I’ve been looking closely at iOS 7, and like many designers I have mixed feelings. Some of the changes, like the expanded use of motion, are a breath of fresh air. Animation is coming to the forefront and will only be further explored in the years to come. And that’s very exciting. In other areas, meanwhile, such as the heavy reliance on type rather than icons, the over-reliance on plain white backgrounds everywhere, and the lack of clear separation between elements such as the status bar and the…

“So, will Jony Ive remove all textures and ‘designs that look and work like real things’ from iOS? I highly doubt it. There’s simply no reason to make unilateral design decisions like that outside of frustrating designers and making things worse for users.” (via The Next Web.) Extremely well thought out argument from Matthew Panzarino here. I agree with it completely. People love to take the extreme sides of every argument. X is always right. Y is always wrong. But as we all learned when we prepped for multiple…

I was really happy that I was able to learn enough Objective-C to make my own app, put it on the App Store, and see other people getting use out of it. The response has been great so far, and I’m planning lots of new improvements already. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there was one thing, visually, about the app that was bugging me. And that was the default Apple keypad. Not that I don’t think Apple’s keypad is a great design.…

I work with an amazing team at Bombing Brain Interactive. While my role there has always been visual and user experience design, along with web site development, one of my goals this year was to branch out a little into real, honest-to-goodness app coding. Not that we don’t already have an abundance of coding talent going on with Gene and Tim, but because I wanted to improve my skill set and make myself more valuable to the group in any way I could. I believe firmly that in order…

Today I’m launching my first iOS app, x2y. While I’ve collaborated on many apps with my partners at Bombing Brain Interactive, this is the first app developed entirely by yours truly and published under my own name. x2y solves an old and common problem. You have an image or other media file, and you need to display it at a different size than the original. But when resizing the image, you need to be careful to keep the aspect ratio consistent, so that your media doesn’t get…