This time, Huawei made a work of art.
Mobile phone, as a scientific and technological product that integrates advanced technology, software algorithms and other multi-dimensional technical points, is the product of cold lines and technology integration in most people's cognition, how to give the mobile phone an artistic atmosphere and fashion temperament under the tough appearance? This is not completely achieved by technical solutions in ID design, but more importantly, the pursuit of aesthetics behind it and the expression of scientific and technological aesthetics are shown. Therefore, blending fashion sense in scientific and technological products is an exploration of an aesthetic sense of boundary, and it is also an aesthetic beauty that finds a balance in the collision. As the longest-running smart device, the use of mobile phones between hands and feet shows their personality and temperament all the time, so making mobile phones a work of art may be an important aesthetic appeal that everyone wants to have.
Back in the mobile phone industry, a product that can be called a work of art is the highest praise given by consumers.
It is often said that fashion is fleeting, but art is eternal. But in the hands of top designers, there is often a subtle vein between fashion and art itself. A haute couture garment often requires artisans to spend months making it, from embroidery to beading, and every detail of the details needs to be carefully polished and deduced.
In the past, the design of direct-screen mobile phones has gradually homogenized, and designers are more often like dancing in shackles, limited by the "kidnapping" of industry popularity and space design. With the emergence of folding screen mobile phones, breaking the shackles, setting off a smart phone ideological change from product form and user cognition, but also allowing more excellent designers to enter a field full of creativity.
There has never been a mobile phone category that can be as close to the field of fashion and art as the vertical folding screen mobile phone, and its form is not like a mobile phone, but more like a jewelry box, business card holder, makeup box and other decorations, opening and closing, switching scene attributes at will.
On December 23, Huawei launched the first vertical folding screen mobile phone Huawei P50 Pocket, often referred to as the Huawei P50 "treasure box". Small, delicate, sparkling... These most intuitive word descriptions seem to let everyone see that this is the innate appearance of folding screen mobile phones.
A piece of 0.5mm glass is more real
Huawei P50 treasure box at the beginning of the project, has been clear the use of glass as the product shell: because the folding is small enough, like an ornament, it is not as good as making the product into a fusion of beauty and feel of the artwork, compared to other materials, the transparency of glass is more simple and advanced. Therefore, Huawei P50 treasure box ID designers want to achieve a kind of streamer overflow that refracts light through the path to attach to the back panel of the phone, and let people sink in the change of light and shadow at the moment of looking at it.
Often the idea is a beautiful "utopia", but the reality is a difficult "shura field". Trying to achieve the effect of light flow on the glass back of the mobile phone was almost impossible to achieve in the first edition of the plan at that time. And the thickness of the back shell glass of the mobile phone is only 0.5mm, that is, the thickness of five sheets of paper, and the light will not have any nostalgia when passing through, let alone let it swim on the 0.5mm glass.
At first, the designers of the Huawei P50 treasure box locked in the design inspiration at the Louvre Glass Pyramid, one of the most famous glass artworks in the world. Its exquisite structure and dazzling texture under the illumination of the light make it famous all over the world.
At that time, there were two problems that plagued the designer I.M. Pei's vision of a glass pyramid: One was that the glass should be transparent enough, otherwise the glass itself would produce color due to refraction effects. Second, in the case of transparency, the reflection should be strong enough. Pei solved this problem well through a German military glass manufacturing plant.
At the same time, the Louvre Glass Pyramid can solve this problem by setting up the lights and the surrounding set, but mobile phones, unlike architectural works, can find solutions in the environment or achieve effects through auxiliary props, and this inspiration is quickly denied.
In physics class, we learned the principles of refraction, reflection, and scattering of light, and the beautiful light art we can see in some buildings or crafts is because their glass space is very sufficient, so that light can be fully moved. Simply put, glass is "thick" enough to cut more "faces" to form enough reflections.
Then cutting more surfaces on this piece of glass of only 0.5mm may be able to control the refraction of light. The designers of the Huawei P50 treasure box have proposed different ideas.
At the same time as this idea, a designer saw his own drinking cup, although the glass wall is very thin, but the perception is also a flow of light and shadow, associated with a traditional handicraft called "Edo cutter", which seems to bring the possibility of continuing to go on for this plan.
Originated in Edo, Japan in 1834, "cutter" is a craft in which artisans use emery wheels to cut and grind delicate patterns on thin glass surfaces. The cutting part of the Edo cut product is dazzling due to the refraction effect of light, and it also makes an ordinary glass shine.
The most amazing thing is that the graphics produced in the Edo cutter process are not drafted, and they are all based on ingenuity. It can be said that this craft has very high requirements for the craftsmanship of craftsmen.
Huawei designers planned to control the robotic arm through computer programming and hold the CNC (numerical control machine tool) knife to cut, but when they tried hundreds of times, because the robotic arm is not as tactile and elastic as the hand, and there is no focus and flexible flexibility of the artist, so many of them are broken, and the good products are almost non-existent. The proposal was ultimately rejected because it could not move forward.
At a time when we are at a loss, the answer is often hidden in the details of daily life, and the diamond we see most often has become the key to breaking the game.
The luster of the diamond's different folds, its folded design, will let the light travel back and forth between the folds.
Inspired by this, Huawei designers thought: Since it is not possible to cut on such a thin glass, can we use other methods to make such a folded feeling, and we can have the same effect?
The designer inadvertently superimposed two pieces of embossed glass, and the sense of light and shadow produced immediately achieved the effect that the designers expected. So the industrial-level attempt was officially started.
