Marcel Winatschek

iOS 7 and WordArt

I spent way too much time in Microsoft Word making WordArt—tweaking gradients and shadows and 3D bevels, doing ridiculous things with rotation and outline thickness. The interface had this gravity to it. Realizing what I was making was terrible never stopped me from clicking into the next option anyway.

So I’m looking at iOS 7 and something feels oddly familiar. Vaclav Krejci posted about how you could basically recreate the whole design language in Word—same typefaces, same flattened look, same vague sense that something got deleted. Jony Ive apparently took the same path I took with WordArt, except he had teams of people and unlimited money, and it ended up on a billion phones.

There’s something almost funny about that. The most carefully designed operating system ever made looks like something I would have made in study hall, before I knew anything about design. That bothers me in a way I can’t quite explain.