The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

Faces. We all have them (hopefully) and well all instinctively know how to read them them. A face, associated with a mascot or a spokesperson, has always been a powerful way to brand a company or a product. Apple has been using the Happy Mac Face, as well as the Sad Mac Face, for years.

Why? Because humans know how to read faces. Faces can convey a huge amount of information about personality, intent, mind-set, attitude, status, emotional state and most of all, uniqueness.

It should be no surprise that faces are used by many designers for their app icons.

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Take an object. Design it, make it look three dimensional. Then start putting elements on top of it, all of them contained within the borders of the icon-square. Now you’ve made a Dimensional Surface Icon.

How is this different from the Picture Frame Icon? Because all of the elements are contained within the icon itself. The bounding box for the icon mark the edge of the object the elements rest upon.Picture Frame Icons will feature elements that expand beyond the limits of the square.

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In our second installment of current Icon Trends, we’ll be chatting about The Picture Frame icon. Personally, this is one of my favorite icon tricks – but it’s not easy to accomplish and it definitely doesn’t lend itself to every sort of application. A specific tone can be required to make the Picture Frame work or a subject matter where having only one of an item is less indicative of the nature of the program than a broader view.

The Picture Frame is more about illustration than graphic design. It’s more about a scene and a mood than it is a brand or identity. When used right, it can offer a beautiful reminder of an application and what’s inside. When done wrong, it can be a mess that just disappears into the busy nature of an iOS home screen.

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This week’s edition of App Design Trends is going to focus on something we’re dealing with right now over at Rocksauce Studios right now – Icons.

Over the next 5 days, we’re going to be chatting about different types of app icons, the pros, the cons and looking at a few great examples of each type.

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While the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are rather clear on how button placement should be handled in app navigation, many designers have found that treating everything equally just doesn’t make a lot of sense. More and more often, designers are looking at their app interfaces as more industrial design than graphic design, and as such, having nothing but similar shaped/colored buttons is simply terrible for users.

Enter the big center button. You know it matters and you can’t help but tap it!
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