...But consequent to which last detail?

Do you like guessing games? I do. Here’s a fun one: let’s see if you can guess what this partially-obscured icon might be:

Part of a pair of scissors? A teapot? Volume control? Could be anything, huh? Let’s try another…

Care to take a stab at it? No? Too hard? OK, I’ll make life easier for you: let’s send our iPhones back in time and take a look at Thing 1 again, this time through the design language of iOS 6…

And Thing 2…

That’s better. You can actually tell what these two icons are now. Why? Because the original iOS designers had a key insight that for some reason the iOS 7 team found unpalatable: sometimes it’s the details that make an object recognizable, not the abstracted aggregate.

Let’s take a look at a real-life pair of spectacles…

Ah, do you see what I did there? That corner section, that one little detail, is the kind of shape that makes a pair of glasses look like a pair of glasses. Two connected discs with arms either side just isn’t the same: in purely topological terms, you probably won’t see such a configuration anywhere other than pairs of glasses, but I’d argue that’s not the point: the perfectly round circles of the iOS 7 reading glasses won’t indulge you with the confirmation you’d need that, yes, you are indeed looking at a pair of spectacles. Conversely, the classic shape you see in the Ray-Bans above is so distinctive that even without anything else to look at, you’d know right away that you’re looking at eyeglasses. Circles, arcs and rectangles: you’ll see those anywhere. But that shape... could only be eyeglasses.

I really think that Apple dropped the ball with the iOS 7 look. The garish gradients and lack of affordances I could drone on about some other time, but on icon design, I want to take a moment to question what the company was thinking.

Judging by appearances, it was thinking this:

Each icon should be reduced to its minimal topological form, then represented as an outline of unvarying thickness.

Why it should think that, I couldn’t comment, save to say that I think it’s misguided. Not just aesthetically misguided, but philosophically misguided. While the company has long been famed for its dedication to design purity, underlying it all, historically, had been a strong focus on customer experience. But the iOS 7 graphic design principles seem to me more focused on pursuing purity for its own sake than for end users’ benefit. Where conflicts arose between suitability and adherence to the rules, it seems to be the former that got thrown under the bus each time, regardless of how arbitrary the latter may have been.

Hence we ended up with icons that look like bifurcated love-hearts...

...that previously looked like books.

Going out on a limb here, perhaps this is the expected result of an industrial designer being given oversight of graphic design, as famously happened for iOS 7? I’m bearing in mind the famous Rams commandment that good design be consequent to the very last detail, and wondering if it could stir up an interesting conflict: what’s consequential for the usability of an object may have little overlap with what’s consequential to how the object might be recognized.

Consider the humble occlupanid for example: the puritan industrial designer would perceive the distal and proximal palps to be nothing more than vestiges of the manufacturing process and would take pains to remove them. The graphic designer, however, charged with drafting an iconic representation of the clip, may regard them as an integral part of its distinctive shape and would want to include them.

To the former, a pair of eyeglasses is a pair of lenses and a frame that connects them to a pair of arms. To the latter, the eyeglasses are a unique set of shapes that distinguishes them from anything else in the geometric lexicon of everyday objects.

iOS 7’s iconography is thus a showcase for how an industrial designer might prefer glasses and books to look, whereas previous versions capture how such objects actually look.

For an easy-to-use UI, I’d choose the latter.