Talkin’ blues

 

» the first in a series complaining about patterns of design banality 

Application icon designers – please help make my work infinitesimally smoother – quit making so many icons that are blue! Here’s a screenshot from a pretty believable scenario – running Photoshop, Word, Safari, Quicktime Player, Finder, iMovie, Preview, Mail, iTunes, iChat. Many Mac users would have a bunch of these running at once. When you use the shortcut to flick quickly between applications, you are visually scanning for shape, and in particular, colour. A bit of a blue haze.

Most users only want finding things to be a hassle when it’s games of hide and seek or Where’s Wally. When your main tools are becoming camouflaged in front of you, you have one of those minor pangs of self-doubt: ‘Must get my eyes tested/lay off the morning gins’. Precisely the feeling everyone has when they’ve fallen victim to bad user interface design.

If you thought this stuff about colour and other design trends was the moaning of a deranged hermit, you could look at web 2.0 logos or energy drinks, or red and yellow fast food franchises, or just stop and stare at toothpaste packaging in the supermarket [sidetrack – McDonalds are starting to tone down the colour].

 

Back to the almost automatic sameness of graphic icons. Quick differentiation of these things also isn’t helped by this assumption that all things are better with shiny glass effects. Luckily there are still people making the small things in nice distinctive packages. Check out some sweet pixel icons by Etherbrian, or the ravishing Edo icon set by Mikworks.