Discussion
Do I know anyone (or, do *you* know anyone) who actually studied or would be interested in studying some classic Braun hi-fi hardware?
I have this hunch to validate that industrial and UX design fetishizes these as spartan and minimalistic, but that they might be filled with a lot more nuance and inconsistencies and “maximalism” than we assume, and we’re doing those designs disservice by not talking about these aspects.
@mwichary I think there is a lot to talk about here. He was famous for using the grid, sometimes to an extreme degree. But he also believed in strong visual hierarchy. So as you point out, the larger knobs separating things out, the colors on his calculator, etc.
These were all good examples of visual simplicity and structure. Even his tactical sense with his concave buttons or ridged sliders were way ahead his time. But there's also room to criticize because he frequently used tiny text with low contrast ratios and sometimes missed on colorblindness issues.
So I don't have the full story, but I believe this would be a really interesting conversation to have and to flesh out.
@scottjenson Yeah, once in a while I find some nice detail here and there that goes beyond “looks pretty.” I want to study this a bit more carefully.
Of course, there is also a bigger message: “you are not a Braun radio.” Most software is a lot more complex *and* lives next to other software. Even iPod’s had column view and iTunes doing the hard IA work, and they never got top billing that the click wheel did.
@mwichary Your point: "it's more than a radio now" is exactly right. The target has moved. The rules, while we can still appreciate them, aren't as simple to apply any more.
Here’s one example:
- the most important dial (tuning) is much larger and separated from others and close to the edge for easy grasp
- it’s also underneath the tuning indicator
- the radio/push buttons are shaped differently from dials to indicate an affordance
- the leftmost push button has two labels (on/off) to distinguish it from radio buttons next to it
It’s all minimalistic, but still quite a bit going on rather than 9 identical controls, which is what a Braun copycat would do.