iOS 7 Design
We can quibble about colour choices, but when viewed against the new style, the sheer weight and gimmickry of the bubbles and bevels and shine becomes very apparent. The navigation bar at the top hangs there like a lintel, frowning away. It’s a pretty Photoshop job, but to my eye it now looks chunky and theme-y, like a skin for jailbroken devices.
In fact, the designs are so different that you might even have been surprised that they came out of the same teams that were behind the home screen on iOS 6. Well, you’d be right. We’ve been talking to people all week about the new designs of iOS and multiple sources have given us a better picture of how it went down inside Apple in the last few months.
First of all, many of the new icons were primarily designed by members of Apple’s marketing and communications department, not the app design teams.
I don’t think most developers of mature, non-trivial apps are going to have an easy time migrating them well to iOS 7. Even if they overcome the technical barriers, the resulting apps just won’t look and feel right.
There’s an intricate system at work, a Z-axis of layers organized in a logical way. There is a profound reduction in the use of faux-3D visual effects and textures, but iOS 7 is anything but flat. It is three dimensional not just visually but logically.
But with major user interface changes such as Aqua or iOS 7, Apple has another tendency: they overshoot the mark. Their incremental approach then becomes one where unnecessary items are removed (such as Aqua’s stripes) or improved (excessive shadows and transparency are toned down).
1 Comment RSS · Twitter
[...] 7 - Matt Gemmell Michael Tsai - Blog - iOS 7 Design Subtraction.com: Requiem for a Back Button Manton Reece: [...]
