the trouble with skeuomorphs…

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013
Apple's skeuomorphic calendar design

apple’s faux leather calendar ©apple

a skeuomorph on iPhone

dialing a number on a digital device
©learnforeverblog.blogspot.co.uk

skeuomorph digital book

pretending that a digital book is made of paper ©gearlive.com

“Skeumorph” is a term I only came across recently – and like many such terms, once you learn of its existence, it ties up a set of things you already knew about, in a bundle that gives you a better grasp on that issue than you had before. Once aware of it, you start to see it everywhere.

Skeumorph is defined by the online Oxford Dictionary as: an object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artefact in another material. The current vogue for use of this term is mostly related to the design of digital interfaces. A good example is Apple’s Calendar app with its faux leather effect (the first image – note the torn margin where it is suggested that a paper page has been ripped out). Much liked by Steve Jobs, it apparently reproduces the interior trim of his private jet. It seems that Jonathan Ive may well be about to dispense with this kind of thing.

I do not deny that there is something ‘cute’ about skeuomorphs, and I suppose that – as computers became capable of producing realistic faux glass, or steel, or wood – I was as wowed by these novel effects as anyone else. There are people out there who will defend skeuomorphism as being helpful and pleasant. Counter arguments can be made on aesthetic grounds that seem to me reminiscent of the modernist architectural creed that ‘form should follow function’ – a position that I am increasingly sympathetic to. However, I would like to advance a different argument that it is beyond the realm of aesthetics, for I believe that ‘skeumorphs’ are not only hampering desirable developments in some areas, but are potentially being used by some corporations against the common interest.

An example of a ‘skeuomorphic’ mindset being misapplied is, I believe, in the various ebook systems (that I have experienced). I have expressed my support for ebooks elsewhere, however, my hope for what ebooks could become is currently being frustrated by the reality of what ebooks are. What irks me most is ‘navigating’ the text of an ebook. Animations of pages turning in mimicry of a paper book are all good and well – though a clear skeuomorphism – but they do nothing to help with moving around the text of an ebook. You can ‘bookmark’ a page, and you can slide through the pages, and you can go to a contents page – each a skeuomorphic example of paper book mimicry – however, none of these actually provide the comparable functionality of a paper book. In a paper book, a bookmark allows instant access to the bookmarked page because it is always at hand: the ebook equivalent is only visible if you are on the page it marks, otherwise it has to be located on a special bookmark page. The page slider on an ebook attempts to provide us with something akin to leafing through a paper book, but, without the physical ‘feedback’, I find it almost unusable. After sliding back and forth a few times, I mostly resort to swiping forward one page at a time to find what I am looking for. An ebook’s content page can be accessed without losing your place in the book, but if you choose to go from there to some other part of the ebook, then you will only be able to return to your original position if you had had the presence of mind to bookmark that page. This problem could easily be avoided if the ‘go back’ button available on all browsers were present – but, for some reason, rather than using the technology commonly used on computing devices, the designers of these ebook systems (the one’s I’ve experienced certainly) are so committed to the skeuomorphic project of mimicking a paper book, that they don’t feel the reader needs one. Imagine how difficult a browser would be to use without a ‘go back’ button?

In a bid to mimic paper books – no doubt with the laudable view of not frightening off traditional readers – the designers of these ebook systems are doing something like roping stuffed horses to the bonnet of a motor car in the hope of easing the transition from carriages. I suggest that ebooks are going to remain clumsy and frustratingly unmanageable until we stop thinking of them as paper books, and instead begin to explore the true nature of what they actually are and could be.

Another attempt to treat ebooks as if they were paper books is Amazon’s proposal to allow the lending and reselling of ‘used’ digital books. This is skeuomorphism applied on a conceptual level. Similar attempts are being made across various digital media. These attempts seem to me to have more to do with preserving the business models and commercial hierarchies that existed before the digital revolution, than on satisfying any need in the consumer. What is interesting is which characteristics of the physical objects being superseded are being selected for skeuomorphic ‘simulation’. These corporations wish to avail themselves of the advantages of digital objects: their ability to be distributed across the internet and to be produced in unlimited numbers – thus avoiding distribution, warehousing and printing/manufacturing costs – but wish to pretend that digital objects are like physical ones in that they cannot effortlessly be cloned by whoever wishes to do so, and thus to be obtained free of charge from the internet. This initiative on the part of Amazon to give us back the facility to lend and sell our books has nothing to do with benefitting their readers, but only to further extend their control over our ebooks.