For more than seven months, Huawei designers spent almost all of their time in glass factories. In this process, a large number of patents were also born, such as how to press out the double-sided grain on the glass, how to control the cutting surface to the diamond-like facet, what kind of coating to match the glass, in order to achieve the same sense of transparency as the Louvre and so on.
At this stage, the most appropriate annotation can only be found in the test after test. In the end, the Back Layer of the Huawei P50 Treasure Box Crystal Diamond Version was 0.5 mm thick glass, and a double-sided texture was made on the upper and lower sides, and the upper and lower layers of the double-sided texture were staggered, forming an effect of about 1,000 diamond-shaped squares from the naked eye, and the double-sided stereoscopic micro-carving process gradually matured under such continuous attempts.
After about two years of experience, the burst of inspiration and countless experiments are the only way for a work of art to be born, and it is with these that the Huawei P50 treasure box is enough to be called a "work of art". The process of finding the answer is also the process of designers injecting soul into the Huawei P50 treasure box.
A change of gilded flames
So with such a stunning cutting technique, what color should be used to match it to highlight the texture? Huawei designers have been having a headache for more than a month.
Until the emergence of a video of a ballet dancer dancing, the dancers' beautiful dancing posture and smart costumes gave people a sense of the future. With the help of the designers of the Huawei French Research Institute, the Huawei P50 treasure box found the author of the ballerina's agile design, Iris Van Herpen.
Iris van Herpen is a Dutch female fashion designer known in the fashion design world for new materials such as glass lenses, metal tubes, eco-friendly materials, and the use of 3D printing technology. She also founded the eponymous fashion label Iris van Herpen, a edgy idea and a tense, creative expression that made it a hit.
Iris Van Herpen's "Source of Rebirth" artwork uses sustainable and eco-friendly materials such as recycled plastics as fashion ingredients
The ballet film that Huawei designers saw was iris van Herpen's short film Bionics with the Dutch National Ballet. The translucent dance skirt worn by the dancers is to use 3D printing technology to make the pleated fabric into a translucent eugen yarn, so that the stripes of technology and the dancer's limbs are combined, and the clothes really fit the rhythm of the body to swing.
Iris Van Herpen once mentioned: Constantly seeking new forms, at the intersection of art and science, humanization and high technology, artificial and organic, new forms can be found. Huawei's designers quickly found resonance with Iris Van Herpen's design philosophy — a vein of convergence between technology and art under the symbiosis of all things.
When closing his eyes and recalling the dancers' dancing and the costumes swaying with them, Huawei designers' minds seemed to have a fluttering spark dancing in the dark, warm tones with changes in spark light and shadow, so the veins were transformed into textures on the clothing, and the black dye became a high-grade "gold" under the flames.
For huawei P series, the choice of color must achieve a high degree of unity in psychology, vision, and perception. For example, the P40 series is called the fairy color of frost silver, in the metallic texture, low-key by not losing the stability of the formation of a color synaesthesia, physiologically awaken the frost scene; and as in the P30 series, picking tea card salt lake magical "sky realm" natural phenomenon, the color of natural gifts moved to the back of the phone, each P series release, its color matching design will inevitably become a classic case of the annual explosive color, and this time in the Huawei P50 treasure box gilded gold expectation is expected to once again achieve the color aesthetics of the industry leading trend.
The artistic background under science and technology, the innovative pursuit above the art
Opening the Huawei P50 treasure box, under the explicit density of science and technology, we see that Huawei designers are more sincere about inspiration, a high standard of aesthetic and artistic quality, and a transformation from technology to art.
On top of art, the pursuit of technological innovation is still the deepest DNA engraved in Huawei's P series products, although huawei P50 treasure box and Mate X series are the same folding form, but the temperament and technical breakthrough ideas shown are still different. Using technology to give beauty to products is the core value of the "P" series, in the eyes of many Huawei old users, Huawei P series is a collection of aesthetic flagships and image pioneers, so how should the innovative pursuit of Huawei P50 treasure box on top of art break itself?
First of all, folding screen as a new species in the form of mobile phones, its technical difficulty and is increasing exponentially, just structural design and material technology breakthroughs, the required technical personnel, capital investment is a considerable series of numbers. However, Huawei is the confident catfish in the entire folding screen mobile phone industry chain, activating the industry at the same time, so that the narrow industry gate of the folding screen has become a track for manufacturers to step up the layout. In Huawei's view, innovation is not only reflected in its own product technology, but also in the industry-driven. It is also the sufficient accumulation and grasp of the industrial chain that allows designers to have enough confidence to turn experiments into reality. It all complements each other, bringing art and technology together perfectly.
Another key word in the P series is smart photography.
The Huawei P50 treasure box is based on the continuation of Huawei's imaging technologies such as the primary color engine and computational optics, and is also equipped with the industry's first hyperspectral imaging system. The biggest effect of this system is to capture detailed information in imaging, providing clearer and more accurate image restoration capabilities, as well as stronger scene environment perception, which can identify scenes and bring the best shooting experience.
At the same time, the benefit of the folding screen form is that it can be filmed through the external screen preview with the rear camera. Compared with the front camera, better hardware brings better picture quality and better natural bokeh effect, under the blessing of the new rear selfie portrait algorithm, this time Huawei P50 treasure box will have a qualitative upgrade in the portrait selfie.
With the aesthetic concept of symbiosis, the craftsmanship of perfection, the new image system, and the technologically advanced folding form, the Huawei P50 treasure box is releasing its own innovative vitality and artistic expression from the inside out.
The reason why a work of art has a long and vivid vitality is not that it changes its price over time, but because of the added value it generates in the process of creation.
Huawei P50 treasure box is such a work of art, the art into the treasure box, the polish into the pocket.