I’ve been working with Leopard now, since its recent release. I find it fast, efficient, and filled with dozens of new improvements that are making my daily adventures on the Mac easier, and dare I say, more enjoyable. Who’d’a thunk it? But, if you will pardon the bad cross over phrase, I’ve also bitten my design tongue for some two weeks now.

It’s cheesy. The design is cheesy.

It’s kitschy, and kind of ugly. Do we really need a spiral galaxy and Star Trek moving stars to get the extended metaphor of “Time Machine”?

This literal depiction of iconogoraphic concepts is a sort of talking down to us, don’t you think? Up until this point, Apple’s design team has given us the benefit of the doubt about our aesthetic sensibility. They’ve figured we’d appreciate the demure, confident and clean compositions they profferred us. Well, no more. They have to show us, ‘Look, it’s a time machine. See? It’s a shelf! See?’

Until this point, the cheesiest thing we’d find on our OS X was Otto, the Automator icon, who has the distinction of being the only application icon who is a character. If Apple designers are looking for a direction to move in, let’s hope it’s not character-based iconography. Furry little tribble icons should be left for hackers and other non designers. I’m hoping that the next versions of the OS won’t insult us with this cheapness. I feel like shouting, in a digital age version of the old fairy tale, the Leopard has no taste!

Andrew Shalat