How to design timeless aesthetics: the iMac
How many tech products can you think of that was designed almost 10 years ago, haven't gone through a major design iteration and still manages to have a wider appeal than any of its competitors? Such is the story of iMac. It's astounding that the aesthetics outside remained unchanged, while the technology inside took leaps.
iMac still looks the part for the technology it packs. And I t hink it won't look dated even ten years from now. Some would scoff at this and people like to demand change for the sake of it.
But I think the designers at Apple achieved this timeless-ness to iMac by making sure the design doesn't point to any of the design idiosyncrasies of a trend or an era. Where achieving this, perhaps, gets most difficult, is when avoiding the technological limitations of an era that washes over the design aesthetics in all sorts of obvious ways. But this is exactly what the Apple designers achieved with the iMac.
Technology that is limited today, won't be tomorrow. The iMac achieved this timelessness by never showing these limitations.
It's not Bezels, it's a frame.
Let’s start with Bezels. Most displays from early-to-mid 2010s are characterized by quarter-inch plastic bezels surrounding the display. Companies stood by these bezels yawning, living within the limitations. But the iMac bezels are not plastic bezels. The iMac bezels, covered in glass, takes on the same texture as your screen, looking the part as a frame to your digital world.
The thickness has a "utilitarian" visual purpose too. It keeps the rounded edge of the device far apart from the sharp corner edge of the screen. Too thin, hence too close and they will start to visually contradict each other.
To go even further, I would argue that while using the device, the display must feel bezel-less. And I think that's essentially what iMac achieves. Mitch Robertson of Superframe calls having an edge-to-edge glass over a picture: the "frameless" frame. He describes it as creating an empty space around a picture to draw attention and keep it in the center.
Then came the sunflowers.
iMac has no thickness or weight.
The sunflower inspired Jony Ive and Steve Jobs to keep the iMac floating in the air and make it seem weightless.
Then they go a step further to visually eliminate the bulky technology with some clever design. The bulk of a device is signaled by how thick it’s edges are. But the iMac, instead of being made to look bulky, is made into an “interesting” shape that tapers into zero-thickness at the edges. This is a similar technique that many smartphones today use and makes the entire device look much thinner than it actually is.
The iMac's main housing is not a thick computer, but an interesting shape that aesthetically doesn't remind you of the bulky technology inside.
Without the bottom bar, iMac would lose it's identity.
Let's talk about the chin: the aluminum-metal plate that carries the Apple logo.
Some seem to think that the bezels must be removed, but they're missing the point. They are mostly reviewers who are on a bezel-hunt and are shooting down any device with a bezel as "objectively" looking archaic. But the bezel-outdated-association is a game that the consumers don't play. They see the device as a whole and the iMac Bezels, Chin and Stand comes together to symbolize a portal to your pixorama.
If you remove the chin, it would look like any display. But the iMac is a computer. It must identify itself as one. And the Apple Logo feels right at home on this design. On other displays or all-in-one PCs, the logo is plastered over the lower bezel and screams blatant-branding, not identifying. People and Apple don't like this and you can see that Apple’s XDR display doesn’t have any branding on the front.
The Chin, Bezels and Stand are proportionate in size to each other. Argued from a designer’s perspective, there’s a visual design language created and followed by all the elements in any product and dictates things like the size of one element with respect to another. Removing bezels makes me worried about what will happen to the chin as any size for it now won't make any obvious sense or in coherence with some language. The chin will probably end up looking like an Apple-label plastered over the iMac. Without the chin, the iMac would lose it's identify.
Choosing timeless materials, not "premium".
There's a language that must be shared by all the elements in a product. iMac's choice of materials places the language in the timelessness of nature, instead of the timeliness of cultural perception. Glass and Aluminum imprints as metals of nature rather than the artifice of plastic cases. Some would attribute it to looking premium, but a material can be expensive and exclusive today but it might not be tomorrow. (There was a time when Aluminum was more expensive than gold.)
Glass and Aluminum may be said to signal expensive and luxurious and hence, it must obviously look inferior when replaced with gold, or hell even leather, but that's never has been the case. Hence, I think it is better understood when put on the spectrum of time, instead of status. Apple chose to exit this game and pick natural-materials to dress up the digital world. That said Apple does play the game of looking expensive, but as a by-product to it's ultimate aim of timelessness.
Minimalism is not less stuff. It's about being timeless.
Apple managed to hide all of the obvious and unobvious technological limitations, and make it clean and simple. Most would comment that "it is all so minimal" without realizing that minimalism is about timelessness, first & foremost, and not simplicity. The designers at Apple achieve iMac's timelessness by making it as simple as possible, but not simpler to ensure the iMac gets a unique identity. Even if we decide to not need all-in-one PCs anymore, iMac will still hold a distinctly unique symbol in our shared history.
This certainly has been the prowess of Apple’s design over the years when they often achieve timelessness in our shared memory by giving their devices “a look”. They did it with the stems on the AirPods, the square display on the Watch, the black (keyboard) and silver (aluminium body) color pair on the MacBook.
Outro
Today, I want to strike out the narrative that refers to minimalism as some clever trick for "less is more." It is a chase for timeless-ness by eliminating all tethers to the zeitgeist and nothing more. It is not who can eliminate-the-most-stuff race to the bottom. In effect, by eliminating any more stuff from iMac's current design, it will lose its identity.
Minimalism is a loaded term these days. For a while there, we took it to such an extreme, we're starting to see a backlash. However, the true essence of minimalism is timeless.
- Tobias Van Schneider
(designed Spotify, and Founded Semplice and Carbonmade)
Apple is the poster boy of Minimalism, and as Van Schneider noted, “Our products and interfaces echo Apple’s.” Whether timeless designs make for more beautiful designs is a conversation for another day, but the iMac has survived 10 years without a design change, and I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years later we look at iMac and feel everything is where it is supposed to be.
At most, I predict it’ll change at most to this.
