By way of contrast, consider my Treo 650. Or, for that matter, consider any of the many, many pieces of digital hardware currently available on the market that, like my Treo, share the absolutely cringe-worthy characteristic of being pieces of plastic that are painted to look like metal.
Metalheads
We seem to have a fascination with metallic surfaces here in the early part of the 21st Century. In commercial hardware, a high metallic polish is one of our most facile methods of quickly signaling that a product is digital, that it’s a refined and efficient mechanical creation of some aesthetic value. It’s a conceit that I can abide, sure, when the constituent materials of an object are in fact metal of some kind. A good case in point is the Motorola RAZR mobile phone, which isn’t a design that I adore tremendously, but it’s a design that I can respect, because it is in fact made from metal (well, mostly).
But nothing irks me more than a hunk of plastic that’s trying to look like it’s something else. To me, if you paint a plastic object to look like anodized aluminum or chromium steel, you may as well paint it to look like rosewood and line the walls of your basement bar with it. Which is to say: the attempt to disguise its true nature seems cheap.
For savvy industrial designers, this lesson of respecting the essential nature of materials isn’t a new one. But I think it’s also a germane one for visual designers: to bring to life the most effective and aesthetically pleasing solution to any design problem, let a thing be what it is — whether that thing is a button, a tab, a block of text, a hyperlink. Don’t try and make it something it’s not.
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