[geuis]

Folks, stop bitching and complaining about this or that idea being good/bad/impractical etc, etc. It's a designer's demo portfolio work.

http://www.johnnyplaid.com

Designers do this stuff because they have ideas about how devices and interfaces can change and they explore those ideas. It doesn't seem to me that Johnny is making claims about inside information. He's using his visual talents to create mockups of what might be possible in the future.

The medium is different, but the process isn't any different than sci-fi writers setting stories in the future or me making UI wireframes for an application. It's just ways of exploring what could be done.

The last point is to realize that this is most likely just personal portfolio work. Some of us have github profiles and others have PSD's. Just think about the exposure Johnny is getting out of this and how it might get him more work in the future. That's the best reason for him to make this.

[ChuckMcM]

Perhaps the response would be similar if he had a design for two headed baby clothes, or superhero outfits.

There is this notion of the 'uncanny valley' where a rendering/expression of a human gets too close to the real thing. There is a similar space in design where dissonance between what is possible and what is shown jars the senses.

Escher used this to great effect, creating scenes that you eyes initially perceived as 'normal' but began to sense a 'wrongness' or 'otherness' which as you looked more closely became apparent.

This would have worked better as an exercise if he had done an advertising type pitch for a tri-corder or what ever the Stargate equivalent is. But by using the next generation of a product that is already out there and known for its design, and adding in features which are currently science fiction (and physically impossible [1]) the designer causes the brain to go "urrrk?" and the whole thing collapses.

[1] For example, iPhones use a touch screen based on capacitance. Graphene is a conductor. A transparent graphene cover would shield the phone from being able to see any change in electric field (it would, at best, be diffuse across the conductor) and render the touch screen inoperable. Try this fun experiment, put a piece of paper over an iPad and watch your gestures go right "thru" it, put a piece of foil over your ipad, and note how you can do anything.

[mayank]

You may be taking this a bit too literally. I saw it as a designer's attempt to build marketing for a fictional device that is fun to imagine. If you've ever read science fiction, there's a certain joy in imagining new devices with capabilities that currently seem impossible. Without this sort of imagination, like the tricorder that you point out, a whole lot of contemporary engineers might have never found this inspiration.

Graphene isn't the best choice, but the point was to illustrate a currently unseen level of tensile strength, not as a blueprint for manufacture. Wouldn't that be a fun device to have?

We tend to ignore humor on HN, but this is one person's imagination at work, and I applaud that.

[ChuckMcM]

That is the nature of the uncanny valley, it is where the result is 'real enough' that one part of your brain classifies it as 'real' but it still has enough flaws that another part of your brain yells 'wrong'. That dissonance is uncomfortable.

Per my point about a tri-corder (a clearly fictional device) had he made his project "more clearly fictional" it would have avoided that uncanny valley. Basing it on the iPhone was not a good choice for me. A friend of mine was doing the computer graphics thing and initially all of his "models" were real actresses (he used stills from films to figure out the models) and it was hurting his portfolio because the 'goodness' of his modelling skills was being subverted by the 'wrongness' of the model (people recognized the actress and then saw things "wrong" in the models of them). I suspect that is the case here is well.

[1123581321]

We should be thankful for people who venture into uncanny valleys or any gap between safe-and-works the next generation technology. The work that finally crosses over the valley and is widely accepted is built on the work that didn't. We need those attempts and should encourage them.

[ChuckMcM]

I think you missed the point (but correct me if I'm wrong) the 'uncanny valley' is an artifact. It can be a positive (Escher's case) or a negative (any number of nearly perfect CGI scenes in films). In this designer's case it distracted me from his goal of presenting his skills as a designer. Had he done the same thing with a clearly non-actual product, my response would have focused on his skill at rendering a good looking device and compelling narrative, rather than thinking "wait, that isn't even possible, this is crazy" which I don't think was his intent given that this was a portfolio project. But I cannot speak for him, only to my reaction to it.

[millerm]

Thanks! Great response. Too many people arguing about nothing. I wish I had those skills. I'm a software engineer and am in no way a designer. I've mucked with so many design tools throughout my career and it just never really clicked. I can't draw so that might be a contributing factor.

Anyway, dude has some skills.

[gregsq]

It's a hodge podge of loose notions, and is pretty well techno babble, especially considering the materials hyperbole.

The screen however is very reminiscent of Atmel's XSense touch sensor, which I'm keen to play with[1].

The wolf in sheeps clothes special pleading I'll leave alone.

http://www.atmel.com/microsite/xsense/default.aspx

[na85]

It's so silly, though. Does this guy work/speak for Apple?

