iOS 7 icon grid on physical products

With iOS 7, Jony Ive designed an icon grid that was meant to give developers some guidance on how to proportion their icons so they would look “harmonious” on the new iOS 7 homescreen. As you can see above, though, Jony Ive has been using a similar mental grid to design Apple’s physical products for a long time. As Reddit user Kepano notes, however, Ive has probably not used this grid as a precise guide to design in the past.

“In my opinion as an industrial designer this image suggests that there are some intuitive similarities between all of Ive’s designs but that the iOS 7 icon grid is probably the first time he’s defined those proportions so strictly. The fact that certain shapes match so closely (e.g. the width of the donut shape on the iPod) is probably not a coincidence but a matter of taste. What the image doesn’t show is that these products have radically different dimensions which is why the corner radii are very different from one another.”