The Honor Magic6 series is a very special existence in the flagship series of mainstream mobile phone brands, whether it is Huawei Mate or Pura, Xiaomi digital series, or vivo X series, OPPO Find series, there is almost only one design theme for each generation of flagship series, at most, Xiaomi's Ultra line is launched independently in the name of digital series. But this generation of the Honor Magic6 series, 4 models, but 3 design themes appeared.
The law of large-scale industrial manufactured products is that the fewer SKUs, the lower the supply chain management and production costs, 4 models, 3 designs, no matter how you look at it, it is a bit anti-mainstream, but for Honor, there is a major issue that needs to be realized through design.
Glory independence, need to design independence
For a long time, the top three smartphone shipments have affected the design style orientation of the entire industry.
The three companies are Samsung, Apple, and Huawei.
On flagships, most of the design styles we see can be classified into these three categories: Samsung style, Apple style and Huawei style.
Samsung S24 Ultra
The "button-type" layout of the camera module of Samsung's flagship mobile phone is now mainly used by Samsung itself, and Samsung's once staunch ally: Meizu.
The processing of Xiaomi's digital series (excluding Ultra) back camera module in recent years, as well as the changes in the right angle of the bezel and the straight screen, are obviously converging with the iPhone.
Xiaomi 13 series
For a long time, putting a "mahjong block" on the back was a universal solution, whether it was a "second cake", "three tubes" or a "bath bomb", it was the same solution, and most Android phones at that time adopted this solution.
As for the flagship phones of OPPO and vivo, they have also changed to the design style of "round sky and place" in the past two years, with a huge round camera module on the back in the center, and the main model supplemented by plain leather material to highlight the texture of the body and shooting capabilities.
华为 Mate 60 Pro
And the one who carries this style forward is naturally the Huawei Mate series.
Note that there is no discussion of imitation here, for example, the prominent element of the "round sky" design style is the center and raised super large round camera module, which is not the first of its kind to Huawei, and can be traced back to the Nokia Lumia 1020, when people called this module "Oreo".
The discussion here is about which brand has more influence on consumers and more influence on the industry, and thus can drive the industry to shift in design and aesthetics.
For example, it is customary to think that Apple has a great pursuit of design, but in the generation of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, consumers' demand for large screens far exceeds the resistance to the "injection tapes" behind it, so Apple has the confidence to launch this generation of iPhones with unspeakably good-looking designs.
But at that time, the one-piece metal body was quite advanced, so we saw the inheritance and improvement of the Meizu PRO 6 and the hammer smartisan T2 mobile phone, cutting off two injection molding belts and eliminating the injection molding breakpoint of the metal middle frame.
iPhone 15 Pro
To be precise, both Apple and Samsung follow the principle of "form follows function", without more aesthetic masks on the camera module, and without considering too much about the relationship between the camera module and the back of the fuselage, so you can see the phenomenon that the buttons are swinging more and more, and the box is crossing the center line.
Brands with a focus on sales in China tend to tell more design stories, incorporate more design concepts, and link mobile phones to personal aesthetics, as well as personal life and work.
Just like the sense of stability brought by "the sky is round and the place is round", the light luxury brought by the plain leather material is more in line with the needs of business people.
In this subtle trend of design convergence, in the process of finding the optimal solution for design and public recognition, it is actually extremely difficult to innovate and be accepted by the public.
After Honor became independent at the end of 2020, it experienced a very long trough, especially in the first half of 2021, with monthly shipments often only a few hundred thousand units.
After solving the supply chain problem, Glory quickly pulled up shipments, stabilized in the top five positions in China, and often served as the first or second quarterly shipments.
It was also after independence that the main task of Glory at the competitive level changed.
When I was in the Huawei system before, Honor's main task was to take online channels, lay out the low-end, and compete with Xiaomi, so for a long time, there was a lot of public opinion confrontation between Xiaomi and Redmi and the Honor brand.
But in the past two years, Honor has spoken out to the outside world, never mentioning Xiaomi and Redmi, but has replaced the benchmarks with Apple and Samsung, and even Huawei has been listed as a direct competitor.
However, in the two generations of products after the independence of the Honor brand, we still see the convergence with Huawei's design in design.
