“Most people who’ve been using the word skeuomorphic lately aren’t exactly clear about what it actually means,” Matthew Panzarino writes for The Next Web.
“Skeuomorphism is a technical term, used almost completely by industrial designers or digital artists until recently, when arguments about where Apple’s design are headed dragged it out of the dungeons of semantic obscurity and into the harsh light of ignorance,” Panzarino writes. “So many things about design on iOS are mistaken for skeuomorphism. A ‘leather’ texture, for instance, is not skeuomophic in and of itself. If it’s applied to an object that is leather in its original form, and then that object has interaction design and function applied to it that also mimics the original’s purpose, then it becomes skeuomorphic. The Contacts app is, for instance, but the Find My Friends app is not.”
Panzarino writes, “Making a choice to ‘make things skeuomorphic’ or ‘make things less skeuomorphic’ in a unilateral fashion, across iOS and maybe OS X, makes as much sense as deciding to stop using the color blue. You either use blue or you don’t use blue, you don’t decide ahead of time to outlaw blue for life.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]