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Famed Mac Icon Designer Says iOS 7 Icons Are a 'Good Direction'
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Ive should've just given the job of designing the icons to Kare. She wrote the book on designing icons that both communicate and entertain. She was being political, but it's obvious she thinks the icons need a lot more work. Hopefully we will see the designs iterate in future betas.
None of this really matters anyway. I am more interested in the functionality, which is an upgrade over the current iOS.
We will all buy the next generation phones and not give it a second thought.
We will all buy the next generation phones and not give it a second thought.
If Steve was still here so would Forstall and we'd be stuck with the best mobile operating system from 2007!
Sorry I think now Apple has a creative license to thrill!
The only way is up now!
I don't think elaborate is always graphically pleasing. It's not difficult to add that kind of faux sheen that many of the prior ones had. If anything overdoing that could be argued as treating their users like imbeciles. This isn't a new opinion for me. I've always been a fan of subdued designs. They're often built to promote obvious differentiation from competing products. I personally dislike it when it gets into weird gloss and excessive gradients. You can do so much through subtle visual cues based on the basic shapes and colors, assuming you account for some variation in cultural training.
Flat often implies lack of volumetric cues. Those aren't any harder to produce anyway. With the prevalence of 3d apps it's not difficult to produce renders for reference using each shape in 3 dimensions as a basis for producing the final artwork. Most younger graphic designers also have some 3d app experience, at the very least something like Cinema 4D.
That has always been my biggest gripe with iOS. There is usually only one choice: the Apple way or the highway. Me, I chose the highway.
There re a zillion irritating aspects of iOS. Heck - you can't even put the icons where you want them - they always snap to grid.
Let's hope that you are right, and when things "seem like it would/should work in that way" they actually will. But I doubt it. Apple thinks that one way is best, they know what you should want, and if you don't like it, hit the road.
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I think that their basic paradigm is often wrong. For example, the web browser has an icon showing a compass. WTF? A compass? A compass should be the icon for well, the compass! That's an app, right?
And you are not allowed to use an icon that makes more sense to you, the user. You are only allowed to use the icon that Apple or the dev picked out, no matter if it makes sense to you or not.
Again - Apple's way or the highway. And these days, most people choose the highway. iOS devices are quickly becoming smaller and smaller factors in overall sales. They are losing market share rapidly.
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Even the old icons were too often meaningless, like using a compass as the icon for a web browser.
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"In my opinion, the best aspect of rococo design is its stark simplicity, while the best aspect of Bauhaus is the rich textures applied to every little detail of everything". Or not...
So this lady whose "iconic" design is an icon that looks like a 5 year old did using MS Paint on Windows 3.1 is supposed to be the expert and the large amount of iOS users that are repelled by this Hello-Kitty/unicorn-barf theme are supposed to be clueless about what's aesthetically good?
Let me tell you, it doesn't take an expert to see the excessive use of gradient, the childish color pallet, the lack of uniformity, the confusing icons and the overall lack of character in iOS7. If they were going for "simple" well they did it wrong.
Apple should be more careful when they release something that you're pretty much stuck with and have to look at every day. They're not Fischer Price they're freakin Apple.
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That's because the webbrowser is called Safari and appeared long before iOS. It made sense to choose a compass as an icon back at the beginnings. The other icons (IE, chrome, netscape, etc.) were and are worse. It is easy to critize, but to come up with some better ideas is not. A surfboard would be nice, hence it symbolizes "surfing the internet"...
You chose a pretty bad example. Let me explain it with a more realistic example: What icon would you choose for an app that shows photos? Well. You would pick an iconic/symbolic view of photos or a photo book, or at least something that reminds you of photos. That's what Apple did with all versions of iOS and also Mac OS prior to iOS 7. Now they changed it to some color blobs. What the heck? How should I know what's behind those color blobs? My first guess would be an app that shows a color palette or an app that let me draw blobs. There are other nondescriptive icons. That of the camera for example.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of simple and elegant icons. However, they should be descriptive and profound.
My god, you are FULL of wisdom!! Lead us, oh great one!,
I really hope you never spawn.
Well, nothing will create more opinions than having new icons. It's the beauty of designing that it creates many different views as people look at it from all sort of angles. Whether that be personal taste, design principle and technique or simply taking the nay sayer approach to anything new. Nobody will ever create something that's going to be loved by everybody and that can hardly be the aim of it anyway. Designs and in particular NEW designs are always meant to push new boundaries and to introduce something new like we see with the new font being used in iOS7. In the end the user interface is just that. So it is important even though it doesn't offer any functionality itself. It is what makes or brakes it for the consumer.
