Week 6: Apple's Web Presence

Apple is a highly innovative company company who focuses on their technological capabilities, web presence and expertise. A web design for the Apple company should comprise of simplification, clear definition and navigation for company enrichment that is also capable of a simplistic and elegant overall design. Designers borrow, restyle, reinvent, inspire and get inspired. Nothing that is being designed is completely new, if you realize this. I feel that newspaper design has strongly influenced web design when CSS came along and web design took things further to influence newspaper design in its turn.

There are always web designers who reach a larger public, to whom the design is new. Then, the designer who reaches a certain critical mass is dubbed the 'inventor' of the design. However, I saw a very interesting speech by Bill Buxton (he's of Microsoft so of course he likes to bash Apple) who showed images, products (a touch screen (glass) Casio watch from the 80's!) and footage of things we all thought they were invented by Apple. Apple just have top notch designers who know where to look for inspiration.

Better yet: I think that Apple 'owns' marketing, the design helps. If you are world's best product designer but you do not have the ability to reach out and touch your user, your awesome designs will remain unsuccessful. Yet, they might inspire those who are able to get the design 'out there', running off with the credits you might deserve. As long as you know it was your design, you can be proud of it, I think.

Good design is influential. Period. With the exception of the 1996 design, Apple's sites have been a breath of fresh air. Sure, it's easy to look back and criticize their pre-2008 designs, but those of us who were around back then remember that the industry went absolutely gaga over those glass menu tabs in 2000, and there were scads of tutorials in design magazines and on websites detailing how to replicate them. That was in an era of hideous Flash UI's and tediously over-designed "skip intros." Meanwhile, Apple.com was clean and usable.

Influence is about having an effect on (or the power to shape) something, in this case web design. Sometimes influence manifests itself in direct imitation. It's safe to say that Apple has been widely imitated (even the pre-2007 Apple), and there are plenty of good/bad Apple-inspired sites out there to prove it. But influence isn't limited to imitation. I've never designed a site that "looks" like Apple's, but I've been influenced by their aesthetic, which exemplifies time-honored design principles. And I think it's reasonable to assert that any designer who's been to Apple's site has been influenced by it, either consciously or subconsciously, because good design is influential. 

The simple fact remains that Apple, love their products or hate them, is an influential design-driven brand that has inspired quite a few people out there - many of whom are web/graphic designers. I happen to be a PC user myself as well (although not an Apple hater by any measure), but I'd never discount the brilliance of Apple in the field of design. Are they the huge influential juggernaut that some people make them out to be? Perhaps... perhaps not, but to completely ignore their brand's place as an influential force in the industry would be a bit silly. There's a reason why people know what you mean when you say a website design is "like Apple". The same can't be said for many of their competitors (and I'm looking at the full spectrum of brands, not just MS).