Apple Design Influences

How has Apple effected web design over the years, and will continue to do so.

History

Apple has always been big on white space, using it to bring attention to the images and the text, while this  is relatively simple design, it can be seen across many websites with similar design to apple’s website. It uses subtle gradients to add depth to otherwise boring content, great text and content that match, icons used across the site, a grid system to keep everything in line, user friendly navigation and use of javascript to avoid long loading times. This can be seen in Apples website along with a lot of other websites that have been influenced by their design structure.

Apples website:

in comparison to

Mac Rabbit:

Versions:

Pixelmator:

Removing Skeuomorphism

Skeuomorphism is the term given the visual style that represents physical objects. The reason for using the visual style to begin with, was that when people first started using computers, they didn’t fully understand how to use them, so designers made icons to represent the original object. This is why mail icon is a envelope, music icon contains a musical note ect. Now that computers have gone ‘mainstream’ and we all understand them much better, we can remove a lot of this unneeded clutter such as textures, reflections and shadows that allowed things to represent their physical counterparts. This was changing content to so that instead of using texture and realistic imagery to represent certain design aspects, they moved to flatter mimalist design. Here are a few examples from when apple removed skeuomorphism from their mobile operation system;

The Icons were all changed to be much simpler, vibrant and nicer to look at, with the removal of physical objects and textures. The same can be said for the design with the apps.

Examples of flat web design

http://foodpornindex.com Is a website that tracks the hashtags of certain foods, healthy and unhealthy. It then shows it in an info graph designed with flat colours.

http://www.franzsans.de Is also shows another good use of flat design to show off the design of the font so you buy it, It works particularly well and I was tempted to buy the font.

Future

I believe that circle user interfaces will be inspired by Apple’s new watch. Circles appear in our natural world, just look at the moon, wheels and fruit. They create emphasis and focus our attention, giving us a defined centre. Apple have recently re-imagined user experience for the smaller screen of the watch but could have potentially created another web trend. Heres a picture of the new operating system.

Using circles in web design isn’t really a trend that has taken off over the years but there are still a couple of websites that use them in their design. Not just using circles in the design but in the user interface will create a completely different experience, something that hasn’t been created on rectangular shaped screens. While it doesn’t take up every area of the space, it will allow for a new type of white space by naturally giving the page more room to breath.

The operating system runs on a fluid icon system where you flick the screen to navigate into areas that aren’t currently visible, a crown on the side allows the user zoom in/out to their preference. If you click on an icon, an animation zoom into the icon until it is fullscreen then transforms into the app. This could be the next step in web design, as previously spoken about in my blog, pageless designs are becoming much more popular and seem to be more logical and less crowded than current designs. Interactivity to create a more immersive experience for the user would work well with pageless designs, I have researched websites that currently use circles in their user interface to create an interactive, pageless design.

A particularly interesting website I came across was (http://www.circle-ent.com) complete with animations and flat colours this website screams simplicity. Circle is a “idea lab”, a company that works on web experiences for ‘fun and brands’, it targets its market perfectly by showing off their digital skill with a fun, friendly user interface. This website seems to have already mastered Apple’s technique of simplicity through white space, the use of flat colours.

Another great example of a user experience that uses circles was (http://vlog.it) which uses a lot of slick animation from arriving to the site, to the introduction of the wheel of vlogs. It was “named as finalist for the 15th SXSW Interactive Awards in the Motion Graphics category” and “won the Awwwards Site of the Day”. Not quite as simple as the previous, it still uses flat colours and white space. Shadows from one circle to the next give the wheel a sense of depth, which makes the century circle stand out even more. It is perfect for its audience, people who want to watch video blogs the site which on a single visit contains about 40 links to videos which all open within the same window with an animation, will show recycle a total of 396 videos. It means users don’t have to leave the page, they click on all videos until they have watched them all then just refresh for another set. It takes for a great user experience, takes on great design concepts.

