Design Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Walls360 offers Susan Kare icons for your walls

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jan 11th, 2013)

Walls360 is a cool startup in Las Vegas that makes high-quality (but affordable) wall art. They've got the license to some great properties, like Star Trek, Plants vs. Zombies and a host of children's books, and now they are offering nearly all of the icon artwork produced by famed designer ...

CES: Roccat's Power-Grid is almost ready to be switched on

by Mike Schramm (Jan 11th, 2013)

Roccat first showed us the Power-Grid system (that uses an iPhone app to control various functions on a PC and the company's PC accessories) at CES in 2012 before officially announcing it last March. And now, a year later, the service is almost ready for launch. It's not quite good to go, but ...

Predicting 2013's app design trends

by Randy Nelson (Jan 10th, 2013)

What's going to be the next pull to refresh or swipe to delete? The Industry has peered into its crystal ball and come up with what it thinks (or hopes) are the 13 most prominent trends we're going to be seeing in app design for 2013 -- whether we want them or not. Flat design will likely be ...

CES 2013: Nest updates to version 2, fights for more compatibility

by Mike Schramm (Jan 8th, 2013)

We're big fans of the Nest custom controlled thermostat here at TUAW -- it's a great product that got better last year with an update to version 2. Along with a thinner, updated design and brand-new firmware, the version 2 update also jumped up to be compatible with 95 percent of home HVAC ...

IDEO founder David Kelley talks about Steve Jobs on 60 Minutes

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 7th, 2013)

David Kelley is a well-known entrepreneur and design professor at Stanford. The IDEO founder recently sat down and talked to 60 Minutes about his life, his work at IDEO and his time at Stanford. A small part of the segment also discusses his interactions with Steve Jobs and Apple. Kelley's ...

Unreleased Apple products revealed in Hartmut Esslinger's upcoming book

by Randy Nelson (Dec 27th, 2012)

Hartmut Esslinger founded Frog Design, the firm responsible for some of Apple's most iconic products of the 1980s, including the Apple IIGS and the Macintosh II. Now the legendary designer behind the "Snow White" design language is providing a rare glimpse at some of his work that never saw the ...

Dropbox for iOS updated to version 2.0 with all-new design

by Mike Schramm (Dec 14th, 2012)

Dropbox is our filesharing workhorse of choice around these parts, and the company has just updated its iOS app (for iPhone and iPad, of course) to version 2.0. The update is a big one, featuring an all-new (and "shiny," according to the release notes) design, as well as a new Photos tab, for ...

Google Maps for iOS design details

by Steven Sande (Dec 14th, 2012)

With Google Maps for iOS now in the hands of millions of users, it wasn't surprising that someone took a look at the app from the viewpoint of a designer. Sacha Greif, a designer and developer living in Kyoto, Japan, did that just. Greif was impressed with the attention to detail in Google's ...

Skeuomorphic iPad app design

by Steven Sande (Dec 10th, 2012)

Love it or hate it, the skeuomorphic school of iPad app design is here to stay. Even though skeuomorphism proponent Scott Forstall is no longer with Apple, we don't expect to see the fad of replicating the look of analog devices in digital apps to pass anytime soon. Chris Spooner at Line 25 has ...

Animationist creates dynamic titles for your video or printed projects

by Mel Martin (Dec 6th, 2012)

Animationist is a clever and useful OS X app that lets you create animated titles, logos and images for use in iMovie, YouTube or Final Cut. It's currently available in the Mac App Store for a half-off introductory price of US$24.99. The results look professional, and the default titles are so ...

Create Retina-ready graphics for your website

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Nov 23rd, 2012)

If you're looking for something to do this weekend that doesn't involve fighting your way through massive crowds of holiday shoppers, you can work on bumping the graphics on your website up to Retina quality. Designer Chris Spooner took a look at his statistics and discovered that a good ...

Makers of PaintCode open CodeAutomat service, for turning SVGs into code

by Mike Schramm (Nov 12th, 2012)

I'm currently working on developing an iOS app in conjunction with a graphic designer, and because my design skills are pretty terrible, we set out to look for a solution to turn the scalable vector graphics (SVGs) he's designed into Objective-C code snippets I can insert directly in the app. ...

Apple awarded design patent for rounded rectangles

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Nov 8th, 2012)

Folklore.org has the full story of how Steve Jobs convinced Bill Atkinson to give the Mac OS rounded rectangles as they were developing the first versions. I won't ruin the story, but if you played with early versions of Windows you may remember it had sharp corners, not rounded ones. Rounded ...

iPhone owner loyalty declines for first time ever

by Mike Schramm (Nov 5th, 2012)

Research firm Strategy Analytics reports that for the first time in its existence, user loyalty has dropped for Apple's iPhone. According to its numbers, 88 percent of US iPhone owners say they're likely to buy another iPhone when they need one, as opposed to the 93 percent that said the same ...

Joseph Wain designs near-ubiquitous iOS icons

by Steven Sande (Oct 18th, 2012)

Chances are very good that almost any iOS app you use contains icons that were designed by one man -- Joseph Wain. Wain doesn't work for Apple and never has. Instead, he's a designer who was impressed at an early age by the work of seminal Apple and NeXT icon designer Susan Kare, but not ...