a typical racing game in which you can compete with other users. The iPhone’s accelerometer turns your device into a real steering wheel and the more users log in, the more cars populate the public racing track.
Using an iPhone means using it in public space. Yet querying search engines, letting map applications guide you to your destinations, using location based services etc. is a very self-involved way of using data in public space. How can one interact there with other users, with this public space as such, not to mention in a really useful, joyful or even artistic way? “swap” offers exactly this. Much more applications are thinkable and I am certain that other developers will contribute with their ideas.
The styles of “swap” are intentionally very similar to the ones of Apple. On the one hand minimalistic and reduced colors, on the other hand very professional state of the art design styles. Yet Andreas refused to let Apple apply the gloss effect to their nice program icon for the AppStore (see above). He said, it would have been by far too intense.
You can visit “swapblog” and download the application in the AppStore.
Linda Horstkotte initially got in touch with the Apple Interface when she began to study three years ago. She was startled by photorealistic imitations of real objects and the excessive use of graphical effects there. Had Apple not gained word fame especially because of its minimalist approach on hardware design? And had not the early GUI designs been simple and reduced? So why the paradigm change in the field of graphical user interfaces?
Using these questions as a starting point for her theoretical work (“Immaterielle Software und ihre ikonische Entsprechung im Interface”) she draws parallels from the humanization of the early computers to the anthropomorphized icons and metaphors on modern graphical user interfaces and reveals for example that Apple’s new icon for the “Control panel” is by far not as progressive as one might think. By the contrary, shifting from Tiger (10.4) to Leopard (10.5) this icon retrograded from electrified to mechanic age!
Linda concludes that it is the duty of interface designers today to look beyond current metaphors, styles and effects and to be aware that the interface design decides about the users’ maturity.
The icon design she made in her practical work (see above) is an optimistic vision into future developments in the field of graphical user interface design, where not photorealism, regressive metaphors and visual pomp but readability, consistency and formal reduction are criteria for good interface and icon design. (Of course this also applies to the use of drop shadows.)