I've installed it and I tried to like it but I somehow can't quite get my head around these icons either. They seem to lack a bit of consistency or the consistency they have is too wide for my taste. At least the icons produced by Apple should have a common theme so that the main screen on my phone looks somewhat "in tune". Yes, they are flat but that's about it. Somebody used the description "clown car colour" and that's not too far off the mark. I never liked the iOS6 icons either and the new ones are better but still a bit too wide spread across the colour pallet for my taste. Well, who knows. Things may still change. I would love to see a choice you can pick in the settings like the wallpapers. A set of flat & greyscale icons would probably be my choice compared to the current sea of colours.
Just keep in mind that satisfying millions of users will all sorts of wild tastes probably would take a looooong time whether Steve would still be alive or not.
I've installed it and I tried to like it but I somehow can't quite get my head around these icons either. They seem to lack a bit of consistency or the consistency they have is too wide for my taste. At least the icons produced by Apple should have a common theme so that the main screen on my phone looks somewhat "in tune". Yes, they are flat but that's about it. Somebody used the description "clown car colour" and that's not too far off the mark. I never liked the iOS6 icons either and the new ones are better but still a bit too wide spread across the colour pallet for my taste. Well, who knows. Things may still change. I would love to see a choice you can pick in the settings like the wallpapers. A set of flat & greyscale icons would probably be my choice compared to the current sea of colours.
Just keep in mind that satisfying millions of users will all sorts of wild tastes probably would take a looooong time whether Steve would still be alive or not.
The fact that the web browser has a bad name is hardly justification for giving it a bad icon, and how does a compass evoke "safari" anyways?
An elephant with a howdah would have been more evocative of a safari, eh bwana?
And yes, I agree with you about the others. One is a bunch of colored blobs. One is three colored dots, and another is a bunch of overlapping colored circles. I have no freaking idea of what any of thee three are supposed to be. They evoke noting. Bubbles? Dots? The NBC Peacock? Huh?
I always thought Safari was a pretty good name. It's like Safari took you on a figurative safari through the big world wide web. It was your compass and guide through the morass of the internet.
NBC Peacock
I thought the exact same thing. The bubbles, blobs, dots, and globules of jello do nothing for me either.
iTunes 11.0 is the last Forstall version. And it was rubbish. Since then, every new version has been an improvement. It feels like a bunch of developers were given the single instruction "make it better".
I always thought Safari was a pretty good name. It's like Safari took you on a figurative safari through the big world wide web. It was your compass and guide through the morass of the internet.
NBC Peacock
And the one with the three colored stripes, one with an airplane, one with a movie camera and one with a teacup: what the heck is that supposed to be? What sort of a program is that associated with?
I think that the icons, for the most part, suck really bad. They are meaningless (which is exactly the opposite of what an icon is supposed to be) and ugly. The Easter-egg colors are questionable, at best, while the iconography is devoid of meaning.
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Apple 2.0: The genius has left the building.
People can say all the nasty crap they want about Steve Jobs, how he was a failure as a human being, how he abandoned his infant daughter, how you could not believe a word he ever said. But you really have to give him credit as a masterful huckster: nobody knew how to take money out of the pockets of regular people and send it to the Hedge Funds like Steve Jobs. He was masterful at selling hunks of plastic and copper, for huge prices, to people who thought that shelling out dollars made them cool.
No CEO of any megacorporation in the history of the world could turn a buck like Steve Jobs. Nobody.
So... since I had my Galaxy Nexus running Jelly Bean straight from Google there has been a change & now users can choose their own icons for Android apps?? Oh.. no? Ok, I thought maybe you had a point there for a second...
Hmmm... Maybe that's why they did it...
If the new interface looks better with reduced brightness, it's possible Apple designed it that way. Lowering screen brightness extends battery life, so designing the interface to look good at reduced brightness levels would be a pretty smart thing to do...
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You do realize she designed those icons a couple of years before any version of Windows even existed, right? The Mac was the first widely-available GUI-equipped computer, and everybody and their brother copied the Mac's icons for their own knockoff's of the Mac (GEM, Windows, GEOS, etc. etc.). Those icons are still perfectly functional to this day - in fact, the original Mac's desktop is a lot easier to navigate than the cluttered desktops of most modern systems, even though it's a monochrome display.
Jobs was actually responsible for two revolutions in desktop UI's. After the Mac came out a slew of operating systems followed that looked just like it. Then when he introduced the NeXT in 1988, sure enough within a few years every OS looked just like that, too (especially Windows 95, which was late to the party even by Micro$loth's pathetic standards - hell, Atari and Commodore had already gotten there by that point, and they were broke).
If the new interface looks better with reduced brightness, it's possible Apple designed it that way. Lowering screen brightness extends battery life, so designing the interface to look good at reduced brightness levels would be a pretty smart thing to do...
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You do realize she designed those icons a couple of years before any version of Windows even existed, right? The Mac was the first widely-available GUI-equipped computer, and everybody and their brother copied the Mac's icons for their own knockoff's of the Mac (GEM, Windows, GEOS, etc. etc.). Those icons are still perfectly functional to this day - in fact, the original Mac's desktop is a lot easier to navigate than the cluttered desktops of most modern systems, even though it's a monochrome display.
