When you talk to designers about “application design” there seems to be an invisible box created that immediately gets filled with assumptions. Overly beveled. Tons of chrome. Boring. All too often, whether because of application bloat, feature creep or simply inelegant & unimaginative solutions, designs for applications end up looking like they were stamped out by the same “application making machine”. Well It doesn’t’ have to be this way. As digital/interactive solutions occupy more channels, brand touch-points get closer and more frequent and the lines get blurred on the continuum from applications to advertisements, different ways of approaching application design will prove to be successful. These solutions will be elegant and nontraditional and they should be embraced and learned from. These will be as much brand-immersing experiences as they will be tools to accomplish a task. As such the traditional approach to application design will need to be bent a bit.
We’re starting to see glimpses of this new breed to “application design” in Fallon‘s new social media aggregator called Skimmer (designed by Andy Gugel):
Lots of usability experts will surely take issue with some of the affordances and contrast decisions made in this application, as well as pick apart some of the ID. And they’ll have points to be considered surely, but at the end of the day – it’s gorgeous. And my point of view isn’t just as a visual designer geeking out on a beautiful design. Skimmer represents the possibility of moving away form the expected and into the immersive.
We’re moving toward that future-state we’ve all known was just around the corner, a state where highly meaningful and functional interactions are facilitated through immersive interfaces. And business needs are solved through interactive design.
Great work Andy and the entire Fallon team.