14 DAY TRIAL // A young designer from France is getting a lot of positive feedback on Dribble after releasing his own set of icons for iOS 7’s stock apps, some of which are clear winners compared to Apple’s.
Don’t get me wrong. I love what 20-year old UI/UX designer Leo Drapeau has done to the iOS 7 iconography, but to praise a few hours of adjusting over months of original design is a bit hard to swallow.
TechCrunch is just one of the sites highlighting his work. It points out that “Drapeau, who’s currently living in Paris and is pursuing his Bachelor’s in Web Design at a school called EEMI, says he made his version of the redesign in a few hours.”
Drapeau himself is cited as saying, “I was following the WWDC keynote, and I was really excited about the overall UX and UI changes and evolutions in iOS 7, but the icons of the homescreen [sic] bugged me. So, I just wanted to refined them a little, to make them cleaner and more harmonized, but not to reinvent the whole design.”
Well, no wonder it took him a few hours. I’m no designer, but I’m pretty sure it’s one thing to come up with the whole icon set for an OS, and a whole other thing to retouch it.
And that’s what Drapeau did. Again, that’s not to say his icons aren’t pretty. In some instances his “mod” is actually very close to what the public expected from Apple.
But let’s remember that Apple did this whole thing (and I mean the whole OS, not just the icons) from scratch, and now every designer who wants a bit of spotlight can just tweak the colors here and there and rack up accolades from the designer industry.
No offense, Industry, but let’s not credit a few hours of nip-and-tuck over Apple’s year-long efforts to create a UI that everyone can use, regardless of each person’s preferences.
I’m sure Apple gets the message too. Thanks to the input from the design industry, iOS 7 Final will probably be a lot more polished when it rolls out this fall.
Disclaimer
This is a Personal Thoughts piece reflecting the author’s “personal” opinion on matters relating to Apple and / or the products associated with the Apple brand. This article should not be taken as the official stance of Softpedia on Apple-related matters.