Matias Duarte, head of design at Android, is holding a Nexus 7 tablet, and he’s clearly proud of it. With its custom, high resolution screen—one that was selected not just for its pixel density but also its brightness and color gamut, says Duarte—it’s the perfect vehicle for showing off the graphics and animations that his team is building at Google.
The design for Android, Google’s mobile operating system, has become progressively more refined since the product’s earliest days, and it’s apparent from the moment you pick up a Nexus 7, which runs the latest version of Android, that Duarte’s design team is working very hard to make it look and feel as polished as possible. Part of that work is resolving the debate raging among design geeks about whether mobile operating systems, and computer interfaces in general, should be “skeumorphic,” which means that all the elements on a flat screen should look as much like real objects as possible, or “flat,” a design convention that sheds all pretenses that a screen should resemble the real world, and aims instead for austere simplicity.
The design for Android, Google’s mobile operating system, has become progressively more refined since the product’s earliest days, and it’s apparent from the moment you pick up a Nexus 7, which runs the latest version of Android, that Duarte’s design team is working very hard to make it look and feel as polished as possible. Part of that work is resolving the debate raging among design geeks about whether mobile operating systems, and computer interfaces in general, should be “skeumorphic,” which means that all the elements on a flat screen should look as much like real objects as possible, or “flat,” a design convention that sheds all pretenses that a screen should resemble the real world, and aims instead for austere simplicity.
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