Luxurious stitched leather. A fine wood grain you can almost feel. An old-fashioned microphone. If you use Apple devices, expect to encounter less of this kind of thing decorating your apps and operating system.

After Monday's big executive shakeup at the company, the interface design principles employed in the company's software is expected to take a new, more modernist turn. Progress is good, but Apple runs the risk of watering down some of the familiar appeal that makes their devices so easy to learn and use. 

Skewering Skeuomorphism

This design tactic, known as skeuomorphism, mimics familiar, real-world textures and objects in a digital interface. It's something for which Apple has become known - and sometimes ridiculed - for using in its apps and operating systems. The approach has long been championed by Scott Forstall, who was shown the door earlier this week. Forstall shared his affinity for these faux-analog details with Steve Jobs, whose death a year ago paved the way for the kind of sweeping changes recently undertaken by his successor, Tim Cook. 

Taking charge of the Human Interface group at Apple will be Jony Ive, the legendary hardware designer. Pretty much all of the company's most successful hardware products - the iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro and iPod Touch, to name a few - came out of Ive's secret design lab in Cupertino. It's that type of minimal, no-frills design that many expect to see more of in OS X and iOS now that Ive is in charge. 

That means things like the stitched leather across the top of iCal and the faux notebook paper in Reminders could find their way out of OS X and iOS. Don't expect elements like this to be wiped out with the next OS upgrade, though. Apple's operating systems are used extensively by millions of people who have grown accustomed to how they look and work. If the skeuomorphic stuff is going to get axed, expect Ive and team to start by easout out the subtle details - the linen texture in the background of Notification Center, for example - replacing them one-by-one with cleaner designs that don't attempt to mimic things in the physical world. 

Why Skeuomorphism Isn't All Bad

There's been a bit of a backlash against skeuomorphic design elements lately, both within Apple and among designers generally. Designer Wells Riley has called it "the easy way out," charging that skeuomorphism 'helps people misunderstand the capabilities and limitations of digital products." Fast Company's Thomas Hobbs urges designers to move beyond the "silly" trend. 

There's certainly a case to be made that this type of thing should be used sparingly. Yet, at the same time, it's easy to see how weaving familiar-looking textures and objects into digital designs can help make new ways of doing things more palatable, especially to new users. 

"Skeuomorphism is about communicating and reinforcing feelings – getting an application to become a memorable experience, not just a tool," writes Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin, an interface designer at Spotify. "It’s about communicating the purpose of a UI, not only the functions it enables."

Skeuomorphism Has A Long History

Computers have borrowed visual conventions from the analog world for a long time. Since the dawn of personal computing, we have navigated through icons that mimic file folders, occasionally stuffing miniature pieces of paper into what looks like a tiny trash can. And yes, the calendar on my MacBook and iPad bears a resemblance to an actual, physical calendar.

In many cases, digital design that mimics analog artifacts can help foster a certain level of comfortable familiarity among consumers, who are spending more and more of their waking hours staring into screens. Maybe we actually need these familiar-looking things to be comfortable with embedding these devices this deeply into our lives.  

iPhones and iPads comprise the vast majority of revenue for what has become the most valuable company on the planet. They're clearly doing something right. It's hard to see how stripping out these vestiges of the physical world could help Apple do even better.

Yet Amazon has done quite well with its Kindle e-readers, which don't go quite as far as Apple's iBooks in mimicking paper books. And Microosft is drawing critical praise for the clean design of its Windows 8 interface, which makes few concessions to the past or the physical world. (It remains to be see how actual users will embrace the approach, however.)

The future may not lie squarely at either end of this debate. Perhaps it's somewhere in the middle, where digital interfaces borrow subtly from the real world, but continue to innovate and feely abandon skeuomorphs when they get in the way. 

At Apple, the visual language of iOS and OS X will continue to merge, possibly more rapidly than it already was. It seems clear that over time, it will have fewer accents of wood grain, stitched leather and fake glass. Will that make any difference? We're about to find out. 

Lead image of Jony Ive from Apple promotional video.

