Hacker News Reader

Comment by infinia | Hacker News Reader

I like the design overall, but am I the only person who thinks these icons are awful? In particular, the color palette they used and the ugly gradients used (app store icon).

View on HN

The Safari icon looks particularly strange. The white border sticks out in an unpleasant way.

Agree with the almost-amateurish feel to those icons. Many of those icons seem ill-proportioned to me, especially the icons for Messages.

It's always hard to create a flat design version of something created non-flat before. I really thought that Apple will do it's best to preserve the functionality of it's own designs and I think it really did it at 99.9%. Those icons aren't the best they could do, but it will change in time for sure!

Personally, this was exactly like what I was thinking-- to me, some of those icons look like bad mockup-stage design. Some of those gradients, in my opinion, are pretty bad and do not work.

It just feels like the like source is different for different icons (some go light-to-dark, others are the reverse), and it's driving my designer eye crazy.

Well you can never tell this, until you see it on your phone. Most of the icons may look like a basic photoshop tutorial, but still that's the minimalistic approach of flat design.

You've got a really different view of something ( a gradient ) outside of it context ( the whole UI ) and the same element as part of a whole design. That wasn't pretty obvious to the great super-pixel-detailed skeuromorphic design, where each icon was a whole design, but I'm pretty sure we'll speak differently by the end of the year when we get that iOS and evaluate the change for real.

Take a look at their new demo paga [1] it looks pretty nice and flattened. I'm afraid of what will happen to the 3rd party apps, that will not get a flat-design update.

[1] : http://www.apple.com/ios/ios7/

Even looking at their site, the mail icon drives me nuts. Personally, I don't like the cyan-to-blue because it looks odd that the gradient shifts so dramatically in hue. The Twitter icon, on the other hand, is fine because it's not really a shift in hue but in lightness.

I wonder what those will feel like on a emitted light display rather than in a giant auditorium. Same for the blue text on white.

You're not, though the safari controls (especially in the bookmarks screen) shocked me more, the blue-on-white is very odd-looking. I'll have to see the actual result, but I'm really wary on that (though I like the new style overall, even if it might take people time to get used to it)

Yeah, i call them x-ray icons. Really awful.

The old Safari and Settings icons are way better.

Agreed; the design of the OS is quite good but the icons seem disproportionate. The Safari icon seems quite odd, and the iTunes and App Store icon "circles" are too far out on the edge of the icon.

Overall though, it's a remarkable effort by Apple. Let's see how good it is to develop for, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com