Web designers of a variety of stripes often post redesigns of popular sites to show off their skills. Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter. I would love to see industrial designers in tech do something similar. Somebody take the laptop and offer a design that isn’t an Apple ripoff. I guess it’s hard to convey things like feel, weight, and material through a visual medium like the internet. But even a visual redesign in some CAD program that isn’t aluminum, buttonless trackpad and black 2.5mm keyboard would be a breath of fresh air.
Apple spends a lot of time making their devices so simple and obvious it’s difficult to imagine any other way. That’s what makes their designs great.
a lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like that is actually getting design out of the way, and I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they’re not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable, it feels almost un-designed, it feels almost like “of course it’s that way, I mean, why wouldn’t it be any other way?” - Jony Ive, in Objectified
But great designers surely can see other ways. And it would be great to get more of those views into the public conciousness. It might make Apple lose its monopoly on cool.
Something different?