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.”

Alternate iOS 7 icons spotted on Apple's website

This is kind of interesting. New versions of some of the stock app icons in iOS 7 have been spotted on Apple’s website. The reason for the changes is not yet known, but the app icons have received the blunt of the criticism thus far regarding Apple’s new mobile OS.

Some of the new icons are starkly different than the ones seen in the first developer beta of iOS 7, while others appear to only feature subtle differences. And it’s not clear if this was a mistake on Apple’s part, or these will be the new app icons in iOS going forward…

iOS 7 Beta 1 Hands On

I've been using iOS 7 a lot over the last few days. I finally made the first batch of hands on videos. I'll be uploading some more through out the day, and a new one for every new beta release featuring what's changed. Look just past the fold for the videos...

iOS 7 VS iOS 6: icons and UI

Just past the fold I've included a comparison of both the UI elements of iOS 7 VS iOS 6 and, for those of you who missed it, icon comparison...

Comparing iOS 6 icons to iOS 7

Love it or hate it, iOS' major redesign has gotten Apple a lot of attention in the past day. With Jony Ive in charge of redesigning iOS, all the icons look different. Look just past the fold for a comparison of iOS 6's icons to iOS 7's...