Via The Loop, a nice post by Louie Mantia on skeuomorphism. I’ve written in the past about Apple’s heavy use of textures on iOS, defending such decisions and also highlighting what can happen when the other extreme (over the top minimalism) is instead used.

Mantia rightly notes that a lot of what people are complaining about as ‘skeuomorphism’ is in fact simply custom textures integrated with standard interface design, because something skeuomorphic is supposed to have a connection with an older/familiar way of doing things. Therefore, a direct translation of some music hardware—knobs and all—to the iPad is clearly skeuomorphic. Find My Friends, with its leather stitching, is not, because you never used to use your leather stitched ‘thing’ to find your friends. Unless you were a serious weirdo in a leather suit, often getting arrested on ‘scaring the shit out of people’ charges.

However, the part of Mantia’s post that really struck with me was this:

More importantly, a visually distinctive app such as Game Center, Find My Friends, Podcasts, or iBooks helps you to remember which app you’re in. The colors, textures, and environment paint that picture instantly.

As I’ve said in the past, I find it strange people now see Jony Ive’s shift to looking after all of Apple’s human interface as an indication that future software will be as minimal as the hardware. If that is the case, either they don’t understand Ive or—more worryingly—Ive doesn’t understand good software design. I don’t have a problem with Apple perhaps toning down some of its excesses, but to remove every texture and all the fun from its software and head towards Office 2013-style minimalism would be the wrong decision.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with somewhat minimal design when it’s the best decision for the app in question (such as Letterpress), but as a default it would make it difficult for people to immediately know what application they are in. On OS X, people have complained enough about Apple removing colour from Finder, and removing textures entirely from iOS would be rather similar. Also, the point of iOS hardware is that it is a blank canvas—it’s designed to get out of the way and enable the device to become the application or game that is running. But in making apps extremely minimal, Apple would be in danger of painting shades of white on its blank canvas, which won’t excite anyone and would even cause minimalist advocates to rapidly start griping that iOS was now boring and less usable.