Not long back John Gruber posted a bit of thinking surrounding the Skeuomorphic UI Textures that Apple has started using and expanding on. This piece was a response to James Higgs criticism of the same. Both Gruber and Higgs are some of the most thoughtful and insightful journalists around, but both can prone to “inside the machine” thinking. By this I mean that some folk (myself included) see design decisions like this as obscure and unneeded. We are entirely right. leather trimmed textures are stoopid. Yes, stoopid. Two O’s and zero You’s.

We don’t have leather trimmed desk blotters. We don’t carry paper and leather day planners or contact lists (didn’t they used to be phone books?). Why should our software have something our “real world” doesn’t?

I am not the target of this design. Higgs and Gruber are not either. For the target audience I must look to my Father-In-Law. 64 years young. Handle bar mustache. 30+ year veteran of the Washington State Department of Corrections, prison guard to the non-con and outsider. Also a well educated man, smart by smarts standard. He reads more in a week than I do in a month.

He won’t touch a computer.

He is afraid of them. Not evil per say, just something he feels is beyond his abilities. He does own a desk blotter and a phone book. Both leather and paper products. He owns an iPad (1st gen) too. He just “gets” the iPad.  Ask him and he will tell you “anyone with half a bean in their noodle would make a computer as simple as an iPad”.

This Skeuomorphic trend (beautiful word, skeuomorphic) is about your Father-In-Law. It is about pushing further distinction between computers and Apple’s. Computers are hard, cruel and beyond the average man. Apple’s are something else entirely. Hell, the iPad is a physical object. You interact directly with it. Zero abstraction between intent and input. A book is much the same, as is a desk blotter.

The “wrapped in leather” look represents the reality that most of the world is still afraid of computing devices. Apple solved this problem without patronizing my Father-In-Law, and without alienating the tech-forward among us.