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Famed Mac Icon Designer Says iOS 7 Icons Are a 'Good Direction'

Gulo said:
I'm glad somebody with experience finally expressed what I feel.

It amazes me how everybody is so ******* sure of themselves when it comes to design. Like their opinion is the de facto standard for beauty in the world....
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Damn straight!

I think it's great that people are voicing their opinions about how pointlessly obnoxious these new designs are.

Oh, wait, you were saying that your opinion is better than the others. Never mind.
 
Watch some of the developer videos in the WWDC app and you can clearly tell Apple software guys are exited. Makes you wonder how many of them have wanted change for a while now. And how much Forstall was holding it back, possibly due to slavish loyalty to Steve. There were rumors that he would frequently play the "Steve wouldn't want that" or "Steve wouldn't like that" card. I get the sense now that he's gone the rest of the executive team is doing what they think is right rather than being hamstrung by trying to do what they think Steve would want.
 
Alright guys, that settles it. If Karen is onboard then that means we're moving forward with this look and further refinements.
 
The icons and interface are great...

..its just the horrid colour scheme I do not like. I want my phone to look cool not like a toy for a two year old.
 
Gulo said:
I'm glad somebody with experience finally expressed what I feel.

It amazes me how everybody is so ******* sure of themselves when it comes to design. Like their opinion is the de facto standard for beauty in the world. Get over yourselves. Design is hard. It's also something that one gets better at as one does it more. This is Apple's first stab at a different direction and I think too, that they are going in a cool direction.

To call something downright "ugly" based on your personal taste is bold and usually pretty arrogant, just saying.
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Wow. Talk about an absence of awareness!
 
Colour scheme is for kids, icons look like they were designed for a toddler market. How does a white border around the safari icon constitute as 'good direction'. It looks like they couldn't think of anything or were scared of not having a border around it!
 
Of course this isn't what Apple would be doing if Steve Jobs is still there, but Apple can't guess what Steve Jobs would do and shouldn't try, and Jobs said as much before he died.

Scott Forstall was doing what Jobs wanted while Jobs was in charge. Forstall was behind not only the look of iOS but Mac OS X's Aqua as well. But Jobs is gone and nobody can guess how Jobs would steer through uncharted waters and how he would balance competing answers to new questions.

Going "forward" with only ideas that Jobs approved or "would" approve is not innovation, it's the opposite.
 
The flat gray folders are the thing I dislike the most. Absolutely ugly.

Looks like jailbreak/winterboard is most definitely in my iPhone's future.
 
Apple should have only used blue, black and army green colors in iOS 7 to satisfy testosterone driven males who are afraid of those "emasculating" pastel colors.

Seriously, I've never understood how can anyone affirm that a color is "ugly".
 
My theory is that iOS 8 will support vector art icons and move towards a scalable screen resolution environment. It will look sharp at native resolutions no matter what size the display.

This is moving into that direction.
 
We'll only know if its the right direction after the final draft comes out and we see the publics reaction.
After coming from 3D like fancy Apps the change to simple illustrations is huge It seemed that what we saw at the WWDC was more of a work on progress. It could be good if Apple gets it right by release time. Is it the right direction ? I would be more encouraged if there was more enthusiasm
 
iOS 7 UI aesthetic is not half baked yet...

As a graphic designer myself I actually don't mind a "flatter" design scheme overall, but Apple's execution of it as currently presented looks over simplified and juvenile at the moment, IMHO.

Taken at face value, I really don't like any of those new icons to be featured in iOS7, with the worst offender being "newsstand", WTF?! (The new icons for "safari", "settings", "notes", and "reminders" are pretty awful too.) And the new "camera" icon looks super generic as to be a blight on one's eyes to know it was somehow endorsed by Apple execs for prime-time unveiling.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the new approach of simplifying the look & feel of the next iOS system, but there's nothing "simple" about creating icons, let alone an aesthetic scheme for a unified UI system, and this is precisely why it looks "unfinished" and consequently unexciting to me.
 
"simple, meaningful symbols that fill a space ... more iconic, less illustrative"

This is exactly the correct mindset and approach for imagery used on buttons in app toolbars, on config panels, etc. You want a clean interface representing the actions the user may invoke. And where iOS 7 uses this approach within apps and system menus, it is admirably simple and elegant.

But the imagery used for the icon of an app itself represents much more than just the action of launching an app. It represents a whole app. It is the first thing which markets an app. It introduces a user to an app and helps the user find it in a sea of apps. It should be memorable. Unique. And this is where iOS 7 fails; it forgets that toolbar icons and app icons are not the same thing and should not follow the same design philosophy.
 
decimortis said:
Or you know, personal opinion.

Replace the word ugly with beautiful and read your post again.

D.
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If you say something like "I think..." or "...to me" along with, you're making it clear the view is your personal opinion. It adds a bit of humility to your tone as well.

Calling something beautiful is positive, and this expression doesn't usually come from the same place as expressions more arrogant - like calling something or someone ugly.

Mince words all you want. Most all of the critics I'm seeing around here and elsewhere sound like a bunch of dicks to me. Not because of their opinion, but rather their execution.
 
nagromme said:
...
And beyond the look, it has great new features, and tons of new stuff behind the scenes for developers to be making great apps with.
...
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Right but we should remember that we are talking about the icons/design/colors here, not about features. IMO, the new features looks great and opens up for great possibilities but the look doesn't impress me. Maybe they really wanted to show that they are going in a completely new direction and from now on things will only gets better (icons/design/colors wise).
At least, they sure got room for improvement in those fields! ;)



BTW, I really liked the OS 9 icons and those are classics but, as mentioned earlier, she seems to have some sort of reserve on the new ones. And saying that it's "going in the right direction" is not the same as saying "those are wonderful icons, they couldn't have done better"... ;)
 
RoboCop001 said:
I think it's definitely the right direction. Kare seemed like she does still have some reservations, but definitely likes the direction they've begun. And that's definitely how I feel too.

I think we're going to see much better updates to iOS from now on. I don't know why, just a feeling. But I mean, they seemed so much more happier up there than with any other presentation since Jobs last took the stage. It's like they were no longer confined to something. They seemed to now have a real sense of where they want to take it, more of a vision for the future.

I really like how much more "alive" the OS seems now. One of the biggest things I felt with iOS was that it felt very static and stiff. While using it every day, and especially where there was heavy skeumorphism, I found myself wanting to use it in a way that seemed like it would/should work in that way, but did not. It felt very confined. For example, you HAVE to press the "back" button to go back. But a swipe makes so much sense, and after some apps started to have that kind of gesturing, I really started to want it in the OS as well and wondered why they never did that.

So even if there's a few crappy icons, I'm really excited about the future that iOS 7 is ushering in.

Time will tell of course, but under Forstal, things seemed to be going very slowly. Now I feel like things will be going faster, a focus on more important features, more gestures, and slowly perhaps even more openness.
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I agree, since Steve's passing, this was the best Apple Keynote I've watched. They seemed really energetic. I'm looking more forward to ios7 than I was ios6. I think the last time I was super excited about an ios was ios4 (although I loved in ios5 the iTunes match feature when it came out).
 
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