Ambience: the story behind Sailfish OS looks, part 1

As a part of our daunting task of creating a new mobile operating system, a visual story (theme) for the user interface was needed. What that usually meant in the past projects, was a ton of work containing:

• appearance for system UI (things that's part of the OS itself like home, lock etc.)
• appearance for each application UI building block (buttons, sliders and switches etc.)
• launcher icon style (how app icons stand out and represent the app itself)
• generic icon style (iconography used across the OS and apps) 
• creating graphical assets for actual implementation of system interface and application UI building blocks
• document how everything is implemented correctly (fonts, colors, geometry, transitions, interaction feedback etc..)
• continuously work on the documentation to fix mistakes, partial details and oversight
• add new features and update existing ones in your documentation

In most cases, one or two design teams are working on this huge pile of things. Team compositions are usually something like this:

• few chiefs for planning, leading, reviewing and managing the work
• some seniors for heading key areas
• a lot of designers to execute the design and deliver it to be implemented. Usually one per application. 

That easily means work for 15-25 people. At the time when we started, we had 2. We couldn't really continue the Nokia N9 style, due to both the amount of work required (see above) and it was still part of Nokia's brand. Same restriction applied for going for Android or iOS -copycat style. Too much to do. The amount of work needed to define, implement and maintain such an UI style, would've burnt us up in no time. Not to mention delivering something like that, understaffed, with a competitive quality. We went the opposite way, do as little design as possible.

The current Sailfish OS visual appearance was born out from the idea, that it's not the interface that matters, but what's around it; starting from the user. The more we could capture that, the less visual design would be required.

Let me open that up a bit more. The less a designer dictates how an interface looks like, the more one leaves room for personal expression. The less you try to control everything, the more the interface can become adaptive, and to resemble its owner.

We didn't want to control everything in Sailfish OS. That's not what personal is about. We wanted to make it adaptive, so that every device would look unique through portraying something that's dear to the user. As a designer, you cannot decide what that something is. You need to let go and trust the user.

And we did. We didn't end up defining everything like the competition. We almost completely eliminated documentation overhead (we're not shipping that, but a product), and instead worked with the actual software. We crafted a rule-set for adaptive interface, and continue improving and developing our own personal story.

The Ambience story.

In the next part, I'll dive deeper into how the visual style works (with example pictures).

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.