Is he an electrical engineer who can say for certain that the retina display can actually be manufactured in this edgy way?

No, he's just a guy with Adobe Illustrator.

So... why should I care what he thinks?

[ruchirablog]

Retina display huh? Retina is just another marketing word. Apple's retina display was surpassed by consumer technology more than a year ago. GS4 has a 441ppi screen while the Iphone 5 "Retina" display is just 326ppi.

[na85]

.... okay?

I'm not sure why you thought that I didn't understand that Retina is a marketing term, or why it's relevant to the point I was making.

[acterizk]

Perhaps because he has provided something to consider... - Edge touch with a new suite of gestures and gesture recognizers? - Side touch without obscuring the UI? - Sideways image projection via total internal reflection?

[woah]

I used to be in school for ID (switched to the web), and stuff like this annoyed me. You enter contests, really think through what can be done with current tech and what compromises can be made while still preserving the beauty of the design, and some asshole enters with something that is physically impossible.

[sbierwagen]

If this is an advertisement, then all it advertises is that he is incompetent at industrial design.

[arrrg]

Yeah, well he is not an industrial designer, doesn’t advertise himself as one and doesn’t sell his industrial design skills. Which he doesn’t have. Doesn’t even claim to have. Not even a little bit.

He is a fucking graphic designer and that’s exactly how you should judge this.

[lotyrin]

If he's not an industrial designer, then why is this an industrial design?

It's like you hand me an album of somebody scratching at a violin for 80 minutes and tell me that the point was the album art, he's "not a musician" and "not advertising himself as one", gosh.

Excuse us silly engineers that got distracted by the actual content of the damn link. Guess we didn't see the trees for the forest.

If the point is to have a portfolio piece as a visual designer, Make a brochure for something that already exists, or that is unique and doesn't exist. This is an uncanny valley of being unimaginative yet impossible and that distracts me (and many readers here) from everything else.

[arrrg]

Sometimes I hate stupid engineers. They are such assholes sometimes that just do not get it at all.

This fucking thing is some stupid fun. Nothing more. I’m not sure what this cynicism burning with the power of a million suns shit is all about. Why do people behave this way?

[dkuntz2]

He's a graphic designer? Than where's some original graphics? The entire thing looks like he made a tweak to an iPhone model, but didn't produce anything nearing original, and slightly modified the iPhone website.

None of the assets look original, and there doesn't actually seem to be any graphic design involved. The entire thing looks to be a showcase of non-existent industrial design skills.

Hows that for judging it based on graphic design?

[gurkendoktor]

I thought the app icons were pretty good.

[dkuntz2]

I honestly couldn't see a difference from the ones used in iOS 7...

[joesb]

If he is a fucking graphic designer, then he should stop talking about technical details like graphene, as if he knew how it worked.

[keypusher]

Perhaps he should stick to graphic design then, and stay away from industrial design.

[pallandt]

I can understand the need to re-design something in attempts to get exposure, I think someone attempted a Facebook redesign relatively recently on Behance and they got a ton of exposure from that, but this iPhone concept is completely impractical, starting with that screen curving over the borders (fragile, slippery, higher costs etc). I pretty much agree, if he was so committed to the idea of a 'better' iPhone, a little more research into industrial design wouldn't have hurt.

[danso]

I dunno, my negative reaction to it isn't that the designer is breaking the limits of feasible materials and mechanical engineering...it's that, given no such limits, the designer proceeds to create something not terribly original or interesting.

But to be honest, what really annoyed me was a designer who proposes a Retina2 type screen yet in his showcase work here, uses low resolution fonts. It's just hard to give any serious thought to a designer who overlooks one of the most critical -- yet trivially easy to do right -- aspects of a prototype design.

[Niten]

> I dunno, my negative reaction to it isn't that the designer is breaking the limits of feasible materials and mechanical engineering...it's that, given no such limits, the designer proceeds to create something not terribly original or interesting.

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

My secondary negative reaction to this, though, is that I think there's a certain conceit in putting this design together and calling it the "iPhone 6". Whatever merits these drawings might have, they could be showcased just as well by making up an arbitrary new name for it and calling it an evolution in smartphone design in general — rather than hijack Apple's branding just to draw attention.

[coldtea]

>the designer proceeds to create something not terribly original or interesting.

Yes, god forbit he also being somewhat pragmatic...

[wmeredith]

Yeah, as usual HN is taking itself a touch too seriously. This is the design equivalent of re-creating $nineties-video-game or whatever else in $modern-language. It's an exercise used to stretch a designer creative and technical legs.