How Not to Design an iPhone Icon
Byline 2.5 finally saw the light of day last week. The update has had a very positive reception, with the notable exception of the new icon, which has been roundly abused by almost everyone I’ve heard from. Making changes to anything which so many people are familiar with — fond of, even — always provokes a bit of a backlash, but I was surprised by the sheer volume of the complaints I received, and, on reflection, I think they’re justified.The new icon is a blunder, one which I find particularly embarrassing because it’s Byline’s third icon in under a year, and I really should have gotten this right by now. Why haven’t I?
Byline 1.0
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The best icons consist of a simple, distinctive visual metaphor which hints at the app’s function. I spent a long time considering suitable metaphors for Byline, but there are no easy answers. The idea of an RSS reader is fairly abstract — a newspaper is the obvious choice, but newspapers tend to be neither simple nor distinctive when depicted at the tiny size required for an iPhone icon. In the end I settled on a modified version of the standard RSS icon, but it proved to be too generic, as dozens of other RSS apps with similar icons began to appear in the App Store. |
Byline 2.0
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This was beautifully drawn by Everaldo Coelho, but when shrunk to the appropriate size the newspaper is rather indistinct and jagged (as I had feared). There’s just a little too much going on in this icon for it to work in so few pixels. Many users didn’t realise that the object sitting on top of the newspaper was supposed to be a coffee cup, and some found the icon distracting when glancing at their iPhones due to its similarity with the red notification badge. In addition, this icon is not a very good match for the new interface in Byline 2.5. |
Byline 2.5
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I thought that a bold typographic design would make up for the lack of a visual metaphor, but I should have known better. This is more logo than icon, and logos — especially unfamiliar ones — have no place on the iPhone. The black background makes it appear to have an unusual shape when viewed on the iPhone’s home screen; it stands out, but at the expense of being wilfully inconsistent with other icons. I don’t think the design is actually ugly, it’s just entirely inappropriate as an icon. I have no idea how I let myself think it was a good idea. |
Much as I hate to change the icon a third time, I almost certainly will, and swiftly. I’ll try to get it right this time.
