“[Steve would have] these extensive reviews of materials just to see what would look best on the calendar or bookshelf apps,” recalls Nitin Ganatra, Apple’s former director of engineering for iOS applications. “It would be one image after another of leather and wood, and I remember the HI guys having a bad day every so often because textures that they worked so hard to create would come up, and Steve would just make a blech noise for every single one that went by.”

It’s a classic example of Jobsian perfection. But it’s more than just a fascinating anecdote. The story shows not only how much time Apple dedicated to perfecting its much-maligned visuals, but also how much has changed since Jobs passed away and his protégé Scott Forstall, the executive said to be most carrying on the torch of skeuomorphism after his death, was reportedly fired.

Now, the latest iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 7 has finally been distanced from this visual skeuomorphism, a term often used (or co-opted) to describe the gaudy, three-dimensional renderings in Apple’s software, from its reflective glass to its faux-leather stitching. But despite moving toward a flatter design in iOS 7, skeuomorphism still lives on in the software, as a slew of insiders told me during Fast Company‘s recent oral history of design at Apple. But it’s not manifested in the form of silly textures. Rather, Apple’s approach to skeuomorphism has evolved to bring more subtle, life-like physics to the OS, laying the foundation for a more harmonious and seamless meld of hardware and software.





Interestingly, this approach to skeuomorphism is not new; it actually gets back to the core of what Apple aimed to accomplish when it first began developing the iPhone. The concept of skeuomorphism didn’t just come up regarding the look of the user interface. “A lot of the [talk of skeuomorphism] came in around the discussion of gestures,” recalls Ganatra. “There was a lot of thought about natural metaphors. It started with your hand. If your finger is swiping back and forth, and you’re moving the view accordingly, that in some ways is mimicking [real-life interactions with] physical objects.” In other words, in order to educate users on how touch-screen interactions would work, the company had to develop intuitive gestures that translated on screen, such as pinching to zoom in on your pictures, or the inertial scrolling that allows you to glide naturally through your music library with the flick of a finger.

Apple’s approach to skeuomorphism has evolved to bring more subtle, life-like physics to the OS.

“It was definitely understood that as much as you could tie things to the physical world and give people clues in the digital presentation of how these things operate, they’ll be able to manipulate them more successfully,” Ganatra explains. “I don’t remember a feeling of, ‘Oh boy, here we go again, mimicking physical objects.’ It was seen as a positive thing.”

In the years after the iPhone came out, however, Apple drifted from that core idea toward a more traditional and visual approach to skeuomorphic design. These principles can be traced back to the desktop metaphors employed in early versions of Mac OS and Windows, when designers used, say, virtual rolodexes to help users understand how to navigate through their contacts. The aim was to create an aesthetic experience that was immediately familiar to the user–which translated to real-life visual metaphors: the iCal app, for instance, was designed to look like a leather office calendar, while the Podcasts app was modeled after a reel-to-reel tape player. This trend is best epitomized by Game Center, a social gaming app for the iPhone that took Jobs’s preference for visual metaphors to garish new extremes. With its green felt and lacquered wood, it had all the classiness of a Trump casino. Critics objected to this direction. “These [visual] metaphors that were, in the early days of the computing revolution, relevant to assisting people in bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds, are no longer necessary,” Gadi Amit, the founder of NewDealDesign, once told me. “Our culture has changed. We don’t need translation of the digital medium in mechanical real-life terms. It’s an old-fashioned paradigm.”