Great points all around and the new icon looks fantastic. Your cinematic app looks very cool also. Where are you grabbing the showtimes data from?
Make Your App Icons Boring
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Make Your App Icons Boring
#22The old icon looks much better. Until I read the paragraph preceding it, I actually assumed the left was the new icon and the right was the old, because the right is much brighter and more annoying. The left feels more subdued and like something I wouldn't mind having on my home screen.
Re: Make Your App Icons Boring
#23I think this is nice in theory, but it's naive. From a developer's point of view, an icon is an ad that causes you to click and read the description in the app store. I don't like it, but those are the facts.
The author argues that a movie app icon can be designed in two ways:
1. To stand out against other movie apps in the app store
2. To stand out against Mail and Safari on a device home screen.
The fact is, developers are incentivized to do #1 and incentivized against #2. It would be nice to live in a world where that was reversed, but as long as developers are competing for eyeballs in an app store against other apps in a search query that will simply not be the world in which we live.
I've run A/B testing on dozens of app icons. #1 becomes optimal as your app becomes more niche, #2 becomes more optimal as the niche becomes increasingly competitive. Compare and contrast the icons for "cinema" as for "sign language" to watch this battle play out. Cinema you get brand names, abstract art. Sign language you get a hand sign, or little kids (in the case of baby sign).
Re: Make Your App Icons Boring
#24So what if everyone made generic icons? I think your idea only works because not everyone is doing it.
Re: Make Your App Icons Boring
#25Clean design can be just as flashy. The new one stands out...but not in a good way. It looks cheap.
I do agree that app icons should be respectful of the user, but some users demand flashy!
Re: Make Your App Icons Boring
#26Off-topic, but I need to complain about the YouTube app icon. It should be red and white and say YouTube on it. Instead, it's a brownish-green old-school TV. I miss it every time I go looking for it.
Re: Make Your App Icons Boring
#27I'm not a designer; but I feel that mistaking good taste, i.e. the expensive black luxury car on the right, with 'boring' just isn't accurate.
Exactly. While the author chose a example to make his point, a (near) stock Honda S2000 [0] can be just as classy as a Maserati GranTurismo.
[0] http://i22.servimg.com/u/f22/11/02/45/28/9610-210.jpg [1] http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4132/4950947259_b9c8208ddf_z.j...
Re: Make Your App Icons Boring
#28I think this is nice in theory, but it's naive. From a developer's point of view, an icon is an ad that causes you to click and read the description in the app store. I don't like it, but those are the facts. The author argues that a movie app icon can be designed in two ways: 1. To stand out against other movie apps in the app store 2. To stand out against Mail and Safari on a device home screen. The fact is, develo…
The premise of my post is that your first assertion ("an icon is an ad") is not a fact, but a choice. If you search for "email" in the App Store, would Sparrow jump out at you? No, but they've chosen not to pursue that "advertising" strategy. Their growth is based on fully delighting their users with the product, and an icon which, IMO, looks like it always belonged on my phone.
Sparrow's growth comes from happy customers (and some traditional advertising), not an icon that looks like an ad.
I'm curious how you A/B test app icons...Do you switch from one version to the next and compare downloads?
Also, can you clarify what you mean by "developers are...incentivized against #2"?
Re: Make Your App Icons Boring
#29So what if everyone made generic icons? I think your idea only works because not everyone is doing it.
So what if everyone made generic replies to comments? I think your comment only works because not everyone is saying it.
;)
Re: Make Your App Icons Boring
#30I like the look of the old icon better, but at a glance it's hard to tell what the app is for. I'd say keep the old icon, but replace the C with a film reel like in the new icon. Then it stands out enough to find it in a folder (because that app is probably not going in many docks).