Ebooks and other digital objects ‘want to be free’* – that is their inherent nature. I would suggest that any attempts on our part, to try and impose on them the restrictions inherent in what it is they are replacing, are bound to fail. Perhaps the little skeuomorphisms of Apple’s faux leather calendar may need to be ditched because, in part, they lead to the repressive skeumorphisms being perpetrated by corporations like Apple and Amazon. All revolutions are painful for the people who experience them, but they are only worth enduring because of a general perceived need or desire for change. For the digital revolution to justify the chaos that it is wreaking on consumers and producers of art and entertainment, it must be to the advantage of all. If the promise of these new digital forms is going to be fulfilled we need to resist skeuomorphs.

*how we recompense the creators is another issue, and one I will try and address in another post

After this post was substantially written, I did come across this skeuomorphic ebook system that goes some way to assuaging my gripes about ebook navigation – and I am including it for fairness…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
No Comments Yet

art by committee…

Sunday, July 22nd, 2012

a horse….

A friend of mine sent me this article and asked me what I thought about it…

Well, I champion all kinds of advances in technology – not least the advent of the ebook – however there is the ever present temptation that because we can do something that we should do it. The creeping digitisation of everything – from music to video, and now books – makes all of these media infinitely malleable to anyone who can afford a computer; a device that is becoming an universal ‘solvent’. Digital objects together with the internet must surely eliminate traditional distribution systems (with their limitations of penetration of, and consequently of access to, that distribution). For good or ill, the marriage of computer and internet is bound to tear down not only the traditional gatekeepers of all the medias (publishers, record companies etc), but also the gates they guarded and must, ultimately (barring the intervention of political ideologies and/or corporate imperialisms – though these interventions, I believe, must ultimately fail), give everyone access to everything digital… Though this outcome forms a part of my creed, I have made the statements above because I believe that these freedoms are inherent in the structure of the internet – or, at least, in how that structure is likely to develop given human nature.

Evolution of the internet could lead to all kinds of blissful outcomes one of the greatest of which, surely, would be that an artist can freely create and give (how an artist is recompensed sufficiently to allow ongoing creation is another issue) his or her creation to whoever is interested in experiencing it. However, though the internet tends to thin the boundary between an artist and the experiencer of his or her art, much (all, even) could be lost if this boundary thins too much: the experiencer must not begin dictating the nature and content of the artist’s creations. I say this not because I believe this would be detrimental to the artist primarily, but because the real victim would be the experiencer – for surely any value that the art may have for that person is that it provides a unique expression of the artist’s psyche, and that it comes from the viewpoint that he or she occupies in the world.

The notion that we should use ebook technology as a way to enable readers to control what a writer actually writes is abhorrent to me. How could this not further increase the already overpowering commercial pressure on an author? How could it not end up with all books converging on the same book – a book effectively written by a vast committee?

It seems to me that the beauty of a flower is not likely to be best realized by attempts to force open its bud…

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments »

arrival in Istanbul…

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

packing and yoga mat...

I hate flying. I hate flying for several reasons. For one being transported like sheep in a truck. For another the being processed like a parcel – moved around on conveyor belts, weighed and stamped, shunted from one tedious wait to another. The apparently glamorous ultra-modernism of grand airport terminals is hardly a compensation, saturated as they are by advertising and all the vulgar excesses of rampant consumerism. Worse of all is that, like the tube system in London, the indistinguishability of one airport from another makes them part of a globe spanning system that annihilates the very point of travelling: the sense of movement and the meeting with the other. You pop into one end of the system, are processed, and extruded at the other end like sausage meat.

I talked to a teacher on the plane and she told me that she had a map of the world that she showed her pupils who had flown off to Gran Canaria and had no idea whatsoever where they were when they were there. As I have written elsewhere, it seems to me that this virtual relationship with the planet is going to bite a large chunk out of us.

Don’t worry, my posts from my travels are – I believe – unlikely to be as grumpy as this one is turning out to be. Of course I am likely to have ‘moods’ – being as I see it is my job to absorb everything I can – and that is going to have to include the bad as well as the good… And let’s face it, our planet isn’t exactly the Garden of Eden at the mo. So, if you don’t mind, a little more ‘down’ before I swing into the ‘up’.