荣耀 Magic3 Pro
For example, the Honor 50 series is very similar to the Huawei P50 series in terms of camera module processing, both of which use a "double ring" design, while the Magic3 series and Magic4 series are quite similar to the style of the Huawei Mate40 series.
It is not difficult to understand that "independence" is not only a state, but also a process. Honor, which has just come out of Huawei's system, has not immediately forgotten each other with Huawei in the public perception, and under this cognitive inertia, the similarity between the two is actually conducive to Honor's performance on the consumer side.
In addition, there are also two sentences widely circulated within Honor: "Never forget that you used to be a Huawei person" and "Always remember that you are no longer a Huawei person".
However, cognitive inertia will always disappear one day, and the independence of glory, in addition to the independence of the brand, the independence of operation, the independence of the supply chain, should also include the independence of design.
荣耀 Magic6 Pro
We can look at this independence from another side.
Xiaomi,It is an opponent that all domestic consumer brands cannot ignore,Whether it is a mobile phone、TV or a car,Benchmarking Xiaomi,Binding Xiaomi,It is a shortcut to gain public opinion heat and attention,In short,Xiaomi comes with traffic,Benchmarking Xiaomi can share traffic。
Before OnePlus and Zeekr, the brand that fought hand-to-hand with Xiaomi was Glory.
But after Glory became independent, it almost no longer mentioned Xiaomi, assuming that its opponents were Apple, Samsung and Huawei.
As mentioned earlier, these three happen to be the three brands that have the greatest influence on mobile phone design, so if Honor is really as said, with these three as opponents, then the design must also jump out of the trap of these three.
Points, lines, and faces
Summing up the style of current mobile phone design, there is nothing to say about the front, it is nothing more than the choice of curved screen and straight screen, how narrow the bezel can be, whether the four sides can be of equal width, whether the front glass is used 2.5D or 3D glass, etc.
The contradiction in the front design of the mobile phone was once the pursuit of a high screen-to-body ratio, and the contradiction between the biometric hardware that must occupy the front space, such as the fingerprint recognition module, the 3D structured light facial recognition module, and the front camera. As a result, we saw solutions such as under-display fingerprint, dynamic island, under-display camera and micro-hole camera.
The back of the phone leaves more room for the design to play, revolving around the three elements of CMF, so we see an endless stream of new colors, metal, glass, plain leather, bamboo, wood, plastic and other materials blooming, as well as AG glass, anodized aluminum, flash sand, microcrystalline ceramics and other specific material processing processes.
But the more you go, the main contradiction in the back design becomes the contradiction between how to deal with the increasing number of cameras and how to make the back look beautiful.
The methodology for resolving contradictions can be summarized simply as the distinction between "point" and "surface".
Meizu 21 Pro
Samsung regards the camera as a "dot" and arranges it next to each other, while Meizu takes it a step further and uses the ring flash module as a "dot" and strings it into a "sugar gourd".
While the style of Apple and Xiaomi flagships is to incorporate the camera into a square shape, the Huawei Mate, Oppo Find and vivo X flagships have a round back, and the Huawei Pura has reinvented itself by turning the module into a triangle.
Elementary school knowledge comes, triangles, quadrilaterals and circles, which are the three most basic "faces".
As mentioned earlier, there are more and more "buttons" on the back of Samsung's flagship, and the back squares of the iPhone are getting bigger and bigger.
We talked about the self-breakthrough of Huawei's Pura70 design before, which is to choose triangles other than squares and circles, and handle the triangles well.
The design breakthrough of the HONOR Magic6 series is different, but in addition to the "point" and "surface", the "line" is chosen as the breaking point.
The reason why mobile phone manufacturers spend their minds on the camera module is because this module is almost the user's first visual focus, so many designers have also thought of creating a second visual focus to increase the recognition and interest of the back. For example, the large letters on the OPPO Reno 4, the "One Stroke Danqing" on the Huawei Mate50 Pro+, the "Ribbon Cloud Steps" on the vivo X90 series, and the contrasting design of the Desert Silver Moon color scheme on the OPPO Find X5 and X6 series, etc.
