This article is about one of the best designs made in recent times, but also gives credit to renovation work. We talk about the update that has made Microsoft on the Xbox system, which has given a minimalist touch, while improving technically and trim size significantly.
In the book of tastes, nothing written so I will not impose on anyone who likes this Xbox One S, nor do I deny that there may be influences on existing products, as it is virtually impossible to create a product without it looks like something that has already existed. This in the end is about evolution, there is no magic.
The weekend I was watching the comments that made one of its designers, Andrew Kim, giving birth to some ideas that have been taken into account to create a design that has all the earmarks of becoming an icon: clean and simple, care to maximum detail and easy to remember, and is in a product sold to the masses.
Influences are clearly in the Korean designers like Dieter Rams, which shares many pictures and buy many products. Also the Japanese Naoto Fukasawa. Nor can we forget that Apple and Jony Ive are in thought, before entering Microsoft – even now – acquired and analyzed all products from the point of view of design.
How to start working for Microsoft? For it was following a person work he did in 2012 in which he presented a complete redesign of the visual language of Microsoft, with failure analysis he considered committing. It took little enlist in its ranks.
Xbox Design Team is a team, not a person
I have long been following the work of Andrew in his blog, has all the earmarks of which will become someone important in the design world, especially with regard to gadgets, but the renewal of Xbox has made a team called Design Team Xbox, and he, Andrew Kim is possibly the last to arrive, with less than creative directors responsibilities.
It is selling the play as a work of one person, and we would like you to meet some names design team, something you can easily find out by giving you a walk through the Behance team – a site well known where artists share their work -. There we find the following names: Nicolas Denhez, YeongKyu Yoo, Bryan Sparks, Youngduk Song, Travis Hosler, and Andrew Kim.
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This really is the first project that Microsoft assigned responsibilities to Kim and tells on his personal website, formerly very alive, but visibly dead since it began to work more seriously for the Redmond company.
We note that before launching the Xbox One, the design team and investigating new ideas, quite different from what they had maintained over time. With the small S wanted to put in hand the customer something closer, more universal and away to what is a video game console product.
The first thing you have to do is look at Windows 10, based on the system had to simplify much the lines of the console, and if possible use a consistent design language. The simplification comes with a unibody construction body, which reduces external parts that can be seen from outside. The next thing was to create something much smaller, eliminating the power supply as far as possible.
The result already know, I personally love it, I do not see a console in time that is so achieved – possibly a model of the original PlayStation -. Typically in renovations console is to do something smaller, more efficient chips inside, but not as important as up to generate a new trend step. In fact, I think that Scorpio will be very similar to this, but they did so, it would be lost on a path to discover and leave one clearly like.
We must also assess the type of product before us, is not the same create something as complex as a Surface, a square box with almost no buttons, no moving parts.
Kim will continue to work in Microsoft after this, but now their responsibility is in the HoloLens team, along with two names mentioned above: Nicolas Denhez, the head of the industrial design of this department in Microsoft, and YeongKyu Yoo.