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Countless designers seem to be whining about Apples incessant deployment of visual metaphors.

As designers, we like to clean, harmonize, remove bumps in curves, straighten lines, literally organize the life out of everything.

One has only to look at ebays new logo to know it is within the capabilities of every designer to remove the heart and soul of anything in the name of formal structure.

As designers we seem to talk allot about user centered design, or design for human factors, maybe more so since Bill Moggridge died. But it seems that Interaction Design has matured way more in this matter than Visual Design.

If Visual Design was more Human Centered, we would realize that vernacular, metaphor, inference and observation are crucial elements of communication and understanding

We would realize that, in a world where local relevance is as important as global consistency, applying swiss to every system could be akin to facism.

We’d see that there other kinds of design, many, that are not swiss in heritage. Design which is interested in the vernacular, admires rough edges, seeks the peculiarities that make something more human. We’d acknowledge that there are many design frameworks that admire the idiosyncratic rather than forcing homogeny.

We would realize that the foundational insight for the Apple Brand at Xerox Parc, was that computer systems could look more like something we know, than the lines of code and the commands of a native computing system.

As designers, we need to become more interested in the world around us, take inspiration from what we observe, open our eyes, our minds and our toolsets.

Because, by doing this, we may move skeuomorphism beyond kitsch towards defining a new vernacular.

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