Today, Scott Croyle, the man creditworthy for the prima designs of HTC’s One smartphone lineup, is leaving the Taiwanese company. Since 2008, he has led the HTC industrial design and user experience teams and he is now departing to work on his own projects. According to the verge, the company Croyle’s plans are a “long-term transition” where he will stay involved with the product development in a consultancy role for a few months to come. But for how long? And how will this impact the compnay’s design language?
HTC is doing it’s best to assure us that Croyle’s departure will not mean the end of their smartphone design innovation, and they claim that he will be focusing on special projects and dedicated on next generation developments. And among these developments is of course next year’s One Flagship devices. It’s expected that his deputy, Jonah Becker,might replace him how well will he fit into Croyle’s shoes? HTC is not doing well in sales and recent departures of big shots is not a sign either.
The Taiwanese company has for the recent past been known for its iconic smartphone designs which unfortunately were not been converted into massive sales like the Galaxy s series from Samsung. We all know its never about HTC’s designs and why their phones don’t sell like the Galaxy hot cakes, it’s all about Samsung’s massive advertising. The only thing it has going for it are it’s drool worthy designs even on their low-end smartphones and once that’s stripped away from it? They basically have nothing.
HOW WILL HTC FARE IN THE FUTURE?
Impressive smartphone design has been in HTC’s DNA ever since they acquired Croyle’s company One & Co studio in 2008 from the HTC Desire series, the Butterfly and HTC One Flagship Phones and that’s only on the Android side of things. They also designed the impressive Windows Phones like the colorful HTC 8x and 8s. The challenge is for the design team to stay on top of their game even without the captain steering that ship, there’s now even greater incertitude about how HTC will fare in the future — particularly now that the company is trying to break into new product categories like wearables they need a clear vision more than ever before.
SOURCE
