[Defenderland]

Originally Posted by ignacio ferrer

I always like it when people know what they are talking about: form follows function is a design principle, not an engineering priciple.

I'm talking about engineered design.
Design decisions have more and more become pure marketing decisions. These days marketing is overruling engineering. The better solutions very often are ruled out because of pure marketing aspects: instead of the principle that form is secondary after the best possible functionality, this has been perverted into design being everything.

That would be something like: function follows form - as is applied by Apple in an exemplary matter.

Good engineering is about the best result and quality, not about the highest profit!
Engineering means finding a solution. Therefore ALWAYS the functionality has priority and afterwards the design, the form.
So to me it seems you have no clue what engineering is.

As for the color of ereaders: they come in all shapes and sizes, even red and blue - so the choice seems to be pretty subjective ...

Well, i think it is undoubted that physical paper gives the best reading experience. And it's border has the same color as the background of the text.
Now since ereaders are available in all colors and forms, you should have no problem, to name me a product that offers a frame with roughly the same color as the epaper, so that the eye can adapt on the brightness of the background and must not accomodate when reading at the borders.

Oh wait, there is none?
Not a single eReader on the whole market, that offers the best frame color for reading? Because marketing has taken over everything, the first impressions, the look on a photo or presentation has become more important than the functionality and the results are products that are MUCH worse than they need to be.
Marketing people are good in talking up worthless BS, but they are not clever enough to explain big ergonomic advantages that are vastly superior to a "cool" looking design.