As a part of the MacStories Apps Tree event (where you’ll find a huge giveaway worth $10.000 of 450 Mac and iPhone apps licenses), I thought it would be interesting to hear the voice of Mac designers and developers about the steps that go into desigining and developing an application for Mac OS X. Or an application’s icon.
This is a guest post by Anthony Piraino, designer at the Iconfactory.
Have a good read.
I’ve figured out why Apple’s industrial design resonates so deeply with people.
Icons are the key. But not in the way you may think.
Working as a designer at the Iconfactory, I spend a lot of time dealing with icons. Developing metaphors. Rendering concepts. And one of the critical issues in icon design is economy ‚ the ability to cultivate an efficiency in the icon. A good icon needs conceptual efficiency. In an application icon, the artwork needs to concisely and clearly represent your entire app. In a toolbar icon, the artwork needs to distinguish one feature from all the other features in the toolbar. To do this properly, there’s no room for extraneous elements running willy-nilly around your icon. Sometimes concepts need to be reigned in. For instance, a hypothetical developer might describe the following as a concept for an application icon:
“Well, the app scours the internet for news articles, culls photos and images from the articles and organizes them in an archive with tags based on the content of the articles. So, the icon will need to contain a globe, a newspaper, a few photographs, and a filing cabinet. Better add an arrow in there too, since you know, it’s downloading stuff.”
Efficient? No ‚well, unless the goal is to give the icon designer fits of despair. But there’s no conceptual efficiency there. Elements need to be removed, and the concept trimmed down.
A good icon also needs visual efficiency. Especially at smaller sizes, such as for toolbar icons ‚every pixel counts. Lines need to be simplified and textures toned down. Fussy detail can often turn a crisp, clear icon into a visual mess.
These economies of concept and rendering push the icon towards an idealized depiction of whatever the icon is meant to portray. At its best, an icon should truly be iconic,communicating the essence of what it represents as directly as possible.
And that leads us back to Apple.
From a visual standpoint, Apple’s hardware designs are becoming increasingly economical. The Cube and the Mini distilled the computer down to a compact minimum. Comparing my Titanium PowerBook G4 to my new MacBook Pro reveals a stark contrast. Despite feeling sleek and stylish back in the day, the G4 had seams, trim, and extra visual distractions all over the place. The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, is a solidly seamless, gloriously streamlined slab of aluminum. At the extreme end, we have devices like the iPod Shuffle and the iPhone, where the hardware itself is just a few small buttons away from being a smooth, featureless monolith of technology.
That simplicity is a big part of the appeal of Apple’s hardware, and one reason their designs resonate so well. All the visual noise is being removed, one seam, one button at a time. Macs and iPhones are slowly becoming idealized representations of computers and cell phones.
Apple is turning their hardware into icons of hardware.