The Honor Magic6 Series 4 models actually made a design breakthrough attempt, namely the Magic6 Ultimate and Magic RSR (Porsche Design Edition), while the Magic6 and Magic Pro are actually continuing the style of the previous Magic5 series.
荣耀 Magic6 至臻版
On the Magic6 Ultimate, two "metal bands" are placed vertically in the plain leather material, and the linear ribbons extend separately and then meet the frame of the camera module, forming a "surface is the intersection of lines, and lines are the extension of faces".
Although Honor says that its design is inspired by the "Qilian Tianchi", and the lines show the beauty of mountains and lakes, this belongs to the image that is difficult for users to think of. But for me, the visual focus at first glance was the two lines and one face, and the three cameras in the middle of the face were completely ignored.
The logo of Porsche Design is a combination of the letters P and D
When I first saw the Honor Magic6 Ultimate, I thought it was a Porsche Design Edition, because the outline of the back line was very similar to the shape of the Porsche Design logo, which made me think that Porsche Design was integrated into the phone in this way.
荣耀 Magic6 RSR
The real Porsche Design Edition is the Magic6 RSR.
Compared with the Ultimate, the design of the Magic6 RSR is simpler, and there is only one "line" that appears as the essence of the design.
In design, it's a complex thing to do simple.
In fact, the HONOR design emphasizes the "line", not starting with the Magic6 series, but in the HONOR 100 Pro.
Honor 100 Pro
On the blue and purple versions of the Honor 100 Pro, the Honor designers used a curve to split the back cover into two parts, which were covered with glass and plain leather, of which the purple version was still embossed plain leather.
I would think that this design is a little complicated, and the treatment of glass and plain leather is also debatable, but the Honor 100 Pro is mainly stylish and thin, and the design is close to the light luxury style.
It is true that in the production and manufacturing process, the difficulty of making curves is always greater than that of straight lines, so that "straight lines belong to human beings, curves belong to God" are about to be quoted as rotten.
However, straight is also good for straight.
The Magic6 RSR is based on the classic "flying line" design of a Porsche sports car, which is used to create a fastback shape on the side of the car that descends towards the rear of the car. The ridge line in the middle of the back of the back of this mobile phone rises from under the camera module and extends downward, because the ridge line is slightly convex, it divides the two sides of the back of the fuselage into two inclined planes, so that even if the back glass is extremely fine frosted texture, it can also use light to show a subtle but clear line of two sides.
As the middle ridge continues to fall, the end bulge disappears, and the line is gone, so far, on the Magic6 RSR, the designer has used a line to pry the surface, plus the camera module is presented in black, framed by matte titanium alloy, although it is a maverick hexagon, but it still deliberately reduces the sense of presence. Therefore, the visual focus is still this simple "flowing cloud flying line".
荣耀折叠屏手机 Magic V2s RSR
The Magic V2s RSR Porsche Design Edition, an earlier Honor foldable phone, also has a similar "flying line" element, and the camera module of this phone also uses an irregular trapezoidal shape instead of a square circle.
At this point, we can see that Honor has begun to integrate the element of "line" into the high-end series on a large scale, and has raised the priority of this element in terms of vision and concept to a higher position.
The co-branded cooperation with Porsche Design has also made "Line" famous and ambitious.
The reason why I spent a lot of space in front of me to talk about the overview of today's mobile phone design, the general genre, and the independent background of Honor is also to make the design of Honor's mobile phones more reasonable.
Honor tried to use the "line" as the core in the high-end series, especially the Porsche Design co-branded mobile phone, which achieved a completely different design from Apple, Samsung, and Huawei, and also made Honor's design independent.
This is the current status quo of Honor mobile phones in design,On the one hand, the design of the main shipment models is still based on the word "stability", not seeking ingenuity, but seeking the public's liking, and in the most expensive, on behalf of the brand tonality and product design capabilities, Honor has tried as much as possible to make new attempts, out of a road of design independence.
That's why there are 6 designs in the Magic3 series of 4 models.
Liu Xuewen
In the plastic greenhouse of fate, every cabbage that has been sprayed with too many pesticides has a dream of becoming a pollution-free organic vegetable.
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