A Eulogy for Skeuomorphism

Yesterday, at the World Wide Developer's Conference in San Francisco, Apple unveiled its new mobile operating system, iOS 7, as well as the newest iteration of its desktop OS, Mavericks, named after a surf beach in Northern California. In Apple's new vision, colors are brighter, typefaces lighter, movement more nuanced and dimensional. Apple CEO Tim Cook called it the "biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone."

These new operating systems are revolutionary for many reasons, but mostly because they've both shucked a design element that has defined the way users interact with their computers for as long as there have been graphical user interfaces—which is to say from the very first click. This element is called skeuomorphism, and despite the insane and possibly unfamiliar word, it was, until this morning, an indelible part of your digital life.

Rewind: there is a computer beneath all the pomp and gloss of your 13-in. Retina MacBook display. And in the days before such gloss, you needed to be versed in computer language in order to use it. Back then, it was you and the computer, in direct communication through a sacred channel called the command line. With the advent of the graphical user interface (or GUI), however, the hallowed tradition of command-line tinkering was sublimated into something palatable to lay users, to folks uninterested in learning the language of code for themselves. Great pains were taken not to spook these people; familiar sights and sounds were summoned into the chimerical space of the personal computer. The so-called desktop metaphor was invented; notepads, drawers, and trashcans were diligently recreated in two dimensions. Documents were made to unspool like scrolls of paper. Systems were organized in little manila folders.

In a slim 1999 classic on the subject, In The Beginning Was the Command Line, the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson compared this (perhaps unjustly) to a Disney-fication of computer culture: just as Disney turns mythology, literature, and folk tale into adventure parks and perfectly manicured replicas, so did Macintosh and Windows turn the arcane and often torturous relationship between computer and user into a theme park of visual mixed metaphors.

Skeuomorphism, in essence, is what we call those metaphors, which, even now are everywhere in our digital lives: our devices abound with rendered knobs, switches, and sliders, emulating varieties of manual functionality that we can intuitively grasp. Digital clocks are made to look analog, and we can nimbly jam on immaculate replicas of guitars, drums, and turntables. They're not always literal, or even visual: the shutter-click sound on your iPhone is an auditory skeuomorph, a relic from the old world meant to remind you that your chameleonic device has momentarily taken on the role of "camera."

While under the direction of the late Steve Jobs, Apple's design aesthetic tended heavily towards the skeuomorphic. The Apple desktop calendar, famously, is rendered with accents of rich Corinthian leather; its bookshelves gleam with wood veneers, its chrome always brushed, its pages stitched and torn, its tabletop felt green.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.