“When you have a very good concept, you want to make sure you follow it all the way through and not be compromised in any way,” said Samsung’s senior designer Hong Yeo
Samsung has made some of the most popular and widely-loved mobile phones of all times. Solid pieces of hardware with innovative features and top of the line specs such as the original Galaxy, the Note 2 and even the underrated Ace have gone a long way in making Samsung the world leader in smartphone sales. The company, to a large extent, invented the phablet form factor with the original Note and was a prime mover in transitioning cellphone screens into the full HD era with the super AMOLED display technology.
However, for all its awesome technology and solid hardware, there is one area that Samsung phone’s have lagged behind in. An area that unfortunately, bitter rivals like Apple, excel at.
Looks.
The bottom line is that by and large, Samsung’s smartphone range has never turned heads with spectacular design cues or innovative form factors. LG did it with the original Flex, Sharp did it with the Aquos phones and Apple continues to make the best looking mobile devices on the planet. It seems that Samsung will have to be content with being the old faithful of the cell phone world: solid, well built and innovative but with rather homely looks.
Or so we all thought.
In the last few weeks some of us lucky journalists have had the opportunity to play with Samsung’s latest flagship phones, the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge and off the bat I must admit that the phones, the S6 in particular, is one of the prettiest phones I have ever seen, right up there with the like of Apple iPhone 6 and HTC One series. At the presentation, Samsung spoke about their new design philosophies with Samsung’s senior designer Hong Yeo telling us that that with the S6 line, the Korean company was rethinking the way they built phones.
After the presentation , I sat down with the amicable Yeo and we spoke about the design philosophies and directions at Samsung. Yeo, whose previous jobs have included stints as a lead designer in car marker Mclaren, revealed some of the steps he and his team took with making the S6 series.
Yeo Hong, Senior Designer, Samsung
According to Yeo, when he and his team approached the S6 project, “It was about creating a new experience. It wasn’t about looking at an object and saying that that’s our inspiration. We wanted to create a whole new immersive experience, a brand new design language.”
He explained that the immersion a user feels should begin the moment he picks up the device. He used the curved screen of the S6 Edge as an example, as to some people, the curved screens such as on the Note Edge was seen as a gimmick.
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He explained that: “The dual edge is something we have been working on for while now. We were just trying to find the right moment to put it into production. Its about the immersive experience, its almost 3D, it looks like its floating on top of your palm and you get this infinite screen edge feel.”
It’s about a concept he explained, as a designer, you had to stick to your original concept if you wanted to make a product that was focused and refined instead of one that was a hodgepodge of different ideas and philosophies. “When you have a very good concept, you want to make sure you follow it all the way through and not be compromised in any way. It was really important for us to start and end with the same language, the same design philosophy and the same theme,” he explained.
Yeo went on to explain that another key tenant of good tech design is communication. ” It’s really all about communication. When you have a device like the S6 its all about good communication. You cant make a product like this without communication with the engineers. It’s easy for us designers to create a model and say that this is what we like but without understanding what the engineers require, what good is a great design.”
The design process at Samsung, according to Yeo, involved the bigwigs telling him and his team to, “design your dream phone.” And design Yeo and his team did, for over a year the design staff focus on one core vision: A new experience. The challenge according to Yeo was that “in this day and age the problem is that phones are getting so thin that they are getting cold and industrial.”
Yeo makes a good point here. In the past, with phones being of a certain heft and size, designers had room to do what they want, to be as mad or as subdued as they like, giving us phones like the Nokia N-Gage or the Motorola Razr.
Now however, with this race for lightness and thinness, there is physically no room on a device on which to give it an artistic flair. After all, what can artist do when he has a kaleidoscope of colors to play with but only a tiny canvas.
Yeo does believe that with the S6, he and his team created a product to defy that style of thinking. “We wanted the warmth and the character and the depth within the phone to shine through. After all, this is a product that you use every day.”
Well, if the S6 I was holding in my hand was any indication, it would seem that Yeo might have actually pulled off his vision and Samsung might actually have a phone that looks as good on the outside as it does on the inside.
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