Just about the most asinine, presumptuous, hubris-filled thing a designer can say is that someone else’s design is “wrong”. That word is reserved for judgments of absolute truth or ethical guidance; for flawed mathematical proofs and crimes. And yet, allow me to declare the following: Jony Ive’s icon grid in iOS 7 is wrong.

One of the reasons iOS 7 looks a bit odd.

☰

Illustrator CC — Diarrhea

Radiolab Behind the Scenes. As you may know Radiolab is my favorite podcast. Go give them money.

This PSD is based on the beta, so be aware that design decisions you’ll be making when using this file will need to change as the OS becomes more refined. We’ll keep it up-to-date as best we can. Whatever your use, we hope you enjoy it.

☰

It’s not even about how it looks. Well, the new icon for Safari is a bit ugly funny and what’s going on with those cogs in Settings.app?! No, it’s not only about visual things.

Remember “Slide to unlock” on our iOS 6 lock screens, written in a highly visible dark area with an arrow pointing in the direction you’re supposed to swipe? Gone. Instead there is a arrow pointing bottom to top that indicates how to open Command Center. Because that is exactly what I need to do all the time. That’s not bad enough to write a post about it, I hear you mumbling? No problem, Apple has got you covered! There is another arrow! Pointing from top to bottom it indicates how to open the Notification Center. Two arrows pointing in different directions, non of them indicates how to unlock your stupid phone.

“But… but everybody knows how to do that and the text has a shiny animation on it!” Sure. Let’s look at somebody who switched from Windows Phone to iOS 7. Windows Phone is unlocked by swiping from bottom to top and iOS 7 shows an arrow that tells you exactly that.

(4MB .gif images, FTW.)

Do you want more? Sure! Remember blurred backgrounds? The stuff the design community got rid of about half a year ago? Apple celebrates its renaissance. Everywhere. One of the best things of Messages.app is that you can swipe up to see more messages and your keyboard hides itself to give you as much screen real estate as it possibly can. In iOS 7? LOOK GUYS IT’S TRANSLUCENT AND YOU CAN SEE BLURRY MESSAGES GOING UNDER IT WHEN YOU’RE SCROLLING ISN’T THAT AMAZING?

Control Center in general. Did anybody consider to… reduce the number of buttons on that thing? That’s just ridiculous.

I don’t know. All those smart people on Twitter are saying that you have to hold it in your hand to critizise it and you have to use it for a few months and it’s just a beta and hold your feet still or switch to a different operating system. But I don’t want to. There are some things obviously wrong with what Apple presented yesterday and that’s a first for me. Sure, maybe they’ll fix the few things I just pointed out but that doesn’t mean I can’t write a hurried post about it.

I’m not impressed.

iOS 7, sponsored by every twelve year old on Dribbble.

— Marcel Wichmann (@UARRR) June 10, 2013

Yesterday, we rolled out free accounts to LayerVault along with the concept of forking. The release had been several months in the making. But unlike most big launches, the pieces of this release were exposed over time. If anything, it wasn’t so much the big launch but one of the last launches in this thread of thought. After building LayerVault for nearly two years, we have realized that the best way to build a product is to release things piecemeal and to avoid the Big Launch.

Layervault does everything right at the moment. Amazing post, even better update.

☰

A UI concept which merges loading indicators into the action that invoked them. Primarily intended for use with forms where it gives users immediate feedback upon submit rather than leaving them wondering while the browser does its thing.

I’m not a big fan of the ones changing their width and height but I’d like to see some of the other ones more often.

☰

In the search for more sales, developers often try out various promotional techniques. One of the more mysterious and lesser used ones is to make the app free for a day. Whenever I considered doing this in the past, I was cautious – the idea of giving away a paid product to a mass number of people for free would make anybody slightly wary. In some cases, where the app costs the developer money based on usage, it’s simply not possible. But for every other app, it can be a highly productive and cost-effective form of promotion. I couldn’t find any other resources on the experience, and so I wanted to share mine.

Might be something to keep in mind. In case one of you has a nice app that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

☰

The way Wunderlist feels and acts should remain consistent regardless of what device you’re using now or in the future. Our ultimate goal is to keep the complex technology running our product hidden behind an intuitive human experience across all devices.

Ben rules.

☰

I designed most of the audio currently in the product today. There are a few major components that make up the audio identity. First, is the base chord which is an Fmaj7 chord. For you music nerds out there, yes, these notes actually spell out “FACE”. There are a few reasons I went with this chord

Sound design, a topic I have never thought about. Sure, I know that there are people working at BMW who try to optimize the sound a door makes but this Quora answer by Everett is far more concrete.

☰