I was conscious when planning this expedition that I would most likely be flying – and I know that flying is bad for the planet. I did look into doing the whole thing by train – but the cost and time are prohibitive; the former should perhaps not be so, but there it is. It seems likely that, in our lifetime, this business of flying off to a place as far as Istanbul for a couple of days – the teacher was doing just that – is going to collapse. Not that anyone would guess that was even possible with newer and bigger airports being built everywhere. But one of the things that amazes me is how, over the years, the amount of baggage people take with them has increased to absurd proportions. No doubt, defining ourselves, as so many of us do now, by the things that we own, we must, like good Queen Bess, pack everything – down to bedding, silver plate and the tapestries from our walls – every time we go anywhere; perhaps we are trying to mask an anxiety that, without our objects around us, we might loose our identity.

(As I’m typing I can hear muezzin singing the call for prayer – presumably from Hagia Sophia, I at first wrote, forgetting that it is now a museum – it’s beauty is sending shivers of delight down my spine :O)

Surely, one of the core arts of nomadism is packing. There is a liberation in only carrying what you – or your quadruped – can carry. It seems to me that there is a pressure here towards minimalism – where elegance is achieved through form following function – and where relocating substantial objects and comforts is seen as the extravagance of kings. Fossil fuels, here and elsewhere, by removing this need to operate within one’s means, leads to all manner of excess – here a gluttony of packing. One of the beauties (perhaps virtues?) of backpacking is that it represents a return to the principle that you can only take what you can carry yourself. In the attached photo you can see what I have taken with me. Aside from my backpack, you can see the little orange sack in which I am carrying all the leads that, alas, a techno-nomad (in this current iteration) is compelled to have with him. There should also be my ‘little green bag’ that I’ve just noticed I forgot to put in the shot. The heap of other stuff is tat; both Scottish and football related, that Lloyd, an experienced ‘Iran hand’ advised me to take to distribute among the various children I am likely to encounter. Though this is a sentiment I applaud, the business of buying the stuff and lugging it around somewhat goes against my ‘religion’.

A final thought, before I go and experience Justinian’s sublime basilica – the historian Arnold Toynbee proposed a theory of ‘culture and transmission’ in which he postulated that the relative rates of cultural innovation and those of transmission determine how diverse culture becomes across the planet. He said that in the Neolithic, though the rate of transmission of cultural ideas (including technologies) was incredibly slow, the rate of innovation was even slower so that, effectively, a single culture spanned the whole globe. Later, when the rate of innovation began accelerating, regional centres generated cultural innovation faster than it could be transmitted and so we ended up with extremely distinct cultures: China and Rome, for example. The European maritime expansion, beginning in the 15th century, greatly accelerated a transmission that has gradually eroded cultural diversity. This so called process of ‘globalisation’ is churning ever faster and soon we will have a mono-culture dominating the planet. I abhor this – at least where it concerns culture – and am travelling to try and see some of this ‘other’ before it disappears. The irony, of course, is that by so doing I am contributing to the tourism that is the very cutting edge of globalisation. Alas, today, each one of us that flies to some ‘exotic’ destination, is being his very own Vasco de Gama or Christopher Columbus…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
No Comments Yet

naked books…

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

the old and the new...

the old and the new...

Once upon a time books wore nothing more than a leather jacket. This could be decorated, it’s true, and be inscribed with the title and author’s name; brands burned into an animal’s hide. More recently, books began wearing paper covers sporting bold designs, but also an ever increasing baggage of quotes and comments and general blurb. Though this clothing can serve to make a book into a seductive and glamorous object, it seems to me that it is a false skin, a disguise – for it is generally only the content of the book that the author is responsible for; the cover is produced by other people, often with little direct understanding of the content, and whose focus – quite naturally – is a commercial one: a desire to get the book sold.

Ebooks are a return to presenting texts naked. If they are clothed at all it is in the shell of the ebook-reading device that they inhabit. Of course they will still, in a concession to tradition, possess a cover, but this will now consist of just another page. All the blabber of blurbs will be similarly demoted. Functionally, the ‘hook’ of the cover is now replaced by a downloaded sample: a free portion of the actual text of the book – analogous, in some ways, to the trailer for a movie.

