TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Matias Duarte:

“Across the board Google and Android is taking design a lot more seriously,” Matias says, and points out that Roboto is used throughout the system. “There’s this thing that’s happening right now in user interface design that I find kind of shackling. The faux wood paneling trend, and the airport lavatory signage trend.” He laughs when he says this and pulls up a slide on his computer, a split screen of an Atari 2600 and… airport lavatory signage. It’s an obvious dig at both Apple and Microsoft.

“The biggest problem behind these trends is not anything about the aesthetic quality about them, but rather the framework that they impose on everything else,” he opines. “Right now if you look at all of these applications that are designed in this real-objecty, faux wood paneling, faux brushed metal, faux jelly button kind of thing… if you step back and you really look at them, they look kind of juvenile. They’re not photorealistic, they’re illustrations.”

And worse than that, a lot of them don’t even make any sense. Why should Apple’s Find My Friends app UI be set in leather? There’s no real-world object it’s mimicking so it’s easy to understand (and even if there were, that isn’t reason enough to design a touch application the same way). It’s a look, and an ugly one.