There's huge news coming out of Apple on Monday, as two top execs are leaving the company, including one, Scott Forstall, who some had viewed as a potential future CEO of Apple. Forstall will stay on as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook through the end of the year but then he's gone, Apple announced. Also leaving is John Browett, who joined as head of Apple's retail operation only ten months ago, in January 2012.

What's going on? Apple of course won't say. But Cook is a notoriously tough boss, the kind who doesn't waste time getting rid of problems. 

Problem Children?

And make no mistake, both Forstall and Browett were problems.

Browett simply was a terrible fit. He joined from Dixons, a British consumer electronics retailer, where he'd been CEO. In August rumors started spreading that Apple was planning to cut retail employees' hours in order to boost profits. It was a dumb move, one that Apple quickly undid, with a spokesperson telling Dow Jones that "Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are being reversed." 

And, right then, the countdown on Browett began.

As for Forstall, maybe he just figured out he is not going to become CEO, and so has bailed. Or maybe, as analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies sees it, Cook is making it a priority to have greater integration between iOS and OS X, and "Forstall probably did not fit into this new leadership vision."

Nevertheless, Forstall's departure comes as a shock. Only a year ago Businessweek raved about him in a piece titled, "Scott Forstall, the Sorcerer's Apprentice at Apple."

That article called Forstall a "mini-Steve" (meaning he's like Steve Jobs) but also pointed out that Forstall is such a nightmare to work with that "a number of high-ranking executives have left the company because they found Forstall so difficult."

Not just a little bit difficult. Businessweek reported that other top execs hated Forstall so much "that they avoid meetings with him unless Tim Cook is present." 

The two top adversaries? Head of design Jony Ive and head of hardware engineering Bob Mansfield - both of whom, curiously enough, are getting bigger roles in the wake of today's management shakeup.

So maybe the explanation is just that Ive and Mansfield got Forstall voted off the island.

Forstall Was A Force

Difficult or no, Forstall had been close to Jobs (he worked at NeXT with Jobs and joined Apple when Jobs returned in 1997) and he was considered a rock star. He oversaw development of Apple's iOS software, arguably the most important division of the company.

But lately Forstall took some heat for the maps fiasco in iOS 6. In the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system Apple dropped Google maps for a homegrown alternative that turned out to be not ready for prime time. Forstall got the blame for it, in articles like "Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?" by Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune, who pointed out that Forstall had also been responsible for Siri, the voice assistant that doesn't actually work right. Forstall also got blasted by Business Insider and by Jean-Louis Gassee, a former Apple executive and close Apple observer who writes an influential weekly column. 

A paranoid person might suspect that someone inside Apple had it in for Forstall, and was trying to drive him out.

Apple Infighting

Then just this month Fast Company's design correspondent, Austin Carr, reported on a civil war brewing inside Apple over its use of skeumorphic design, an approach in which designers create software that looks like real objects in the physical world - a book application looks like a real wooden bookshelf, a calendar app comes decorated with a fake leather binder, and so forth.

According to Carr, Forstall likes skeuomorphism, and kept pushing for more of it, while Jony Ive, the head of design, hated it.

Neither of these things, on their own, were probably enough to get Forstall pushed out, but when you've got a guy who is obnoxious to everyone around him, and then he slips up a bit, well, this is what happens.

Note that Apple's press release announcing the changes points out that, "Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design.

Get that? All user interface stuff, on all products.

Note also in the press release that Bob Mansfield suddenly is returning to an operational role and "will lead a new group, Technologies, which combines all of Apple's wireless teams across the company."

That's funny because just last June, Mansfield, who used to run hardware engineering, announced plans to retire. But then, in August, Apple said Mansfield would stick around, working on "future projects."

Earlier this month Businessweek reported that Cook had lured Mansfield back by offering him "an exorbitant package of cash and stock worth around $2 million a month." The article also quoted a former Apple employee, Bret Halle, who said "there's more organizational infighting than is healthy," and that "it needs to be brought into check."

So now Forstall is out, and Mansfield, who supposedly can't stand Forstall, is back. Coincidence? 

Earlier this year, in a book titled "Inside Apple," Fortune reporter Adam Lashinsky dubbed Forstall "Apple's CEO-in-waiting." 

Well... not anymore.

Time Cook image from Apple video feed. Scott Forstall image by Matt Yohe.