This seems to me a profound development: a reader’s first point of contact is with the work itself – a connection between reader and author that is not only unmediated, but honest…

Tags: , , , , , ,
No Comments Yet

ebooks – a superior aesthetic?

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

my iPad...

Let me whisper to you a heresy: ebooks may be aesthetically superior to paper books. There, I’ve said it. Before they come for me, to burn me as a witch, let me try to explain what I mean.

First I would like to distinguish two different functional components of the paper book: the paper book as machine and the paper book as a (complex) surface that bears text. Though it is the latter that concerns me most here, I will say the following about the former:

Ebook reading devices can not only emulate many of the page turning, indexing, book marking etc functions of the paper book, but, by being programmable, can provide us with new facilities: ebooks can be searched, linked to other texts (or images, sounds, video etc), typographically modified (to use different fonts, or to use different sized fonts – thus tailoring the reading experience to the reader), and can come to possess any number of other features thought of or unthought of to date. These ergonomic issues are, of course, aesthetic in their own right, as are the actual physical characteristics of the paper book. This latter point seems to come up time and time again especially in the context of the ‘feel and smell’ of inked paper. I am the last person to dismiss this preference. However, not only is it possible that ebook devices will come to emulate – if the desire for this should continue – the ‘feel’ and ‘look’ of paper, but I would suggest that the ebook can bring its own feel and look to the reading experience; the slickness of metal and glass and all manner of textured plastics, and who knows what other materials. These particular aesthetic aspects of physicality will, no doubt, long continue to be a bone of contention – at least for those of us who have grown up with paper books.

Setting aside these considerations, I would like to turn to the second of my functional components: the book as a surface that bears text. This surface in paper books (and in scrolls, tablets and other devices that preceded the codex) is, after all, the one that most matters; it is that through which we actually ‘read’ the book. I would suggest that it is this surface that constitutes the primary aesthetic of any book (second only to its content). In the West (and I believe this carries through to other orthographies, printed or otherwise) the locus of this aesthetic lies in the laying out on the surface of crisp black characters in lines and in paragraph blocks, culminating in a macro-block, consisting of these components, that forms a ‘page’. It is thus the page that is central (everything else is merely a means of moving from one page to another). And it seems to me that there are two aesthetics that dominate the page: the quality of the print and the orthogonality of all the elements on a page.

Print by its very nature privileges repetition over individual uniqueness. For centuries scribes struggled manually to make each example of a given character identical to every other. With the advent of printing this became just about possible. I believe that the ebook represents the culmination of this process… for even printed books suffer from variations in ink density across a page and, because paper is an organic substrate, the kerning between printed characters can vary. Ebooks, by contrast, supply us with text that is of a perfectly uniform density and with precise, invariable kerning.

Similarly, the orthogonality of the macro-block of text on an ebook page is also invariable, whereas its paper counterpart is not. However, there is, I feel, a more important difference in the orthogonality (the perils of orthogonality are another matter: refer to “orthogonality” tag) of the macro-block: the gutter of a paper book. We are so accustomed to this that we hardly notice it, however, it is for many of us a cause of some irritation. It seems to me that, with all the advantages gained in the move from scroll to codex, there came also a major disadvantage: the gutter that was introduced by the need to attach the pages to the spine. Of course, in expensive books, hardcover rather than paperback (or even worse, those that are perfect bound), the way a page slopes down into a gutter is somewhat ameliorated – not only because the superior binding allows the book to lie flatter when open, but also because the macro-block is often kept away from the gutter by a wider margin. Paperbacks are altogether a different matter, with sometimes a reader being forced to peer down into the gutter into which the text seems to be slipping. In this sort of book the reader almost has to pull it apart to read it; perfect bound books literally come apart, so that the cover ends up as a folder holding a sheaf of loose pages.

The reader of an ebook is spared all of these misfortunes. Each page is presented perfectly flat and square and with no danger of being lost or of any damage coming to the device from the attempt to read what it displays.

So – I’ve not got long now before they come for me – though ebooks may be extremely disruptive to us readers, and though some things may be lost, I feel that, on balance, ebooks are destined to provide us with an aesthetically (never mind functionally) superior reading experience…

Tags: , , , , ,
10 Comments »

« Older Entries