A website that doesn’t use circles as its user interface, but just adds to the simplicity of the pageless design is this one created for the iPhone game “Hundreds” (http://playhundreds.com). It uses white space really well to give focus to the content of the page, and again uses flat colours. There are clutters of different sized circles together and animations create an experience that attracts the user to pay more attention. As you scroll down the page, you follow a grey circle which is shown above and below other images which creates depth within the page.

References:

http://www.dtelepathy.com/blog/design/8-reasons-why-pageless-design-is-the-future-of-the-web

http://versionsapp.com

http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/how-apple-has-influenced-web-design-over-the-years–webdesign-2553

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-otl-aicher-ios-7-2013-7?op=1

http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/flat-design-ios-7-skeuomorphism-and-all-that–webdesign-14335

http://www.apple.com

http://versionsapp.com

http://www.pixelmator.com

http://macrabbit.com

http://mashable.com/2013/06/12/ios-7-apps-comparison/

http://wpmedia.business.financialpost.com/2014/09/apple-watch-features-apps.jpg?w=620

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/mobile-creativity/see-how-app-designs-have-changed-in-move-from-ios-6-ios-7/

http://gizmodo.com/skeuomorphism-will-never-go-away-and-thats-a-good-thin-1642089313

http://designshack.net/articles/graphics/designing-with-circles-tips-and-advice/

http://i-remember.fr/en

http://www.theprz.com/

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-otl-aicher-ios-7-2013-7?op=1

http://www.awwwards.com/best-websites/franz-sans-powerful-pleasant-1

http://www.theprz.com/

http://activetheory.net/#!/work/food-porn-index

http://www.franzsans.de/

http://foodpornindex.com/#!/berry

http://wp.iosfans.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Apple-Logo-Banner.jpeg

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WEBSITE ANALYSIS 5 – SONY’S BE MOVED CAMPAIGN

Sony’s ‘Be Moved’ campaign main focus is to allow users to look deeper into the products they create and the teams that work in them. They created an elaborate website with a fully immersive user experience using parallax scrolling, which is where the foreground images move faster than the ones in the background. This method of having separate layers within a page and manipulating the size and the speed they move you can create a sense of depth.

The method of having images and text moving alongside each other and flowing in front of and  behind each other looks like something that would be somewhat of a nightmare should it be attempted using code.

The website is complete with animations of shattering glass, assembling of products and visual scenes of underwater, forests and the universe. It looks very professional and an extreme version of a parallax scrolling site, at first glances this website seems extremely complicated to build, but doing a bit of research I came to the understanding that it was much more simple than how I’d imagined.

By creating a video sequence that lasts 1306 frames and allowing the user to flick between the frames by scrolling is essentially all that is needed to create a website as creative and professional looking as this one. It then creates a website that looks like nothing else on the market as it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to create the movement of some of the objects in 3D space with just normal code. Looking at the code;

the .frameloads is a function that makes the display move on the the next image when thhe user scrolls, and the small_256,small_512 and large_960 are for the different size images for the different sized displays.

As you can see it is very visually appealing, the textures and layers just create this completely immersive experience for the user, telling the story of how they engineer and design together.

References

http://subtlepatterns.com/thumbnail-view/page/16/

http://discover.store.sony.com/be-moved/

https://ihatetomatoes.net/sonys-be-moved-website-deconstructed/

WEBSITE ANALYSIS 3 – LUHSETEA.COM

luhsetea.com (pronounced loose tea)

This is a fun website, regardless of the fact they sell a simple product, they are targeting a gap in the market, a small niche of people care very much about the quality of tea they drink. Therefore they need to stand out of the crowd, to do so they have created the “Tea bag prohibition”, the tea they sell is without the bag, so creating some form of story around the fact they don’t sell their tea in bags will give the user an experience like no other. They have gone as far as to create characters that are featured around the website.

By doing this they give the customer a more personal and fun experience when using the site, because lets face it, if you were a tea fanatic, you probably wouldn’t be expecting a story with characters that the website is based upon. Not stopping there, they have gone as far as to create a “Suspect Intelligence Report” for each character, these look like this;

If all of this wasn’t enough, the sidebar even has a picture of king kong hanging off it, this website is fun, quirky and definitely creates an extra-ordinary experience for it customer.