Jobs was actually responsible for two revolutions in desktop UI's. After the Mac came out a slew of operating systems followed that looked just like it. Then when he introduced the NeXT in 1988, sure enough within a few years every OS looked just like that, too (especially Windows 95, which was late to the party even by Micro$loth's pathetic standards - hell, Atari and Commodore had already gotten there by that point, and they were broke).
Are you sure? Windows 95 borrowed heavily from Mac OS 8 (or was it version 7 then?). NeXTstep was quite different than the competitors. Minimizing a program produced an enourmous block for example, many menu entries and symbols were more a precursor to what has become Mac OS X 10.0.
To be fair... kara.com has some logos on the website. Don't see anything that I would use for anything.
Totally agree about them being a good direction. I was never a fan of the photorealistic icons that started with OS X. An icon should be just that: iconic. A simple graphic representation. iOS 7 strives towards this, and it's a good thing IMO.
Unfortunatley I can believe that marketing was responsible for the icons, because many of them lack any functional meaning at all. They are pretty designs that catch the eye, but half of them I wouldn't bet any amount of money that I could figure out what pressing them will make happen. That's bad design regardless of how pretty the icon looks.
But the new direction is great since iOS 6 icons were nothing to write home about. Some were very good, some ok, most of them were too busy. I can't wait to try iOS 7 so I can form a better opinion of the new icons, but so far they look promising.
To nitpick, the colored blobs are meaningless, they have no place as icons. The one with the tiny icons within icons for airplanes, movies, and coffee is a weird mix of simple yet busy, needs too much squinting to ascertain its meaning. Steve Jobs would have said in his black/white way: "these are ****, redo them". Apparently there is nobody at Apple to say "these aren't ready, keep working".
Unfortunatley I can believe that marketing was responsible for the icons, because many of them lack any functional meaning at all. They are pretty designs that catch the eye, but half of them I wouldn't bet any amount of money that I could figure out what pressing them will make happen. That's bad design regardless of how pretty the icon looks.
But the new direction is great since iOS 6 icons were nothing to write home about. Some were very good, some ok, most of them were too busy. I can't wait to try iOS 7 so I can form a better opinion of the new icons, but so far they look promising.
To nitpick, the colored blobs are meaningless, they have no place as icons. The one with the tiny icons within icons for airplanes, movies, and coffee is a weird mix of simple yet busy, needs too much squinting to ascertain its meaning. Steve Jobs would have said in his black/white way: "these are ****, redo them". Apparently there is nobody at Apple to say "these aren't ready, keep working".
A huckster? Jobs's talent was in putting together teams of "A Players" and driving them to excell that their highest possible level. He had a amazing artistic sense for a non-artist, and his intuitive understanding of technology was rivaled by none. Yes, he made a crap-ton of money, but he was about much more than that.
In any event, other CEOs have probably surpassed Jobs when it comes to making a buck. Carnegi and JP Morgan come to mind. Today's oil companies can turn a buck in their sleep. And for most of Apple's history, making money was pretty much the opposite of what they were associated with, even with Jobs at the helm. Apple was plenty awesome then - perhaps even moreso than now.
I find it interesting that Jobs would always find true creative geniuses like Wozniak, Tevanian, and Lasseter, and use his social skills and marketing savvy to help them achieve greatness. Often he stuck with these people through business failures before finding success, which shows an incredible ability to judge the potetial of others. I believe Jobs was about as far from a huckster as one could be.
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True, but she's only commenting on the direction. This isn't about what's in iOS 7 Beta 1 icon per icon, but the cleaner designs in general.
With the earlier comments from Apple that the Beta 1 icons aren't final work, I have high hopes for the final release of iOS 7. They're clearly listening (or they wouldn't make a defensive comment / reminder like that). I think I can see a good foundation here, although many icons are in need of polish.
"meaningful" ???!!!!
As well as looking crap, half of them are not descriptive at all. Gamecentre being one of them.
What is square, with rounded corners and quite clearly represents 'gaming' a freaking DICE!!!! C'mon Apple. You cant get any more simple than 3 or 5 dots to represent a dice. Instead we get 3D multi-coloured bubbles on a supposedly 'flat simplified' design.
As well as looking crap, half of them are not descriptive at all. Gamecentre being one of them.
What is square, with rounded corners and quite clearly represents 'gaming' a freaking DICE!!!! C'mon Apple. You cant get any more simple than 3 or 5 dots to represent a dice. Instead we get 3D multi-coloured bubbles on a supposedly 'flat simplified' design.
The higher detail icons from iOS6 can easily be reproduced using 'vector art'.
I'm sure all icons actually were designed using vectors to more easily export variations for different screen resolutions.